What's really insidious is that they mix well-sourced, real news with absolute trash, so if you're just looking at the headlines it's not unreasonable to think that they're all real. That is, until you click on one of the trash articles and find that the "source" is a blog that sources another blog, which sources yet another blog and so on.
Kind of like what news papers do in their OP-Ed sections.
Worth noting, it took the NYT until March 10th [1] to finally come to the conclusion that ZH had come to on Feb 24th [2], regarding the burning of AID trucks being sent to Venezuela. ZH has an anti-establishment bend, and will take a critically hostile point of view against the main stream, it's interesting to read that perspective when most established news organization are aligned one way in their reporting.
Glenn Greenwald had a great piece on the spread of fake news surrounding the AID truck event, worth reading for anyone who is somewhat skeptical of establishment narratives. [3]
> Worth noting, it took the NYT until March 10th [1] to finally come to the conclusion that ZH had come to on Feb 24th [2], regarding the burning of AID trucks being sent to Venezuela.
The latest update to the ZH article says:
ZH> True to his word, it appears the humanitarian aid trucks being sent from the west into Venezuela have been repelled by Maduro's guards as reports come in from social media that they are all now on fire.
I don't see anything that says that the protestors set them on fire, but might have missed it. The way that is written makes it sound like Maduro's guards did it. The only mention I see of protestors setting anything on fire is the burning of a bus covered earlier on the page.
You're correct, I cited the wrong article. It was rather on Feb 28th [1] that they published an article which posited that the opposition to Maduro's government may have been responsible.
To also clarify my position, ZH is not very reputable, but they provide interesting insight into current events and will sometimes post contradictory views from different blogs/news sites. It's up to the reader to determine if the "news" they produce is verifiable or merely conjecture. It should not be up to facebook to make the decision for the reader.
Also it is worrying that a company with the reach of NYT doesn't produce this information till weeks after the event. It allowed for the false version of the incident to complete its cycle in the news without interrupting the narrative being formed, and thus creates and incentive for people to seek-out ZH as a source of info. ZH isn't reputable, but their reputation is improved when they are stacked up against poor reporting from other agencies, which is unfortunate.
Do your own thinking then and exercise criticism towards all sources of information, mainstream or not.
Free speech isn’t about holding your hand and establishing a standard, it’s about laying out all the information, real or not, and letting you decide for yourself.
If you posit that censorship is an acceptable form of filtering where someone else with their own version of facts and biases does your thinking, then you are entering a very dangerous mindset.
> Infowars doesn't believe in a lizard people conspiracy...
No, it believes that the Sandy Hook parents are all malicious liars and that none of them lost children.
It also believes in classic antisemitic conspiracy theories, cloaked in the thin disguise of being about Soros, the most convenient Jew in the world from the perspective of people who want to slide antisemitism back into the mainstream and give people and entrypoint to David Duke-style outright White supremacy.
Prove it. I disagree with everything you said. Provide actual statements showing these things you claim. I don't get my news from IW but it's completely insane to think that IW is any more deceptive than the mainstream.
I disagree. While ZH does have a fair share of this type of news, most of it just contrarian point of view (Tesla bashing, for instance). I read ZH pretty much daily and I personally have no issues understanding which article is which.
I agree. While there are many articles that are questionably sourced and there are many articles with which I profoundly disagree (mostly advocating Austrian style economics and unfettered capitalism), it also provides a forum for viewpoints that are actually quite progressive and liberal (particularly when it comes to civil liberties). I'd rather be the one separating the wheat from the chaff for myself than Facebook or its ilk filtering it for me.
Note that the ZH comments section, however, is a cesspit filled with all sort of -ists.
Blocking content like zh on the socials is really the same as Tim Allen/Roseanne/James Gunn being fired for things they've said. The company cares sooo much about what their audiences think that they won't let said audiences decide for themselves what to think. It's not supply produced to meet an existing demand but versa vice. Legally these companies may have the right to censor like so, but ethically they do not, and they belittle their customers in the doing.
Could you flesh your comment out a bit more? How are they more insidious than Infowars? I am assuming the worst thing Infowars has done was claim that that one school shooting was a fake shooting and the survivors crisis actors.
By contrast my impression of Zero Hedge has been that they are constant economic contrarians. If mainstream media is touting the strong economy, Zero Hedge posters are writing about how fiat currency is unsustainable and how the long-term trend low interest rates is creating a bubble. I do agree the sources of their article range from "I think I heard somewhere" to "based on this Bloomberg data", it's all over the place. But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.
Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.
You understand that pretty much anyone could relay random bits of technical news and produce banal op-eds about market conditions, calibrating the amount of jargon to sound just a level or two above Bloomberg, and then mix insane conspiracy theories into that feed, right? Like, it'd be a 9-5 job to keep it going, but not an especially difficult one.
Back in the mid-late 1990s I ran technical operations for what was then Chicago's most popular ISP (it was eventually acquired, through multiple hops, by RCN). Our arch-competitor was a very strange guy named Karl Denninger, about whom I would relate stories here but I'm pretty sure he'll have a Google search set up on his name and I'd rather not pay to have bogus lawsuits against me dismissed. Anyways: he runs one of these sites, a sort of Zero-Hedge Jr, at Market-Ticker.org.
Maybe switch to Market-Ticker. It's just as batshit as Zero Hedge, but I'm pretty sure Karl isn't trying to influence low-information American voters about Syria.
The only thing approaching an answer to the question you were asked was zerohedges Syria spin. Care to expand on that? My belief is that mainstream us new sources, including the most august, have been guilty of Iraq-level pro-war journalistic mispractice, absolutly hysterical xenophobic jingoism in some cases, in their quest to advance the geopolitical aims of the saudi-israeli-turkey-quatar-us-british-etc coalition. It's not pretty at all. I welcome zh's anti-war activism in principle at least.
>You understand that pretty much anyone could relay random bits of technical news and produce banal op-eds about market conditions, calibrating the amount of jargon to sound just a level or two above Bloomberg, and then mix insane conspiracy theories into that feed, right? Like, it'd be a 9-5 job to keep it going, but not an especially difficult one.
And this is different from me doing the same thing with a status update.... how?
Also, you understand that any other media outlet can do and often does the same exact thing? You think inserting pieces of an agenda/propaganda into news articles is something limited to ZH?
How is this not just an argument against the Internet and free speech in general. I mean, "anyone" could just lie or say something false! How would we ever know the difference?!
>but I'm pretty sure Karl isn't trying to influence low-information American voters about Syria
Lets just go back to Monarchy, people are apparently too stupid and "low-information" for something as advanced as Democracy. Is that what you mean? Not saying you are wrong, btw, just asking.
How is controlling what people are allowed to read or watch or know about any different than controlling what they think, how is that not the same thing as controlling what they do and how they behave, how are you not destroying their independent agency, and essentially corrupting democracy at its very premise?
I agree that spreading misinformation and dishonest propaganda to manipulate ignorant and low-IQ people would lead to the very same end, that is obvious and was basically the status quo before the Information Age, but the difference between propaganda (noise) and censorship (silence) is like the difference between using a condom and full castration.
Zaid Jilani made a point this week about how AIPAC isn't actually that powerful, rather BDS just doesn't try that hard to lobby and get the right people elected. I guess the BDS movement is going to have to get itself hired Facebook as well now to not get its websites banned? If that's how we think things should be--that what we think is and isn't "insidious" as a society should be steered by Facebook's hiring whims--I think we should be pretty upfront about that!
At least all this is happening above board. It's not like Facebook has employees running tutorials on private Slack servers teaching people how to game the harassment reporting system to spike down content involving opinions they don't like.
ZH, circa 8 years ago was half decent, lots of conspiracy nonsense but also lots of market rumours, since then it has become a Russian propaganda page full of nonsense.
Agreed. I still occasionally read through it, but it's 49% political propaganda, 45% conspiracy theory and 5% blatant racism now (the comments over there are 100% ick).
If you want contrarian market opinion, just stick a post-it that says "the market is going to crash" to your screen and eventually it'll be right - just like ZeroHedge.
Which right wing? I don't think that Mitch McConnell is a Nazi. I've not heard anyone call him one. Lots of other right wing politicians, activists, journalists and even right wing shock jocks you can say that about. Most are not. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are not Nazis even though I entirely despise them.
But if by right wing do you mean Richard Spencer, Milos Yiannopoulis, the Portland Proud Boy crowd or the people doing the torchlit march in Charlottesville who were chanting "blood and soil." If so, then yes, the right wing is a bunch of Nazis.
In line with this: [1] Senator Warren gets her anti-Facebook ads blocked, too.
It seems like Facebook just feels threatened by everything right now, and that they recognize that they're dependent on people being on their platform to stay alive.
I would like your thoughts on this: What has to happen to get everyone to migrate to a new platform, or is that even possible?
If by "right-wing" you mean xenophobic/fear-inducing wrt nationality/ethnicity/culture then yeah. Or do you have examples of actual right-wing folks being banned?
People who want their country to stay their country (in terms of ethnicity and culture) are still worthy of discussion...it is a valid political position...you can't just say "they don't count, please provide somebody else we can discuss that fit my narrow definition of right-wing"
What you are talking about is tangential to do with the left-
right spectrum, though (unless I am misinformed of course, who are you talking about got banned for what? I meant it as an honest question, not a rhetoric one)
When China does it to Tibet, it's genocide. When Western governments do it to their domestic populations, it's diversity?
