We all want to be privy to knowledge that is not widely known, even hidden. It should come as no surprise that info that carries an air of "you're not going to see this on the mainstream!" will have an appeal. Heck, that's why I read HN first thing in the morning is because I'm going to see new here long before it shows up elsewhere, along with links to stories/tech you're just not going to find anywhere else. If Facebook it making people believe they have the Forbidden Fruit there's going to be a line of people demanding to have a bite.
Isn't it already common knowledge that Right leaning readers are moving away from mainstream left wing leaning news sources. The rise of Brietbart, and similar sites that fact checkers dislike is hardly a surprise is it not? (Or is it? seriously, I would like to know, are people surprised that right wing sources are increasing in the wake of Trump?)
The surprising part is the extent to which right wing news like what comes out of Murdoch's companies has become a vehicle for dissemination of obvious falsehoods --paranoid nonsense inconsistent with any evidence. Long ago, I used to think right wing politics were fundamentally rational and just carried a different view on how best to govern versus the left's. Nowadays I see little appeal to rationality, and a great deal of trust-destroying, desperately contrarian fiction masquerading as insight. Left wing sources have gotten worse, too, but don't seem as keen on making things up.
An easy example is the idea that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen.
There's Obama birtherism, the Seth Rich thing, attributing all sorts of nonsense to Antifa. Coverage of COVID has been awful and very misleading from the start.
Just out of curiosity, what information about the integrity of the elections have you taken into consideration when coming into conclusion that the election was legitimate? How many of the arguments of the other side have you seen and rejected? Or did you just dismiss it out of hand?
i don’t think you can conclusively say there wasn’t something fishy about the 2020 election. the 2016 election was considered “stolen” or “hacked” by the losing party that year too
I think every election is going to be fishy in the sense that the biased media outlets break stories in ways to manipulate voters towards one outcome or the other. Making voting more accessible to people with mail-in ballots will have had some affect, too, and most likely helped the democrats, just like closing polling stations and under-serving voters has helped the republicans in some cases. But was it cheating, or stealing? I don't think that qualifies at all. I definitely don't think the pandemic response and mail-in ballot measures were primarily some scheme to get more D votes. I wouldn't call Trumps 2016 win illegitimate either, but all the fake news coming from russian owned blogs and sockpuppets and targeting vulnerable voters was still something we needed to make a stink about and work to mitigate.
If there was something fishy there would be evidence wouldn’t there? The DOJ said there was no rampant voter fraud. Every election will have some votes that are off, but when it’s not enough to sway the election (by even a close margin) then I don’t think it rises to the bar of suspicious. In 2016 there was not any coverage about the election being stolen, nor people attacking congress to try and overturn an election. There was a large discussion about polling and how they were so off. Also outrage about how the electoral college works (same thing in 2020). Maybe if you look at the media on the extreme sides you have a different picture, but I would say the sentiment after 2016 was more shock (once again because of polling).
Pay attention to the last two dates. NINE DAYS after this "trustworthy news source" said SARS-CoV-2 "almost certainly" didn't come from a lab, it tried to distance itself and the Democratic Party from that position, characterizing it as something from "last year."
The politicization of news is not trustworthy. The editorialization in the headlines is not trustworthy. The dismissal of plausible hypotheses is not trustworthy. The doublespeak when the evidence is finally overwhelming is not trustworthy.
I think you don't understand how reporting works. Those last two arricles are reporting what other people are saying. Neither one is CNN making a claim.
You may think CNN is not a trustworthy news source, but both of those articles look fine to me.
I understand your position. My response comes in two parts:
First, I don't think it was necessary to make an ad hominem comment about me personally. What you think I "understand" is irrelevant and the comment was inflammatory.
Second, if "almost certainly" is really "what other people are saying," can you direct me to the quote from one of those other people? It seems to me that this is indeed CNN's conclusion rather than someone else's actual words.
