Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another fun one I ask when someone brings up Snopes: Who snopes the snopes? In other words how do we know they are not being biased or thorough enough? I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased articles before.
The bad thing about snopes is they don't have a spectrum, it's a binary 'fact or not fact' system. This means even a slight bit of bias can be the difference between fact or not. But the more important question is why a random website is being used as the basis for truth. They don't even try to hide the bias in their language, it's just filled with words you would never see in an academic document.
The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
161–170 of 503 posts
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#162I love it, the first example of fake news from Breitbart is true. There's video of it happening.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#163This is a long-ish article, as per usual for N Robinson, and I think people ITT are focusing only on the start. Yes free vs. subscription news media is an interesting and important issue, but this article goes on to make a more wide-reaching and incisive criticism of how Capitalism structures the production and distribution of information or knowledge (Current Affairs is a socialist magazine). Information production…
No, they're focusing only on the title. People on HN are no better than the people who get their news from Facebook memes. They just _think_ they're better.
/r/LOLHackerNews
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another fun one I ask when someone brings up Snopes: Who snopes the snopes? In other words how do we know they are not being biased or thorough enough? I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased articles before.
They are biased, but if the facts are accurate, that's irrelevant. A trustworthy organization doing fact checking on one side of the aisle while ignoring inaccuracies from the other side is preferable to no fact-checking at all. Question is: where is Republican Snopes? It's a free information market; why is nobody doing it?
There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself, you are ultimately dependent on some network of trust to inform you of the truth or falsity of something. And even then "true" and "false" outside of logical and mathematical domains is entirely dependent on ones values. That's not to say there's no objective universal set of values.
Most people are Liberal (in the American sense) because that's what all the organs of culture promote and reinforce. It's like the "default" position that people adopt. I grew up liberal in a liberal household where we watched Hollywood movies and mainstream news like ABC, NBC, PBS and I listened to NPR and I went to school which was run by generally liberal teachers and administrators and that's pretty much why I was liberal.
This is the Cathedral vs the Bazaar approach to sense-making.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The existing practice is for the community of these sites to upvote good content and downvote bad content. Separately, moderators purge controversial content as a check/balance to the voting system. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they choose a different site to frequent, as is the case in market systems.
again, if you look at the whole system in aggregate, the existing practice is for GooFaceTwitBaba to farm out their moderation works to subcontractors, while also bending backwards to prevalent political headwinds to preserve their shareholder value. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they are free to leave the megaplatforms and become approximately completely irrelevant, th…
What is your alternative system?
It's very easy to point out that nothing is perfect. It's very difficult to come up with a better solution.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#166The first link in the article is not a "lie". "Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets" has a RT video that shows exactly that, and links to several other confirmed Twitter accounts all stating the same thing. How is that a lie?
There's been a lot of coverage around false-flag sorts of behavior in Portland, but the fact that this thing is being pumped through the lie pipelines that originate with places like RT (Russian state-controlled media) is kinda a dead giveaway. We can get into a nuanced discussion of "is it really lying" since there's a video, but I have not been a party to any conversations in my lifetime that start with a nuanced d…
1) There are protestors 2) They are doing things 3) "Protestors are doing things" is a lie because they might not "actually" be part of the protestors but instead be false-flag undercover agents?
That's wild. You can't have a functioning press under those assumptions, because you don't know for absolute certain that everything is the way it looks. Donald Trump might be a long-term agent of the Democratic Party aiming to damage the Republican Party. Of course, it doesn't look that way on the surface, but you never know. Saying he's a Republican is "a lie" by those standards.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Governments, scientists, and experts have also been proven to be wrong and to have lied in the past.
Getting things wrong on occasion is better than having some sort of idiot free for all.
Maybe, but a well told lie told by The One Authority on Truth has more destructive power than a billion chaos monkeys typing on their typewriters for the next hundred generations.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bad thing about snopes is they don't have a spectrum, it's a binary 'fact or not fact' system. This means even a slight bit of bias can be the difference between fact or not. But the more important question is why a random website is being used as the basis for truth. They don't even try to hide the bias in their language, it's just filled with words you would never see in an academic document.
False. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check-ratings/
I was thinking more along the lines of a true spectrum, like a percentage system. What you have here is a bunch of qualitative truthiness symbols decided arbitrarily, it's not much different from just saying true or false.
For example, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marijuana-electron-microsc... this article would lead a passerby to believe that there is equal parts truth and lie in this picture + caption. In reality I would judge this as 'mostly true' because the caption is more true than it is false.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public broadcasting in Germany is no better than private media. In fact most topics are reported the same and even the opinion is the same. But even ignoring this, it is a big problem that publicly funded media is in direct economic competition with privately funded media. This is exacerbated by the official entertainment mission (Unterhaltungsauftrag[1]) and the usage of advertisement. [1]: https://www.die-medienans…
I'm German. Public broadcasting, including ARD/ZDF but also countless of local radio station is without a doubt significantly better in quality than BILD/RTL or other private tabloid media, and it's one of the reasons the country still has by and large a shared reality when it comes to political discussion. I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of…
"[...] and it's one of the reasons the country still has by and large a shared reality when it comes to political discussion."
Shared reality is quite a cynical word and is a reminder just how bad it really is.
"I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of a cultural offering that should be accessible by everyone. I don't really see the competition issue here, just like the BBC they produce content, which is fine." How is it not unfair if you compete in the exact same market with a publicly funded corporation[1]?
"Has to be said though in quality it doesn't really measure up to the BBC, but you can try to claw Tatort from my dead hands " It is basically on par with ntv, Welt and doesn't really measure up to ServusTV. They all share one thing with ARD/ZDF tho and that is advertisement.
[1]: Open any site of public funded TV and look for "Unternehmen" (Corporation) also they have a lot of for-profit corporations spun off, so there is no point calling it a public institution when in fact it is not.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#170Did anyone realize that this article is free?
The amount of free content that Current Affairs has published on the website is a minuscule fraction of their print (subscriber) output.