Asia is for the Asians, Africa is for the Africans, but the West for everybody? I'd love to see your kind go to South Africa or Saudi Arabia and declare there's not enough diversity. Diversity of thought, not of race, is the strength!
I got banned from twitter after I started a new open source honeypot project. I'm more of a systems/network cyber security guy. I wanted to learn python and git better. So I wanted to get more into the development side. Which hey, I've since then started multiple projects in Python. Python is amazing.
I posted on twitter 'learn to code' and I got banned. Which was crazy, it was entirely a positive message; not aimed at anyone, the only people I follow are people who give talks at hackerconferences.
I then researched that there some super out of touch journalists who were attacking right-wingers and then end up unemployed. So there was some people tweeting learn to code at these unemployed journalists.
The project I just got working last night was a python project that pulls weather data from weather canada and archives.
I don't like Facebook, either for its personal impacts on my mental well-being or its broader societal impacts. That being said, they have a pretty reasonable policy against mentioning Facebook in ads generally, because they had lots of ads that attempted to seem like official Facebook content ("Facebook releases new game!"), and they allowed the ads subsequently upon appeal
... Which these ads pretty clearly weren't attempting.
I can understand the first line review flagging them via rigid application of "the rules".
What I have trouble understanding is how they apparently don't have a mechanism for handling "high risk" placements, or if they do, it missed ads from a presidential candidate known to be critical of them, exactly the sort of placement such a mechanism, you know, is for.
For the ten-thousandth time: getting banned on Facebook is not censorship. When it gets brought up in other countries, it is the governments of those countries doing it.
Facebook can do what it wants here. If you don't like it, divest.
And there it is. The ubiquitous defense, that as long as it's done by the left, it's not censorship because it's not done by a country. That never made any sense
> And there it is. The ubiquitous defense, that as long as it's done by the left, it's not censorship because it's not done by a country. That never made any sense
What makes no sense is thinking Facebook is on the left.
Facebook will be standing right in with the tighty-righty GOPpers when it comes to regulating or taxing it.
Robert Mercer's SCL Group, owners of Cambridge Analytica who worked on the Trump campaign, and campaigns for Cruz and Romney before that, is supposed to be very rightwing. Which made me wonder if the FB/CA deal wasn't the first case but the first one called out, and could Murdoch's myspace have ever been played with comparably, earlier?
Your right, it is worse than that, it's a consortium of governments, NATO and corporate interests that so generously donate to the Council;
>The Atlantic Council’s president and CEO sent a seven-page letter to Hagel Friday that included a list of foreign corporations, governments and government entities that fund the organization. The list includes roughly 100 corporations and 15 foreign governments, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The amount of funding from each entity is not listed.
Sure it does. FB is a communication platform that adheres to the principles of free speech or it isn't.
Here, they are demonstrating (among other times) that they do not believe in free speech. It is their right. Just as it is their right to collect user data and resell it.
The ramification being that some people my choose to understand the world differently from you. The answer to that worry is to make compelling points in your favour, or maybe try to understand the other side of the argument. Freedom comes at the expense of security, and security in this instance is overstepping its boundaries.
> "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."
Marsh v Alabama may not currently apply to digital spaces, but it's not inconceivable that in the future there will be another SCOTUS ruling to clarify this new emerging scenario.
I am familiar with that topic too, but like you said it doesn't apply to the internet.
I suspect the conditions that it is offered at will matter. If I offer my land for yoga I probably can still filter someone who tries to hold a practice for their rock band.
ELUAs and such would come into play.
Let alone that I'm not yet sure if SCOTUS as a group really understands technology.
It is censorship. It isn't government backed and hence legal, but it is by definition censorship.
Telling people to divest from facebook is as helpful as telling a chinese citizen to leave china if they don't like government censorship. Especially if facebook becomes entrenched and monopolistic. Also, considering facebook has more power and reach than almost every country in the world, perhaps it's time to think about censorship and corporate power.
After all, government censorship was the norm until we decided that governments have gotten too powerful to allow to exist unchecked. Perhaps it's time to think of large corporations in the same manner.
Facebook is not your government? They don't control a military or police force? Of course, censorship is censorship, and those kinds of details are irrelevant. What is important is that we develop powerful skills in equivocation and conflation.
I wonder how many of the ZeroHedge fans missed the greatest stock rally of all time and are stuck with gold bars under their floor...bought at 2500USD an ounce from a website peddled by Glenn Beck. Just thinking about this I'm getting a smile on my face.
Well, when you put it like that, ZH is pretty mainstream.
"Donald Trump's first gift to the world will be another financial crisis." Headline in the U.K. Independent. "(He) gives every impression that he will soon be hustling America — and possibly the entire world — in the direction of another catastrophic financial crisis." Same article.
"I have no stocks. I advise people not to invest in the stock market, not now. Way too dangerous." Film maker Michael Moore, August, 2017.
"It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? A first-pass answer is never… So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight." Paul Krugman of the New York Times the day after the election.
That's a naive half truth. You've taken two different ideas, smashed them together to make it sound silly. I'm not here to be a spokesperson for IW but it is kind of funny how many people just spew information they picked up from reading headlines, similar to the clickbait ZH posts daily.
> "The reason there's so many gay people now is because it's a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they're going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don't have children," he said on his broadcast in 2010, according to NBC News.
> "The majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay," Jones said in 2017. The claim was without evidence.
You responded with half a sentence, and you're expecting what kind of reaction to that? A Sixty Minutes special? A state-level briefing? Don't judge people for matching your level of effort.
Several hundred years of human and legal development says that the burden of proof lies with the person to make a claim. I could've responded, "Prove it".
Anyways, what is your comment even saying. What are you responding to? The words I used to describe misinformation? Massive Eyeroll
Well, God knows I am opposed to the current anti-russia madness but I stopped reading zh a few years ago when they were systematically taking Russia' side including when Russia was so obviously red handed. I think the drop for me was their defense of Russia in the MH17 crash.
Why would they care about Russia specifically? What criticism do you expect to see from them?
I read ZH sometimes. They also don't spend much time criticising Iceland. You seem to be assuming they should share the same obsession with Russia as much of the rest of the mainstream media, but their different set of obsessions is rather what makes them useful as an outlet.
I'm not a huge Paul Krugman fan. That said, Paul Krugman is a Nobel-prize winning economist, whereas Daniel Ivandjiiski is a convicted financial criminal.
You highlighted a perfect example of why ZeroHedge and other contrarian news sources are so necessary: When the war drums were in full swing against Syria and every major western news outlet was breathlessly promoting intervention with propaganda of their own (pictures of shell-shocked kids, championing of the brave "freedom fighters" and white helmets, spurious claims of "chemical attacks"), ZH provided a counterpoint that challenged those perceptions.
In that particular situation, both sides were total propaganda and Syria was the grayest of gray areas. I like to think I'm not the only one who read both extremes of the reporting with a filter and arrived at my own conclusion.
I read their stuff, though most of what I read comes out of the weekly emails. There is some actual good content, though like all other outlets, I'm sure there's some bad. Here's some of the stuff I see on their front page right now:
* China's belt-and-road
* Venezuela (worth noting they were an early reporter on the aid-burning)
* Anti-Tesla stuff
* Anti-SEC, pro-Elon Musk stuff
* Stop Brexit
* Boeing
* China's massive debt load
* They still like gold
Yes, it's clear they have their own set of biases, again like every other outlet. But they don't seem to be super far left or right, and certainly don't seem to be "russian propaganda".
They definitely pick up a lot of Russian talking points (see their virulent skepticism over the Skripal attack), but they serve as a very useful counterbalance to CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, et al.
I shudder at whatever Orwellian hellscape we've landed in when people celebrate the censorship of a differently minded news source instead of utilizing it: read both it and your mainstream sources with a filter, apply your own independent thought and judgment and arrive at your own conclusion.
Anti-Maduro rioters being responsible for the aid-truck fire was a "Russian talking point" until a few days ago when the New York Times, America's most venerable newspaper of record, finally admitted it was true.
At least this time it didn't take the New York Times the better part of 60 years to admit they were wrong, as it did when they were publishing Russian talking points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
I totally agree, and just because something is promoted strongly by Russia doesn't mean it's false, it just highlights the importance of reading a variety of different sources and applying your own critical thinking to find the truth.
Two examples: The Venezuelan aid-truck stunt. Clearly orchestrated by the US to help nudge regime change. On the other hand, the MH17 crash: clearly a case of Russian forces mistakenly shooting down a passenger jet and coming up with some outlandish claims against the evidence (ie that it was faked with CGI).
Both are instances where the truth would've been lost on someone who exclusively reads and believes only one source of news.
"clearly a case of Russian forces mistakenly shooting down a passenger jet"
Why not:
"probably a case of Russian or Ukrainian forces shooting down a passenger jet"?
Why "clearly" US burning the truck instead of say a local false flag or truck malfunction? You make a lot of assumptions for saying something is clear.
What should be clear is that neither the American nor Russian media will always be right, and neither the American nor the Russian media will always be wrong, and sometimes one will be right while the other is wrong, while other times both will be wrong or both will be right.
I mean all of that is just common sense. The relative rate at which any of those scenarios unfolds is up in the air, but it's pretty clear all of those scenarios happen at least some of the time. When you see somebody claiming otherwise (e.g. "Russian media disagrees with American media, so the Russian media must be wrong." or "American media disagrees with the Russian media, so the American media must be wrong") you can be sure their opinion is invalid. They could legitimize their opinion by acknowledging a degree of uncertainty, by adding the word "probably" to either of those statements.