Maybe we should be using different words when talking about this subject to clarify, but in my head there's a big difference between CNN being untrustworthy because it's got an awful, inconsistent, and partisan editorial slant, versus say GNews or the Bannon Pandemic War Room being untrustworthy because they literally push falsified and highly damaging information for months, like that the fake news vaccine is designed by the CCP and will result in infertility for the sake of the Great Reset genocide (real talking points).
I don’t see how those articles are an example of what you’re stating. The 3rd article you posted specifically points out the Democrat’s reversal in their stance from a year ago.
Now, if they pretended the democrats were always skeptical of the natural source of the virus, I would agree.
Though, I still haven’t seen anything but circumstantial evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis. Not saying it isn’t possible, but just because China can’t be trusted with these sorts of things, does not mean they’re lying. Most experts still lean heavily on the side of the natural explanation.
While they indeed wrote "last year", this is purely semantic because democrats indeed started to say lab origin was unlikely at that time. The new information is by definition new. Sure they could have said that, up until last week they still thought so, but it's implicated. The article says that virologists still think that it is natural. The very job of intelligence agencies is to control information. Sometimes they say stuff that makes them look incompetent, like the WMD in Iraq or that the Taliban wouldn't take Kabul this soon. While their service protects "our" interests in the end, they are no reliable source for anything. Scientists at least have some incentive to state the truth.
But I have to agree that news outlets like CNN are politicizing information, but an educated reader can still extract what is important. The alternative is no alternative.
There's also a fair bit of circular reasoning going on. Take the lab leak "conspiracy theory." Some organizations were dinged by the media raters (relied upon for this study) for being ahead of the curve on that, while organizations like CNN and the WHO weren't dinged despite being very wrong on an important topic. So people want to share articles that accurately point out that the lab leak hypothesis is plausible, which gets marked up as sharing information from organizations known for sharing disinformation (like the lab leak hypothesis), while people don't really care to share whatever CCP-apologetics the WHO is spouting today because it has no credibility, which gets marked up as not wanting to share True Information.
While the article is easy to believe, I'd prefer it was phrased more precisely. For example:
> news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources
If a publisher is known for putting out misinformation (and what is the threshold?), that does not mean all their stories are false. To make the claim in the title, the shared articles would have to be individually evaluated for truthfulness.
The second thing that stuck out to me (emphasis mine):
> The researchers also found that the statistically significant misinformation boost is politically neutral — misinformation-trafficking pages on both the far left and the far right generated much more engagement from Facebook users than factual pages of any political slant. But publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories, the study found.
The paragraph switches from talking about misinformation (which I understand to be information that is false), to misleading information, which is a far more vague categorization. Notably, any kind of disfavored statistic, that is grudgingly conceded to be factual, tends to be called "misleading", either for failing to adjust for enough factors, or for implying some cause or conspiracy, or for measuring something you shouldn't care about in the first place.
Even though I know it is the case it never fails to shock me how naive and unquestioning people are when they read something. It’s like they feel the act of them reading it makes it likely to be true.
If people then question or doubt it when the person just repeats it they get angry when it’s they that should have done that
I gravitate toward news articles with meaningful citation hyperlink(s) and not links that points to just its definition, or worse points to similarly but not related articles within their own web site.
There's a second side to misinformation. That side is the mainstream media censuring and suppressing true information.
In my opinion, the whole "misinformation" scare tactic is just a way to increase information suppression. The media cries about misinformation so that when your friend attempts to bring suppressed information to your attention, you'll be primed by the "misinformation" propaganda to reject it outright just because of its source. This increases the polarization as huge proportion of the population is simply unaware of critical information.
What kinds of suppressed information?
- Information about covid early in the pandemic. Information about masks early during the pandemic (when the mainstream opinion was against them).
- Information about the source of covid being the Wuhan lab.
- Information about the safety of mail in voting (to remind you, they claimed before the election that fraud is super rare, 0.0001%, she shifted into a much weaker position of fraud happening frequently but not enough to change the result. )
- Information about hunter Biden laptop and about hunter Biden fbi investigation.