Here is the key: recognizing the possibility that you could be wrong. Acknowledgement of uncertainty may run counter to ego, but it's important. Or maybe I'm wrong about that.
> What should be clear is that neither the American nor Russian media will always be right, and neither the American nor the Russian media will always be wrong, and sometimes one will be right while the other is wrong, while other times both will be wrong or both will be right.
Correct/incorrect is not the only axis on which to evaluate media. There's also trustworthiness. I think that Russian media is less trustworthy than American media because it's not independent [1] from a government controlled by people who's jobs included running disinformation campaigns like Operation Infektion [2] [3], which included cooperation from state-controlled media.
No. Something can be entirely factually correct, but untrustworthy, as demonstrated by the concept of lying by omission. Something can also be factually correct, but untrustworthy, by asking a bunch of spurious questions that are calculated to mislead. For instance:
> Did Sweden shoot down MH17? Why are they denying that they shot it down, is there a coverup? Our defense experts have shown that the attack occurred within the range of the Swedish JAS-39 fighter, so they could have done it. What do the Swedes have to hide?
That's why you should read multiple sources, not one. If one source is omitting details but not otherwise lying, you'll get those details from other sources. To reiterate my earlier example, when western media were omitting evidence that Anti-Maduro rioters had started the fire, you could still become aware of this information by paying attention to what some in the western press were calling "Russian talking points".
Regardless, you've not refuted the essential truism here, that no western source is always right and that Russian sources are not always wrong.
> Regardless, you've not refuted the essential truism here, that no western source is always right and that Russian sources are not always wrong.
That's not what I was trying to refute. I'm sorry if you were confused.
The point I was making, is that if you want a diversity of sources, it's smart to select high-quality ones whose real goal is to be accurate and trustworthy. Most Russian media doesn't fit that bill, and certainly not the government-sponsored English language stuff.
To be a little hyperbolic and blunt about it: including propaganda in your diverse set of news sources is expert mode, and it requires an orders of magnitude more effort, skill, and knowledge. Most people who think they're experts aren't, and they can't handle it. Propaganda is created by experts and it's really a specialist job to suss out any novel truths that might be in it.
> when western media were omitting evidence that Anti-Maduro rioters had started the fire, you could still become aware of this information by paying attention to what some in the western press were calling "Russian talking points".
Or just wait a few days for proper reporting to happen rather than inhaling breaking news reports. None of those events have any immediate relevance on my life (and probably yours too), so we can afford to take our time.
Also: Trump's twitter account isn't "western media." I first heard about the aid convoy fire in an NYT story that was refuting the idea that the fire was caused by Maduro's forces, and their original story about the event doesn't assign anyone responsibility for the fire:
What else falls in this category? Flat Earthers? Anti-vaccine advocates? Holocaust deniers?
It's clear that the majority of people have poor information literacy skills and one consequence of that poor information literacy results in measles being an actual problem in 2019.
Another person who thinks they should be the arbiter of the truth for the world, attempting to make an argument for ideological limitations on speech.
The entire basis for thinking democracy is even possible, much less a good idea, is that man is a rational being capable of applying logical and moral reasoning in pursuit of the truth, or least the best answer. You seem to disagree.
The allowance of free expression on all topics and ideas along with rational debate ensures that better ideas are not suppressed and that the worst ideas get exposed and defeated.
>Flat Earthers?
Shouldn't be difficult to prove wrong.
>Anti-vaccine advocates?
Science should be able to put their fears to rest while disproving their arguments. No?
>Holocaust deniers?
Again, there is historical evidence that can be used to defeat their arguments and expose their true agenda. No?
What part of suppressing those ideas, or silencing their advocates rather than debating them, proves that your argument is the correct one? Because you happen to think you have authority with whatever consensus you think exists? Do you think truth is based on consensus? Do you not see how it makes your position more suspicious (as in fraudulent) if you are not willing to address the challenges of skeptics or even devil's advocates?
Also, given what we know about astroturfing and social media bots, how many of these people do you really think there are?
>It's clear that the majority of people have poor information literacy skills
Well, that would have been even more true when the concept of free speech was established, when literacy rates were truly abysmal, as in the vast majority of people in even the most advanced societies couldn't even read.
You are saying the problem is either that people today can acquire the information and/or that they lack the capacity to apply reason and logic in order to separate truth from fiction?
So is the problem that information which isn't necessarily "true" or "morally good" is available?
Or is it that people lack the tools needed in order to separate truth from fiction, reality from theory, good from bad, etc? Is it an education/skill development thing, or a mental capacity/IQ thing?
Where do ethics and morality come in to play, and what would that have to do with "information literacy" when speaking of anti-vax people?
>and one consequence of that poor information literacy results in measles being an actual problem in 2019.
Measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000. Did people have higher "information literacy" back in the 80s and 90s than they do now? Was there nobody who was against vaccinations in the 80s and 90s? And if it was eliminated from the US by the year 2000, and it is a re-emerging problem in 2019, then didn't it actually have to be imported? It couldn't have anything to do with the 10s of millions of illiterate and poorly educated, un-vaccinated illegal immigrants from the third world that have been flooding this country for the last several decades, could it? No, it must be the ${insert ideological opponent of the day} and their ${straw-man trait based on bigoted assumptions} who are wrong.
>The [vaccine] court -- and the law that established it more than two decades ago -- buffers Wyeth and other makers of childhood-disease vaccines from much of the litigation risk that dogs traditional pill manufacturers and is an important reason why the vaccine business has been transformed from a risky, low-profit venture in the 1970s to one of the pharmaceutical industry's most attractive product lines today.
>...the vaccine court limits compensation in death cases to $250,000.
>Even if they had won their cases, the families of autistic children wouldn't have been paid by the companies that make the vaccines, as is common in other pharmaceutical-liability cases. Instead, the government would have footed the bill, using the funds from a tax levied on inoculations.
You won't hear any of the popular news outlets (who rake in big $ from pharma advertising) talk about this side of the "anti-vax" story. All this anti-vax nonsense is a smokescreen.
I guess I'm going to argue minor differences here but I thought the Streisand Effect was more about someone trying to hide a thing via lawsuit or something and that usually involves some effort to actually remove the thing from the internet or visibility.
I don't think Facebook cares if ZH has a website or people can visit. They just don't let that content on their platform.
To me that's different than the Streisand Effect. ZH i'm sure would like similar results no doubt as far as attention goes.
i am a frequent reader and i came to the conclusion that it must be compromised....it is pretty far right and much more pro trump and pro russia than many other comparable financial blogs
I wonder is the GP has been paying attention in MSM these days. I’ve read “bombshell” after “bombshell” of breaking news regarding the current administration, with nearly everything turning out to be a dud. No apologies and no retractions.
Have we as a community decided that newsguard is anything but trash? Why would any of us be willing to submit ourselves to “censorship as a service”?
If anything, we need to be breaking apart these types of technological control software. I don’t want anything to do with “newsguard” and I urge others to take a critical eye on that idea as well.
Indeed, why trust any experts on anything? We should do the legwork, all of it, for every decision we make. Vaccines? I want to see it kill a polio and then not make an autism. The earth? Sure looks flat to me. Can you prove it's round? Then show me how to do it, so I can prove it to myself? Taking other people's word for it is just censoring alternative points of view. This is America. I don't want anything to do with censorship.
Newsguard is a technology meant to control what people see, read, and ultimately think. If you don’t immediately see the dangers of that type of technology then I’m not sure what will convince you otherwise.
That is exactly what antivax people say about vaccination campaigns.
I'm not saying you should trust NewsGuard. I don't know much about them! But the categorical alarm you take to the entire concept of independent news vetting is problematic.
> Newsguard is a technology meant to control what people see, read, and ultimately think. If you don’t immediately see the dangers of that type of technology then I’m not sure what will convince you otherwise.
The problems aren't all one one side. There are problems with having technology like Newsguard, and there are problem with not having technology like it. Just today, I came across the phenomenon of partisan propaganda masquerading as local journalism (https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/03/04/activists-setup-local...).
I've never used Newsguard, but I really hope it flags stuff like "The Tennessee Star." It'd be a clue to question the source more, and God knows we need more clues to get through our hurried, overloaded lives.
NewsGuar doesn't block any content. It provides ratings of news sites. How does that control what people see, read, and ultimately think? It doesn't even verify or refute specific stories, just overall publication credibility.
It's also not really technology. It's a bunch of journalists doing ratings. Technology is just how they disseminate the ratings, but a lot different (and more accountable) than some kind of AI that tries to do this.
We aren't talking about objective empirical science. We are talking about partial, subjective and biased media.
NewsGuard was created by media insiders with funding from media insider foundations. There is most definitely cause for worry there. Would you say china's media "experts" should control what the chinese citizens see? Would you say the same about russia, europe or anywhere in the world?
Blind appeal to authority is just as bad as blindly ignoring authority. I'm not saying I have the answers here. I don't know what the solution is. But I'm certain either extreme is bad for society.
The argument I responded to, as I read it, is that you can't trust any organization to evaluate news sources. That can't be true. I don't so much care about NewsGuard --- I don't use it --- but we delegate all kinds of judgements, many more important than this one --- to experts, for good reason.
Maybe we should just directly delegate voting to experts? Or are you saying that you can't trust any organization to evaluate political candidates and programs? That can't be true. We delegate all kinds of judgements, many more important than voting to experts, for good reason.
In what way is it a sleight of hand? I'd argue that most people delegate almost the entirety of their voting decision to some external authority, in almost exactly the same way as they'd sign up for and use a service like NewsGuard.
The question isn't whether we should delegate. We make bad decisions when we don't. The question is who we should delegate it to. Anyone who told you to vote for Trump was a bad source.
Yes. Technology should be used to suppress anyone who says to vote for Trump in much the same way we should reject anyone who says vaccines cause autism. In fact, both views should be censored because of how dangerous they are.
Maybe we need more delegation experts? Recursively? ;)
Anyway, you originally wrote:
> you can't trust any organization to evaluate news sources. That can't be true.
But it can.
Successful delegation requires alignment of incentives, oversight or some (well founded) trust relationship. Otherwise, if the stakes are high enough (and if you get to shape the voting or news-consumption and non-consumption of a sizeable fraction of people, they are) bad things will happen to those who are willing delegate, in aggregate.
What makes the expert more trustworthy than the politician or news-source itself? Why would you be better at picking one than the other? Credentials? Max Boot is one of the “world's leading authorities on armed conflict” and well-credentialed (academically and organizationally). Do you trust him? Did the American Tax Payers get a good return of investment of following his expertise laid out in “The Case for American Empire” to the tune of a few trillion Dollars?
Tucker Carlson says no, we shouldn't trust Max Boot. Should we trust him instead? Why not?
The answer is that you can only delegate these things to the extent you're able and willing to critically evaluate the quality and basis of the advice (since you have no mechanism to align incentives). And I'd be shocked if you could come up with a single broadly trustworthy news source evaluation organization -- I am not aware of one, are you? Assuming there is one, how would it stay that way longer term?
I don't understand your argument. Obviously, if you refuse to delegate any decision you make to experts, you will make worse decisions. If evaluating news media isn't your full-time job, you will do a poorer job of it than someone who was trained to do it and has years of experience and context to do it with.
You seem to be under the weird impression that I'm saying all experts are trustworthy. No, obviously not. I don't trust Max Boot (I trust Tucker Carlson far less). I'm selective about who I delegate parts of my decisionmaking to, and you should be too.
Again: the point isn't that NewsGuard is good (I have no idea if it is). The point is that the very concept of NewsGuard doesn't offend reason or civic virtue.
I'm wondering if we're talking past each other because each of us has a different idea what "delegating" means in this discussion. I'm not against consulting various "fact checking" services to help inform my opinion and help uncover pointers to relevant evidence I can follow up on my own if I wish to. I would however neither trust their impartiality, nor believe that they have some inherent magical expertise that would make them vastly better at those evaluations than me (in both cases: what would the selection function for this look like and why wouldn't it equally apply to news in the first place? News sources don't thrive by giving their readers hard to swallow, non-partisan facts and evaluation – they are inherently tribal).
But "delegating" to me means completely offloading some task to a third party, even if it's one you've vetted before and maybe periodically check on.
To me, delegation in this sense for what news sources I expose myself to offends both reason and civic virtue.
I don't believe in the existence of particularly trustworthy new sources with broad coverage. That such trust is misplaced is easy to verify by picking a few particular examples where you can dig in a bit yourself. Therefore one should be able to get useful information from people one disagrees with or even believes to be evil or dishonest, as long as they're at least periodically willing to make cogent, evidence based arguments. I can despise Tucker Carlson and still agree with him on his evaluation of Max Boot, by looking up the evidence he presents and validating if it supports his claims. Same with Chomsky, Engelhardt etc.
Yes, it can be scientifically proven which point of view is correct so rejecting a news filter that flags the unscientific viewpoint is actually anti-science.
>Have we as a community decided that newsguard isn’t anything but trash? Why would any of us be willing to submit ourselves to “censorship as a service”?
Worth to look at their sources. But go look at their sources. Virtually all the links dont cover any zerohedge content.
So I'm looking at the site. Lots of links to go through. Lets just start at link 1 of credibility. Follow the story... it says they took the guns based on the guy open-carrying a gun. Which they explain the red-flag-law and such.
Like it makes sense. The cops always overreact at these douchebag open-carry people. Youtube has loads of these videos where people open carry looking to sue the cops under 1984 lawsuits if the cops take their guns.
This is a credible story.
Then I keep going down the list and they have nothing to do with zerohedge.
Sorry but you cant provide a boatload of non-zerohedge articles and assert zerohedge is illegitimate and should be banned off the internet because of not-zero hedge articles.
ZH said the seizure was without a warrant. There was a warrant. ZH's source updated their story to reflect this, but ZH did not.
> Then I keep going down the list and they have nothing to do with zerohedge
The links in the source section include links to ZH stories, links to the sources ZH used, links to fact checking sites, and so on. They are references for the assertions in the text above in the corresponding section.
I didn't realize that you needed the extension to view them. I had thought that all the extension did was lookup links on the current page and add a badge to them summarizing their overall NewsGuard score, and add a mouseover popup for the badges to see the full score, and provide a link to the full report.
Edit: actually, the links aren't working for me now, either, and I DO have the extension installed.
Edit: it looks like they are time limited links. I just went to Zero Hedge again, got a NewsGuard link, and the long hex string is different. That new link works for me regardless of whether or not I am on a browser with NewsGuard, presumably until it too times out. I don't see any way to make a permanent link to their report for a site.
By failing to make it clear to him that their privacy invading browser extension is the only way to view their data. Why did they fail to effectively communicate this to him?
Now, back to Newsguard. According to Mozilla [1], that permission is needed for an add-on to read page content. The Newsguard add-on has screenshots that show it popping up alerts for the RT Facebook page (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/#&g...) and some other post in a Facebook news feed (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/#&g...). I don't see how the extension could provide that functionality without the permission, so giving it access to "all data for all websites" seems reasonable to me.
Insufficient evidence has been presented to make the case that the extension is "privacy invading." Do you have more to support your conclusion, or did you just jump to it?
Frankly I trust gorhill more than I trust whoever is behind any other random extension I never heard of before today. There is this little thing called "reputation".
Why do they make you use their extension, instead of simply letting you enter URLs on their website? If I'm curious what they think of any given website, why must I install their extension to find out? The only reason I can think of to not facilitate that sort of workflow is to coerce the curious into installing the extension, which I consider to be nefarious until proven otherwise.
> Frankly I trust gorhill more than I trust whoever is behind any other random extension I never heard of before today. There is this little thing called "reputation".
That's such a strange attitude. Yes, reputation matters, but there was a time when gorhill was unknown and had none. As far as I can tell, you're just ignorant of this extension, and assuming it's untrustworthy because of your ignorance of its trustworthiness (and likely some preexisting bias).
> Why do they make you use their extension, instead of simply letting you enter URLs on their website?
Isn't it blindingly obvious? They want to put user-friendly reputation-indicators on the page, without making their users go though a lot of extra hassle. This is a fairly common use case services that provide reputation ratings (e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f... for another example).
If I had to guess, the main audience for this isn't people with good media literacy skills, it's people who tend to gullibly believe sketchy websites (and who have friends or relatives with good media literacy skills who want to help them).
>That's such a strange attitude. Yes, reputation matters, but there was a time when gorhill was unknown and had none.
And in that case, I wouldn't have installed it. It's the same reason I install ublock over the dozens of other adblockers on AMO or chrome store.
>As far as I can tell, you're just ignorant of this extension, and assuming it's untrustworthy because of your ignorance of its trustworthiness (and likely some preexisting bias).
For me not necessarily "ignorance", it's a combination of: a) brand new website (to me); and b) immediate prompt for additional permissions (via an extension install). It's the same reason I wouldn't for example, lend $50 to some stranger who walked up to me, even if he was someone "trustworthy" (eg. King of Liechtenstein).
>Isn't it blindingly obvious? They want to put user-friendly reputation-indicators on the page, without making their users go though a lot of extra hassle. This is a fairly common use case services that provide reputation ratings (e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f.... for another example).
>If I had to guess, the main audience for this isn't people with good media literacy skills, it's people who tend to gullibly believe sketchy websites (and who have friends or relatives with good media literacy skills who want to help them).
Sure, an extension is more user friendly, but make it mandatory when a web page would do fine? This is the "install our app" nag taken to the next level and reeks of developers forcing "what's best" upon users.
>> That's such a strange attitude. Yes, reputation matters, but there was a time when gorhill was unknown and had none.
> And in that case, I wouldn't have installed it. It's the same reason I install ublock over the dozens of other adblockers on AMO or chrome store.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree and I haven't installed Newsguard and don't plan to. The other guy really seems to want to jump to the conclusion that the extension is malicious (e.g. he characterized it as "privacy invading"), which I think is unwarranted (and frankly a little conspiratorial, given that so little supporting evidence has been given).
Having researched it, it doesn't look too bad. Definitely better than trash like Media Bias/Fact Check.
> Sure, an extension is more user friendly, but make it mandatory when a web page would do fine? This is the "install our app" nag taken to the next level and reeks of developers forcing "what's best" upon users.
Yeah, I agree it's a questionable design decision.
> Isn't it blindingly obvious? They want to put user-friendly reputation-indicators on the page, without making their users go though a lot of extra hassle.
That explains why they offer the extension. That does not explain why they make the extension the only option. It should be possible for me to evaluate their ratings without installing their extension, but for some reason they haven't made that possible.
(If you think trust and/or erroring on the side of safety is a strange attitude, I think you a strange person. I don't need to prove this extension is nefarious; they need to prove to me they aren't.)