- Information about the vaccines being nearly ready - they lied about it right up until the election, and proceeded to confirm the vaccines are ready just a week after the election!
- Information about election irregularities.
I can keep on going. The levels of information suppression that have been revealed in the last two years is unreal. What's even more astonishing is the "misinformation" campaign being so effective at making people construct their own information firewalls. They have managed to convince so many people to ignore true information from their friends because of a straw man "fake news".
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 77.5 ms ] threadHa!
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/fauci-trump-coronavi...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/lab-leak-coronavirus-t...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/07/health/origins-coronavirus-le...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-c...
Pay attention to the last two dates. NINE DAYS after this "trustworthy news source" said SARS-CoV-2 "almost certainly" didn't come from a lab, it tried to distance itself and the Democratic Party from that position, characterizing it as something from "last year."
The politicization of news is not trustworthy. The editorialization in the headlines is not trustworthy. The dismissal of plausible hypotheses is not trustworthy. The doublespeak when the evidence is finally overwhelming is not trustworthy.
The very premises of this study are flawed.
You may think CNN is not a trustworthy news source, but both of those articles look fine to me.
That is CNN's proven strategy for pushing baseless narratives with plausible deniability.
First, I don't think it was necessary to make an ad hominem comment about me personally. What you think I "understand" is irrelevant and the comment was inflammatory.
Second, if "almost certainly" is really "what other people are saying," can you direct me to the quote from one of those other people? It seems to me that this is indeed CNN's conclusion rather than someone else's actual words.
Now, if they pretended the democrats were always skeptical of the natural source of the virus, I would agree.
Though, I still haven’t seen anything but circumstantial evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis. Not saying it isn’t possible, but just because China can’t be trusted with these sorts of things, does not mean they’re lying. Most experts still lean heavily on the side of the natural explanation.
The grotesque disinformation internet is a mirror of our humanity.
> news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources
If a publisher is known for putting out misinformation (and what is the threshold?), that does not mean all their stories are false. To make the claim in the title, the shared articles would have to be individually evaluated for truthfulness.
The second thing that stuck out to me (emphasis mine):
> The researchers also found that the statistically significant misinformation boost is politically neutral — misinformation-trafficking pages on both the far left and the far right generated much more engagement from Facebook users than factual pages of any political slant. But publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories, the study found.
The paragraph switches from talking about misinformation (which I understand to be information that is false), to misleading information, which is a far more vague categorization. Notably, any kind of disfavored statistic, that is grudgingly conceded to be factual, tends to be called "misleading", either for failing to adjust for enough factors, or for implying some cause or conspiracy, or for measuring something you shouldn't care about in the first place.
If people then question or doubt it when the person just repeats it they get angry when it’s they that should have done that
In my opinion, the whole "misinformation" scare tactic is just a way to increase information suppression. The media cries about misinformation so that when your friend attempts to bring suppressed information to your attention, you'll be primed by the "misinformation" propaganda to reject it outright just because of its source. This increases the polarization as huge proportion of the population is simply unaware of critical information.
What kinds of suppressed information?
- Information about covid early in the pandemic. Information about masks early during the pandemic (when the mainstream opinion was against them).
- Information about the source of covid being the Wuhan lab.
- Information about the safety of mail in voting (to remind you, they claimed before the election that fraud is super rare, 0.0001%, she shifted into a much weaker position of fraud happening frequently but not enough to change the result. )
- Information about hunter Biden laptop and about hunter Biden fbi investigation.
- Information about the vaccines being nearly ready - they lied about it right up until the election, and proceeded to confirm the vaccines are ready just a week after the election!
- Information about election irregularities.
I can keep on going. The levels of information suppression that have been revealed in the last two years is unreal. What's even more astonishing is the "misinformation" campaign being so effective at making people construct their own information firewalls. They have managed to convince so many people to ignore true information from their friends because of a straw man "fake news".