> That explains why they offer the extension. That does not explain why they make the extension the only option. It should be possible for me to evaluate their ratings without installing their extension, but for some reason they haven't made that possible.
Why don't you ask them about their reasons, then, rather than just speculating and casting doubt that you have little basis for?
>Infowars is tabloid material at best; but even they say that this is a lie. They never asserted this.
Yes they did. Alex Jones initially called Sandy Hook a hoax and the families crisis actors. He is being (so far successfully) sued for such acts[0]. He did walk back some of those claims, but here's his words:
>"Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey -- so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit. I appreciate your call."[1]
They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.
>Yes they did. Alex Jones initially called Sandy Hook a hoax and the families crisis actors. He is being (so far successfully) sued for such acts[0]. He did walk back some of those claims, but here's his words:
Could you provide a source for this? Both your links do not source anything from alex jones.
>They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.
When we have a censorship and false accusation problem ongoing. You need to provide the source.
Dont get me wrong, alex jones is tabloid quality at best... but when you have the left-wing calling the right-wing nazis without any evidence of these people being nazis is insane.
Given that he posted them on Youtube and is now banned, I'm not sure where to find them now. Nor do I have any interest in trying to figure it out. However, it looks like you can listen to hour 2 here[1] after entering the date. I haven't tried though.
A couple videos I cannot watch is not a valid source.
Again, there is a repeat issue of the left-wing lying and making false accusations against right-wingers. Ben Shapiro for example is a practicing jew but is regularly called a nazi.
I would love to hear your source but Alex Jones denies ever saying it and I'm not seeing any sources.
Regardless, again the guy is a walking tabloid. He literally calls himself retarded.The guy rants on and on for hours everyday. He gets super drunk and high. The guy is going to say retarded things. Yet you're going back to a 2015 show to find something the dumbass said and you cant even prove it?
I gave you a link to an archive where you can listen yourself. Your refusal to do so is on you, not me. I have proven what I've claimed, you just appear uninterested in believing what's in front of you.
Like I said, Jones's comments were made in speech, not in written word, and the easiest place to find it was on youtube.
Since you don't seem to accept that, I am curious though, what "source" would you accept?
>The guy is going to say retarded things.
Your claim was very specific:
>They never asserted this.
Infowars did. I provided evidence of the falsehood of your claim. Your defense now seems to be that it was a while ago. Which is true, but so was the Sandy Hook attack, so that's not particularly surprising. If you don't want to be called out for defending a conspiracy theorist, don't make absolute claims about a conspiracy theorist that can be proven wrong with a few minutes of searching, and certainly don't then double down on your defense because he said them a while ago.
Please don't defend Alex Jones and Infowars. Its not a good look.
Alex Jones is political humor, have you ever listened to his show? It's like the right wing version of Daily Show, John Oliver, Weekend Update, Bill Maher, or Colbert. Maybe you don't find it entertaining but other people do. By the way he was recently on Joe Rogan and was contrite about calling Sandy Hook crisis actors, he insists it was a hot take and he corrected himself when the situation became more clear. By the way, if you want to hold the left wing media to the same standards about harassment as you are Alex Jones, the world is still waiting for corrections and apologies from most of those shows about getting the Covington kids story wrong and in some cases calling for doxing and violence.
"it's all a joke" is only a valid defense when like you actually market yourself as a comedian or satire (like Stewart, Oliver, Colbert, Maher and snl do).
And I reject your comparison to Covington for a host of reasons. Some of which include:
- no one arrested for attempts against the Covington kids
- the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake
- those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.
This "both sides are the same" talking point is garbage.
> - the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake
You can have an opinion about what the kids could have to attempt to de-escalate and hypothesize about whether that would have led to a "better" outcome, but you can't point to anything that they did that they should not have done, unlike the other people in the story. What really happened was few frames of video were captioned and spread by a likely foreign agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/technology/covington-vide... and that set many peoples opinions - which has not fully been updated now that more information is available.
> - those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.
You can't really make that claim so soon from when the event happened. Some people still think the Covington kids were instigating conflict with that Native American guy and the Black Israelites, and some people believe that Sandy Hook were crisis actors. They will surely talk about it for a long time as long as they believe it's relevant.
I agree that the magnitude of harm is different - but not a completely different universe. However the reaction by mainstream media and tech platforms couldn't be more opposite. I hope you will at least consider that internet censorship is broadly only going one way right now, it is obvious to those being impacted, and really consider what the outcomes could be if taken to the limit. Listen to the recent Joe Rogan podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey, and Vijaya Gadde (Twitter trust and safety) for quite a few examples.
Just because something has a contrarian view doesn't make its good. What use is a contrarian view if their bar for quality is that low? Something like WSJ makes sense as a counter balance to NYT, not some 3rd tier blog. The desire to see "both sides" causes people to lift up sources that are otherwise ignored for a reason.
This isn't a justification for Facebook blocking them, but we sure don't need them either.
There is a ton of 'news' on Zero Hedge and many times I hear about things there first before the mainstream news sites which sometimes never cover the story (Yellow Vest protests in Europe, US taking gold from ISIS in Syria, reasons for what is going on in Venezuela, etc). You need to critically think about what you are reading and understand what biases the writer might have. I'll read 1 out of 20-30 headings and there is some absolutely solid content there.
How trustworthy Facebook is as far as their choices on what to filter is somewhat related to if ZH is in fact trustworthy too... same goes for other sites.
I was a regular reader of ZH for a long stretch leading up to the 2012 election and in my opinion their content is toxic and fuels paranoia. Lots of "end stage capitalism" and "prepper" type content. From my perspective now it definitely seems like the type of content that could be considered intentionally manipulative in a very negative way. It was very fear driven and I don't think that is healthy.
Yeah, I had seen links to ZH from top-notch economic blogs I followed during the recession, so I was surprised when they started popping up as sources for all my favorite crazy conspiracy Youtubers.
Their content at this point spans the gamut from needlessly contrarian to peddling propaganda. I gather ZH is doing it for the page views, because stories like that get plenty of traffic.
It is not a news site but a fight club (their positioning). And over the years more and more people not worth fighting have aggregated there. It is in some way an anarchistic experiment and the longer it runs the sadder it looks. I learned a lot during the early years and I learned a lot by observing how they developed.
What news content isn't toxic and doesn't fuel paranoia? Which content isn't manipulative? Everything I read from every side has me believing the world is going to end, collapse is right around the corner, opium epidemics everywhere, plague imminent, etc. No need to single out ZH only.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadWorth noting, it took the NYT until March 10th [1] to finally come to the conclusion that ZH had come to on Feb 24th [2], regarding the burning of AID trucks being sent to Venezuela. ZH has an anti-establishment bend, and will take a critically hostile point of view against the main stream, it's interesting to read that perspective when most established news organization are aligned one way in their reporting.
Glenn Greenwald had a great piece on the spread of fake news surrounding the AID truck event, worth reading for anyone who is somewhat skeptical of establishment narratives. [3]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-...
[2] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-23/venezuela-border-t...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...
You can find a few examples on algolia if you poke around: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=glenn%20greenwald%20russia&sor...
The latest update to the ZH article says:
ZH> True to his word, it appears the humanitarian aid trucks being sent from the west into Venezuela have been repelled by Maduro's guards as reports come in from social media that they are all now on fire.
I don't see anything that says that the protestors set them on fire, but might have missed it. The way that is written makes it sound like Maduro's guards did it. The only mention I see of protestors setting anything on fire is the burning of a bus covered earlier on the page.
[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-28/burning-aid-interv...
To also clarify my position, ZH is not very reputable, but they provide interesting insight into current events and will sometimes post contradictory views from different blogs/news sites. It's up to the reader to determine if the "news" they produce is verifiable or merely conjecture. It should not be up to facebook to make the decision for the reader.
Also it is worrying that a company with the reach of NYT doesn't produce this information till weeks after the event. It allowed for the false version of the incident to complete its cycle in the news without interrupting the narrative being formed, and thus creates and incentive for people to seek-out ZH as a source of info. ZH isn't reputable, but their reputation is improved when they are stacked up against poor reporting from other agencies, which is unfortunate.
Free speech isn’t about holding your hand and establishing a standard, it’s about laying out all the information, real or not, and letting you decide for yourself.
If you posit that censorship is an acceptable form of filtering where someone else with their own version of facts and biases does your thinking, then you are entering a very dangerous mindset.
No, it believes that the Sandy Hook parents are all malicious liars and that none of them lost children.
It also believes in classic antisemitic conspiracy theories, cloaked in the thin disguise of being about Soros, the most convenient Jew in the world from the perspective of people who want to slide antisemitism back into the mainstream and give people and entrypoint to David Duke-style outright White supremacy.
Note that the ZH comments section, however, is a cesspit filled with all sort of -ists.
By contrast my impression of Zero Hedge has been that they are constant economic contrarians. If mainstream media is touting the strong economy, Zero Hedge posters are writing about how fiat currency is unsustainable and how the long-term trend low interest rates is creating a bubble. I do agree the sources of their article range from "I think I heard somewhere" to "based on this Bloomberg data", it's all over the place. But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.
Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.
With two stopped clocks you can tell the right time!
Back in the mid-late 1990s I ran technical operations for what was then Chicago's most popular ISP (it was eventually acquired, through multiple hops, by RCN). Our arch-competitor was a very strange guy named Karl Denninger, about whom I would relate stories here but I'm pretty sure he'll have a Google search set up on his name and I'd rather not pay to have bogus lawsuits against me dismissed. Anyways: he runs one of these sites, a sort of Zero-Hedge Jr, at Market-Ticker.org.
Maybe switch to Market-Ticker. It's just as batshit as Zero Hedge, but I'm pretty sure Karl isn't trying to influence low-information American voters about Syria.
And this is different from me doing the same thing with a status update.... how?
Also, you understand that any other media outlet can do and often does the same exact thing? You think inserting pieces of an agenda/propaganda into news articles is something limited to ZH?
How is this not just an argument against the Internet and free speech in general. I mean, "anyone" could just lie or say something false! How would we ever know the difference?!
>but I'm pretty sure Karl isn't trying to influence low-information American voters about Syria
Lets just go back to Monarchy, people are apparently too stupid and "low-information" for something as advanced as Democracy. Is that what you mean? Not saying you are wrong, btw, just asking.
How is controlling what people are allowed to read or watch or know about any different than controlling what they think, how is that not the same thing as controlling what they do and how they behave, how are you not destroying their independent agency, and essentially corrupting democracy at its very premise?
I agree that spreading misinformation and dishonest propaganda to manipulate ignorant and low-IQ people would lead to the very same end, that is obvious and was basically the status quo before the Information Age, but the difference between propaganda (noise) and censorship (silence) is like the difference between using a condom and full castration.
Seriously, I just looked at the stories on the front page and most are economic related.
Can you share the ones that are conspiracy related or are what you consider "insidious"? Thanks
https://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/is-the...
At least all this is happening above board. It's not like Facebook has employees running tutorials on private Slack servers teaching people how to game the harassment reporting system to spike down content involving opinions they don't like.
If you want contrarian market opinion, just stick a post-it that says "the market is going to crash" to your screen and eventually it'll be right - just like ZeroHedge.
This is just another example.
From my point of view, the left wing is calling the right wing nazis and trying to get them banned.
I cant say I've ever been on Zero Hedge that many times; just looking through their site now I'm not really seeing anything objectionable.
They do have a ton of content so perhaps I'm not seeing what you see as bad. Could you provide examples?
But if by right wing do you mean Richard Spencer, Milos Yiannopoulis, the Portland Proud Boy crowd or the people doing the torchlit march in Charlottesville who were chanting "blood and soil." If so, then yes, the right wing is a bunch of Nazis.
It seems like Facebook just feels threatened by everything right now, and that they recognize that they're dependent on people being on their platform to stay alive.
I would like your thoughts on this: What has to happen to get everyone to migrate to a new platform, or is that even possible?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/12/blocked-ads-pro...
The right-wing folks on the otherhand stay banned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%8%93right_political_...
Asia is for the Asians, Africa is for the Africans, but the West for everybody? I'd love to see your kind go to South Africa or Saudi Arabia and declare there's not enough diversity. Diversity of thought, not of race, is the strength!
I posted on twitter 'learn to code' and I got banned. Which was crazy, it was entirely a positive message; not aimed at anyone, the only people I follow are people who give talks at hackerconferences.
I then researched that there some super out of touch journalists who were attacking right-wingers and then end up unemployed. So there was some people tweeting learn to code at these unemployed journalists.
The project I just got working last night was a python project that pulls weather data from weather canada and archives.
https://pastebin.com/ajgGJkc7
Weather predictions are pretty inaccurate until its more like a day away.
I can understand the first line review flagging them via rigid application of "the rules".
What I have trouble understanding is how they apparently don't have a mechanism for handling "high risk" placements, or if they do, it missed ads from a presidential candidate known to be critical of them, exactly the sort of placement such a mechanism, you know, is for.
Facebook can do what it wants here. If you don't like it, divest.
What makes no sense is thinking Facebook is on the left.
Facebook will be standing right in with the tighty-righty GOPpers when it comes to regulating or taxing it.
>The Atlantic Council’s president and CEO sent a seven-page letter to Hagel Friday that included a list of foreign corporations, governments and government entities that fund the organization. The list includes roughly 100 corporations and 15 foreign governments, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The amount of funding from each entity is not listed.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/282047-atlantic-council-r...
However, it is not a violation of US law.
If that is good enough for you, then so be it.
No.
I don't see how that changes anything. Nobody has to host a link to anyone else's site either in the name of free speech ....
Here, they are demonstrating (among other times) that they do not believe in free speech. It is their right. Just as it is their right to collect user data and resell it.
They have a right to suck and be evil.
Do you have to host other people's content, anything, to belive in free speech?
I don't know what you mean by free speech at this point.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/internet-speech/facebo...
https://verdict.justia.com/2019/01/09/why-facebooks-hate-spe...
But that seems like an entirely different argument than your idea of "free speech". Related, but not the same.
The ramification being that some people my choose to understand the world differently from you. The answer to that worry is to make compelling points in your favour, or maybe try to understand the other side of the argument. Freedom comes at the expense of security, and security in this instance is overstepping its boundaries.
> "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."
Marsh v Alabama may not currently apply to digital spaces, but it's not inconceivable that in the future there will be another SCOTUS ruling to clarify this new emerging scenario.
I suspect the conditions that it is offered at will matter. If I offer my land for yoga I probably can still filter someone who tries to hold a practice for their rock band.
ELUAs and such would come into play.
Let alone that I'm not yet sure if SCOTUS as a group really understands technology.
Telling people to divest from facebook is as helpful as telling a chinese citizen to leave china if they don't like government censorship. Especially if facebook becomes entrenched and monopolistic. Also, considering facebook has more power and reach than almost every country in the world, perhaps it's time to think about censorship and corporate power.
After all, government censorship was the norm until we decided that governments have gotten too powerful to allow to exist unchecked. Perhaps it's time to think of large corporations in the same manner.
>Facebook can do what it wants here. If you don't like it, divest.
"Country X can do what it wants. If you don't like it, leave."
"Donald Trump's first gift to the world will be another financial crisis." Headline in the U.K. Independent. "(He) gives every impression that he will soon be hustling America — and possibly the entire world — in the direction of another catastrophic financial crisis." Same article.
"I have no stocks. I advise people not to invest in the stock market, not now. Way too dangerous." Film maker Michael Moore, August, 2017.
"It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? A first-pass answer is never… So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight." Paul Krugman of the New York Times the day after the election.
You know what? I bet If you let me control everything you read I can help you understand this better.
Perhaps one site isn't into a lizard conspiracy, but they push a "gay bomb" theory.
Nobody is debating either topic, just noting how absurd the information they push is.
> "The reason there's so many gay people now is because it's a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they're going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don't have children," he said on his broadcast in 2010, according to NBC News.
> "The majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay," Jones said in 2017. The claim was without evidence.
Anyways, what is your comment even saying. What are you responding to? The words I used to describe misinformation? Massive Eyeroll
*was
Which is fair enough I suppose, but at least be honest about it.
I read ZH sometimes. They also don't spend much time criticising Iceland. You seem to be assuming they should share the same obsession with Russia as much of the rest of the mainstream media, but their different set of obsessions is rather what makes them useful as an outlet.
In that particular situation, both sides were total propaganda and Syria was the grayest of gray areas. I like to think I'm not the only one who read both extremes of the reporting with a filter and arrived at my own conclusion.
* China's belt-and-road
* Venezuela (worth noting they were an early reporter on the aid-burning)
* Anti-Tesla stuff
* Anti-SEC, pro-Elon Musk stuff
* Stop Brexit
* Boeing
* China's massive debt load
* They still like gold
Yes, it's clear they have their own set of biases, again like every other outlet. But they don't seem to be super far left or right, and certainly don't seem to be "russian propaganda".
I shudder at whatever Orwellian hellscape we've landed in when people celebrate the censorship of a differently minded news source instead of utilizing it: read both it and your mainstream sources with a filter, apply your own independent thought and judgment and arrive at your own conclusion.
Anti-Maduro rioters being responsible for the aid-truck fire was a "Russian talking point" until a few days ago when the New York Times, America's most venerable newspaper of record, finally admitted it was true.
Credit to arcseco for drawing my attention to this: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...
At least this time it didn't take the New York Times the better part of 60 years to admit they were wrong, as it did when they were publishing Russian talking points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
Two examples: The Venezuelan aid-truck stunt. Clearly orchestrated by the US to help nudge regime change. On the other hand, the MH17 crash: clearly a case of Russian forces mistakenly shooting down a passenger jet and coming up with some outlandish claims against the evidence (ie that it was faked with CGI).
Both are instances where the truth would've been lost on someone who exclusively reads and believes only one source of news.
Why not: "probably a case of Russian or Ukrainian forces shooting down a passenger jet"?
Why "clearly" US burning the truck instead of say a local false flag or truck malfunction? You make a lot of assumptions for saying something is clear.
I mean all of that is just common sense. The relative rate at which any of those scenarios unfolds is up in the air, but it's pretty clear all of those scenarios happen at least some of the time. When you see somebody claiming otherwise (e.g. "Russian media disagrees with American media, so the Russian media must be wrong." or "American media disagrees with the Russian media, so the American media must be wrong") you can be sure their opinion is invalid. They could legitimize their opinion by acknowledging a degree of uncertainty, by adding the word "probably" to either of those statements.
Here is the key: recognizing the possibility that you could be wrong. Acknowledgement of uncertainty may run counter to ego, but it's important. Or maybe I'm wrong about that.
Correct/incorrect is not the only axis on which to evaluate media. There's also trustworthiness. I think that Russian media is less trustworthy than American media because it's not independent [1] from a government controlled by people who's jobs included running disinformation campaigns like Operation Infektion [2] [3], which included cooperation from state-controlled media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_freedom_in_Russia#Govern...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infektion
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-d...
> Did Sweden shoot down MH17? Why are they denying that they shot it down, is there a coverup? Our defense experts have shown that the attack occurred within the range of the Swedish JAS-39 fighter, so they could have done it. What do the Swedes have to hide?
That's why you should read multiple sources, not one. If one source is omitting details but not otherwise lying, you'll get those details from other sources. To reiterate my earlier example, when western media were omitting evidence that Anti-Maduro rioters had started the fire, you could still become aware of this information by paying attention to what some in the western press were calling "Russian talking points".
Regardless, you've not refuted the essential truism here, that no western source is always right and that Russian sources are not always wrong.
That's not what I was trying to refute. I'm sorry if you were confused.
The point I was making, is that if you want a diversity of sources, it's smart to select high-quality ones whose real goal is to be accurate and trustworthy. Most Russian media doesn't fit that bill, and certainly not the government-sponsored English language stuff.
To be a little hyperbolic and blunt about it: including propaganda in your diverse set of news sources is expert mode, and it requires an orders of magnitude more effort, skill, and knowledge. Most people who think they're experts aren't, and they can't handle it. Propaganda is created by experts and it's really a specialist job to suss out any novel truths that might be in it.
> when western media were omitting evidence that Anti-Maduro rioters had started the fire, you could still become aware of this information by paying attention to what some in the western press were calling "Russian talking points".
Or just wait a few days for proper reporting to happen rather than inhaling breaking news reports. None of those events have any immediate relevance on my life (and probably yours too), so we can afford to take our time.
Also: Trump's twitter account isn't "western media." I first heard about the aid convoy fire in an NYT story that was refuting the idea that the fire was caused by Maduro's forces, and their original story about the event doesn't assign anyone responsibility for the fire:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/world/americas/venezuela-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-...
What else falls in this category? Flat Earthers? Anti-vaccine advocates? Holocaust deniers?
It's clear that the majority of people have poor information literacy skills and one consequence of that poor information literacy results in measles being an actual problem in 2019.
Another person who thinks they should be the arbiter of the truth for the world, attempting to make an argument for ideological limitations on speech.
The entire basis for thinking democracy is even possible, much less a good idea, is that man is a rational being capable of applying logical and moral reasoning in pursuit of the truth, or least the best answer. You seem to disagree.
The allowance of free expression on all topics and ideas along with rational debate ensures that better ideas are not suppressed and that the worst ideas get exposed and defeated.
>Flat Earthers?
Shouldn't be difficult to prove wrong.
>Anti-vaccine advocates?
Science should be able to put their fears to rest while disproving their arguments. No?
>Holocaust deniers?
Again, there is historical evidence that can be used to defeat their arguments and expose their true agenda. No?
What part of suppressing those ideas, or silencing their advocates rather than debating them, proves that your argument is the correct one? Because you happen to think you have authority with whatever consensus you think exists? Do you think truth is based on consensus? Do you not see how it makes your position more suspicious (as in fraudulent) if you are not willing to address the challenges of skeptics or even devil's advocates?
Also, given what we know about astroturfing and social media bots, how many of these people do you really think there are?
>It's clear that the majority of people have poor information literacy skills
Well, that would have been even more true when the concept of free speech was established, when literacy rates were truly abysmal, as in the vast majority of people in even the most advanced societies couldn't even read.
You are saying the problem is either that people today can acquire the information and/or that they lack the capacity to apply reason and logic in order to separate truth from fiction?
So is the problem that information which isn't necessarily "true" or "morally good" is available?
Or is it that people lack the tools needed in order to separate truth from fiction, reality from theory, good from bad, etc? Is it an education/skill development thing, or a mental capacity/IQ thing?
Where do ethics and morality come in to play, and what would that have to do with "information literacy" when speaking of anti-vax people?
>and one consequence of that poor information literacy results in measles being an actual problem in 2019.
Measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000. Did people have higher "information literacy" back in the 80s and 90s than they do now? Was there nobody who was against vaccinations in the 80s and 90s? And if it was eliminated from the US by the year 2000, and it is a re-emerging problem in 2019, then didn't it actually have to be imported? It couldn't have anything to do with the 10s of millions of illiterate and poorly educated, un-vaccinated illegal immigrants from the third world that have been flooding this country for the last several decades, could it? No, it must be the ${insert ideological opponent of the day} and their ${straw-man trait based on bigoted assumptions} who are wrong.
>...the vaccine court limits compensation in death cases to $250,000.
>Even if they had won their cases, the families of autistic children wouldn't have been paid by the companies that make the vaccines, as is common in other pharmaceutical-liability cases. Instead, the government would have footed the bill, using the funds from a tax levied on inoculations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123535050056344903
You won't hear any of the popular news outlets (who rake in big $ from pharma advertising) talk about this side of the "anti-vax" story. All this anti-vax nonsense is a smokescreen.
I don't think Facebook cares if ZH has a website or people can visit. They just don't let that content on their platform.
To me that's different than the Streisand Effect. ZH i'm sure would like similar results no doubt as far as attention goes.
For comparison, InfoWars gets 4 out of 9 [2], and Breitbart gets 5 of 9 [3].
National Review, Wall Street Journal, and The Daily Signal all get full check marks [4][5][6], for examples of conservative sites with top ratings.
[1] https://api.newsguardtech.com/1B10A8FE3FE38166041EF99B6BDE6C...
[2] https://api.newsguardtech.com/86BCB950AC90212617C8328B3BDC7B...
[3] https://api.newsguardtech.com/A7F7BCBA597324801963CA38B46F4E...
[4] https://api.newsguardtech.com/5D044567246813D305EF4CFAC2D797...
[5] https://api.newsguardtech.com/BBB6E27D9A686CF806D035DCEC50B4...
[6] https://api.newsguardtech.com/DCFD64CB17AE2BBCC342F9FFD70DB8...
If anything, we need to be breaking apart these types of technological control software. I don’t want anything to do with “newsguard” and I urge others to take a critical eye on that idea as well.
I'm not saying you should trust NewsGuard. I don't know much about them! But the categorical alarm you take to the entire concept of independent news vetting is problematic.
The problems aren't all one one side. There are problems with having technology like Newsguard, and there are problem with not having technology like it. Just today, I came across the phenomenon of partisan propaganda masquerading as local journalism (https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/03/04/activists-setup-local...).
I've never used Newsguard, but I really hope it flags stuff like "The Tennessee Star." It'd be a clue to question the source more, and God knows we need more clues to get through our hurried, overloaded lives.
It's also not really technology. It's a bunch of journalists doing ratings. Technology is just how they disseminate the ratings, but a lot different (and more accountable) than some kind of AI that tries to do this.
NewsGuard was created by media insiders with funding from media insider foundations. There is most definitely cause for worry there. Would you say china's media "experts" should control what the chinese citizens see? Would you say the same about russia, europe or anywhere in the world?
Blind appeal to authority is just as bad as blindly ignoring authority. I'm not saying I have the answers here. I don't know what the solution is. But I'm certain either extreme is bad for society.
By all means, pick NewsGuard apart.
Note that I'm not saying you should be forced to do that, just that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it.
> you can't trust any organization to evaluate news sources. That can't be true.
But it can.
Successful delegation requires alignment of incentives, oversight or some (well founded) trust relationship. Otherwise, if the stakes are high enough (and if you get to shape the voting or news-consumption and non-consumption of a sizeable fraction of people, they are) bad things will happen to those who are willing delegate, in aggregate.
What makes the expert more trustworthy than the politician or news-source itself? Why would you be better at picking one than the other? Credentials? Max Boot is one of the “world's leading authorities on armed conflict” and well-credentialed (academically and organizationally). Do you trust him? Did the American Tax Payers get a good return of investment of following his expertise laid out in “The Case for American Empire” to the tune of a few trillion Dollars?
Tucker Carlson says no, we shouldn't trust Max Boot. Should we trust him instead? Why not?
The answer is that you can only delegate these things to the extent you're able and willing to critically evaluate the quality and basis of the advice (since you have no mechanism to align incentives). And I'd be shocked if you could come up with a single broadly trustworthy news source evaluation organization -- I am not aware of one, are you? Assuming there is one, how would it stay that way longer term?
You seem to be under the weird impression that I'm saying all experts are trustworthy. No, obviously not. I don't trust Max Boot (I trust Tucker Carlson far less). I'm selective about who I delegate parts of my decisionmaking to, and you should be too.
Again: the point isn't that NewsGuard is good (I have no idea if it is). The point is that the very concept of NewsGuard doesn't offend reason or civic virtue.
But "delegating" to me means completely offloading some task to a third party, even if it's one you've vetted before and maybe periodically check on.
To me, delegation in this sense for what news sources I expose myself to offends both reason and civic virtue.
I don't believe in the existence of particularly trustworthy new sources with broad coverage. That such trust is misplaced is easy to verify by picking a few particular examples where you can dig in a bit yourself. Therefore one should be able to get useful information from people one disagrees with or even believes to be evil or dishonest, as long as they're at least periodically willing to make cogent, evidence based arguments. I can despise Tucker Carlson and still agree with him on his evaluation of Max Boot, by looking up the evidence he presents and validating if it supports his claims. Same with Chomsky, Engelhardt etc.
This is what happened originally, so why is this unreasonable?
Was this not done for you in some way before you accepted the fact of the world being round?
>Taking other people's word for it is just censoring alternative points of view
What a terrible straw man.
>This is America. I don't want anything to do with censorship.
Yeah. Right. And?
Worth to look at their sources. But go look at their sources. Virtually all the links dont cover any zerohedge content.
I'm of the opinion newsguard is trash.
It's more like BoingBoing or Jezebel than it is the Wall Street Journal.
Like it makes sense. The cops always overreact at these douchebag open-carry people. Youtube has loads of these videos where people open carry looking to sue the cops under 1984 lawsuits if the cops take their guns.
This is a credible story.
Then I keep going down the list and they have nothing to do with zerohedge.
Sorry but you cant provide a boatload of non-zerohedge articles and assert zerohedge is illegitimate and should be banned off the internet because of not-zero hedge articles.
> Then I keep going down the list and they have nothing to do with zerohedge
The links in the source section include links to ZH stories, links to the sources ZH used, links to fact checking sites, and so on. They are references for the assertions in the text above in the corresponding section.
yikes. that's going to be a pass for me.
edit:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/
>This add-on can:
> Access your data for all websites
Edit: actually, the links aren't working for me now, either, and I DO have the extension installed.
Edit: it looks like they are time limited links. I just went to Zero Hedge again, got a NewsGuard link, and the long hex string is different. That new link works for me regardless of whether or not I am on a browser with NewsGuard, presumably until it too times out. I don't see any way to make a permanent link to their report for a site.
Mislead how? By not offering permalinks? He didn't outline any issues with the information in the reports, just difficulties with accessing them.
By failing to make it clear to him that their privacy invading browser extension is the only way to view their data. Why did they fail to effectively communicate this to him?
You know what other add-on can "Access your data for all websites"?
uBlock Origin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Now, back to Newsguard. According to Mozilla [1], that permission is needed for an add-on to read page content. The Newsguard add-on has screenshots that show it popping up alerts for the RT Facebook page (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/#&g...) and some other post in a Facebook news feed (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/#&g...). I don't see how the extension could provide that functionality without the permission, so giving it access to "all data for all websites" seems reasonable to me.
Insufficient evidence has been presented to make the case that the extension is "privacy invading." Do you have more to support your conclusion, or did you just jump to it?
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-mess...
Why do they make you use their extension, instead of simply letting you enter URLs on their website? If I'm curious what they think of any given website, why must I install their extension to find out? The only reason I can think of to not facilitate that sort of workflow is to coerce the curious into installing the extension, which I consider to be nefarious until proven otherwise.
That's such a strange attitude. Yes, reputation matters, but there was a time when gorhill was unknown and had none. As far as I can tell, you're just ignorant of this extension, and assuming it's untrustworthy because of your ignorance of its trustworthiness (and likely some preexisting bias).
> Why do they make you use their extension, instead of simply letting you enter URLs on their website?
Isn't it blindingly obvious? They want to put user-friendly reputation-indicators on the page, without making their users go though a lot of extra hassle. This is a fairly common use case services that provide reputation ratings (e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f... for another example).
If I had to guess, the main audience for this isn't people with good media literacy skills, it's people who tend to gullibly believe sketchy websites (and who have friends or relatives with good media literacy skills who want to help them).
And in that case, I wouldn't have installed it. It's the same reason I install ublock over the dozens of other adblockers on AMO or chrome store.
>As far as I can tell, you're just ignorant of this extension, and assuming it's untrustworthy because of your ignorance of its trustworthiness (and likely some preexisting bias).
For me not necessarily "ignorance", it's a combination of: a) brand new website (to me); and b) immediate prompt for additional permissions (via an extension install). It's the same reason I wouldn't for example, lend $50 to some stranger who walked up to me, even if he was someone "trustworthy" (eg. King of Liechtenstein).
>Isn't it blindingly obvious? They want to put user-friendly reputation-indicators on the page, without making their users go though a lot of extra hassle. This is a fairly common use case services that provide reputation ratings (e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f.... for another example).
>If I had to guess, the main audience for this isn't people with good media literacy skills, it's people who tend to gullibly believe sketchy websites (and who have friends or relatives with good media literacy skills who want to help them).
Sure, an extension is more user friendly, but make it mandatory when a web page would do fine? This is the "install our app" nag taken to the next level and reeks of developers forcing "what's best" upon users.
> And in that case, I wouldn't have installed it. It's the same reason I install ublock over the dozens of other adblockers on AMO or chrome store.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree and I haven't installed Newsguard and don't plan to. The other guy really seems to want to jump to the conclusion that the extension is malicious (e.g. he characterized it as "privacy invading"), which I think is unwarranted (and frankly a little conspiratorial, given that so little supporting evidence has been given).
Having researched it, it doesn't look too bad. Definitely better than trash like Media Bias/Fact Check.
https://www.wired.com/story/newsguard-extension-fake-news-tr...
> Sure, an extension is more user friendly, but make it mandatory when a web page would do fine? This is the "install our app" nag taken to the next level and reeks of developers forcing "what's best" upon users.
Yeah, I agree it's a questionable design decision.
That explains why they offer the extension. That does not explain why they make the extension the only option. It should be possible for me to evaluate their ratings without installing their extension, but for some reason they haven't made that possible.
(If you think trust and/or erroring on the side of safety is a strange attitude, I think you a strange person. I don't need to prove this extension is nefarious; they need to prove to me they aren't.)
Why don't you ask them about their reasons, then, rather than just speculating and casting doubt that you have little basis for?
Yes they did. Alex Jones initially called Sandy Hook a hoax and the families crisis actors. He is being (so far successfully) sued for such acts[0]. He did walk back some of those claims, but here's his words:
>"Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey -- so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit. I appreciate your call."[1]
They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/alex-jones-de...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170303201414/http://www.politi...
Could you provide a source for this? Both your links do not source anything from alex jones.
>They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.
When we have a censorship and false accusation problem ongoing. You need to provide the source.
Dont get me wrong, alex jones is tabloid quality at best... but when you have the left-wing calling the right-wing nazis without any evidence of these people being nazis is insane.
>the second hour of Jones’ Jan. 13, 2015 show
Given that he posted them on Youtube and is now banned, I'm not sure where to find them now. Nor do I have any interest in trying to figure it out. However, it looks like you can listen to hour 2 here[1] after entering the date. I haven't tried though.
[1]: http://www.gcnlive.com/JW1D/index.php/archivespage?showCode=...
Again, there is a repeat issue of the left-wing lying and making false accusations against right-wingers. Ben Shapiro for example is a practicing jew but is regularly called a nazi.
I would love to hear your source but Alex Jones denies ever saying it and I'm not seeing any sources.
Regardless, again the guy is a walking tabloid. He literally calls himself retarded.The guy rants on and on for hours everyday. He gets super drunk and high. The guy is going to say retarded things. Yet you're going back to a 2015 show to find something the dumbass said and you cant even prove it?
That's some pretty weak arguments.
Like I said, Jones's comments were made in speech, not in written word, and the easiest place to find it was on youtube.
Since you don't seem to accept that, I am curious though, what "source" would you accept?
>The guy is going to say retarded things.
Your claim was very specific:
>They never asserted this.
Infowars did. I provided evidence of the falsehood of your claim. Your defense now seems to be that it was a while ago. Which is true, but so was the Sandy Hook attack, so that's not particularly surprising. If you don't want to be called out for defending a conspiracy theorist, don't make absolute claims about a conspiracy theorist that can be proven wrong with a few minutes of searching, and certainly don't then double down on your defense because he said them a while ago.
Please don't defend Alex Jones and Infowars. Its not a good look.
And I reject your comparison to Covington for a host of reasons. Some of which include:
- no one arrested for attempts against the Covington kids
- the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake
- those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.
This "both sides are the same" talking point is garbage.
There are ongoing investigations by law enforcement for threats made against the kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lInBTiL32Qo - Credible threats are not free speech.
> - the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake
You can have an opinion about what the kids could have to attempt to de-escalate and hypothesize about whether that would have led to a "better" outcome, but you can't point to anything that they did that they should not have done, unlike the other people in the story. What really happened was few frames of video were captioned and spread by a likely foreign agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/technology/covington-vide... and that set many peoples opinions - which has not fully been updated now that more information is available.
> - those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.
You can't really make that claim so soon from when the event happened. Some people still think the Covington kids were instigating conflict with that Native American guy and the Black Israelites, and some people believe that Sandy Hook were crisis actors. They will surely talk about it for a long time as long as they believe it's relevant.
I agree that the magnitude of harm is different - but not a completely different universe. However the reaction by mainstream media and tech platforms couldn't be more opposite. I hope you will at least consider that internet censorship is broadly only going one way right now, it is obvious to those being impacted, and really consider what the outcomes could be if taken to the limit. Listen to the recent Joe Rogan podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey, and Vijaya Gadde (Twitter trust and safety) for quite a few examples.
The only people who shouldn’t be reading ZH are people who believe everything they read. Those people also shouldn’t be reading MSM.
This isn't a justification for Facebook blocking them, but we sure don't need them either.
mmm... fake equivalence
Could you provide me some links showing Zero hedge is different?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
Even people who want someone to censor social media should be concerned about who the censor is.
How trustworthy Facebook is as far as their choices on what to filter is somewhat related to if ZH is in fact trustworthy too... same goes for other sites.
Their content at this point spans the gamut from needlessly contrarian to peddling propaganda. I gather ZH is doing it for the page views, because stories like that get plenty of traffic.