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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

taibbi.substack.com

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Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#481

Post by AniseAbyss »

dang wrote: post #450
mrfusion wrote: post #191

> Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny. - Aaron Swartz

No one seems to have pointed it out, so I'll mention that Aaron was clearly paraphrasing Noam Chomsky there. The point about government being partially limited by constitutions and elections while private companies are not is one that Chomsky has been repeating for decades, and the phrase "corporate tyranny" is very much Chomsky's. This is in keeping with his left-libertarian view that workplaces should operate democ…

Whenever America disappoints me, and that's basically all the time these days, I remind myself that it has also produced critical thinkers like Twain and Chomsky.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#482

Post by zozbot234 »

It's sad to see what's very clearly partisan politics (and not from just one side, either) on HN comments in the run-up to an election. We should try to refocus the discussion here on the actual HN-relevant issue, viz. the broad implications of this sort of content moderation by prominent websites.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#483

Post by cm2187 »

haltingproblem wrote: post #2

I fear Taibbi is right, the suppression by Twitter, irrespective of the merits and veracity of NY Post's report, will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small. Which will then incentivize governments to take on the platforms. This also raises issues of unequal treatment - say the NY Post report was factually wrong - why pick on the NY Post only? Why not the hundreds of other "news o…

In fact new form of political advertising: suppress messages between users that mention stories you don't want to bubble up.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#484

Post by luckylion »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #159
luckylion wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. Yes, in a way, but also obviously not. If that was their only/primary driver, they'd go all click bait all the time. They wouldn't report things that aren't loved by the masses. They clearly do, so clicks/shares/likes can't be their primary things. I do believe that it's partially right, it's just not number one. Number one is agenda, and within the po…

The "agenda" of the paper is whatever position it thinks it's reader base has, if it's reader/ad funded. The political bias due to owner or donor conflict of interest is only one potential source of funding.

Since newspapers are often front-runners and form their readers opinion (rather than just parroting back what their readers already believe), I have doubts.

There's certainly a part of "we need money from ads", but being able to influence the political decisions of a nation is power. That's a value in and by itself, it's not just something you wield to sell ads.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#485

Post by cm2187 »

PaulAJ wrote: post #38
darkerside wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right, but I don't think the previous status quo was tenable either, and maybe even more problematic. Disclaimer: these are opinions. We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more m…

The truth is not a social construct. Either Hunter Biden received that "thanks for the meeting with your father" email or he didn't. Importance is a social construct. If that email is what it puports to be, then whether it is important is a point of view. The media don't (mis)lead us by telling us lies, they do so by deciding which parts of the truth are important enough to tell us.

Unfortunately the notion of truth or lie is often less clean cut.

For instance, when the media tell you "you can get reinfected by covid", is it a lie? As of today, there has been only 5 confirmed cases of reinfection worldwide, out of 50 millions confirmed cases. So it is technically possible but statistically insignificant. Are the media lying when they tell you it could happen to you? I think they do. But technically they don't.

Also most of the lying is lying by omission. I present you one fact but you will never hear about that other fact that completely mitigates the first (the context, or the rest of the sentence, etc). So you can say something factually correct while completely misleading your interlocutor.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#486

Post by cm2187 »

comex wrote: post #392
PaulAJ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is not a social construct. Either Hunter Biden received that "thanks for the meeting with your father" email or he didn't. Importance is a social construct. If that email is what it puports to be, then whether it is important is a point of view. The media don't (mis)lead us by telling us lies, they do so by deciding which parts of the truth are important enough to tell us.

The email didn't say "thanks for the meeting with your father"; it thanked Hunter for "inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father", wording that leaves it ambiguous whether the meeting had already occurred or was in the future. This is important because, even if it is authentic, it does not necessarily contradict Biden's claim that (according to his schedules) no such meeting occurred.

Biden's claim is that there is no trace of the meeting in the diary, but they did mention that the meeting could have happened informally. So they didn't claim no such meeting occurred.

I am a bit puzzled that there wouldn't be a log of who comes in and out of government buildings. It should be easy to prove whether the said executives were at least in the building over that period or not.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#487

Post by dang »

lazugod wrote: post #131
dang wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason people seem to be assuming that more lately (i.e. that "flagged" means mods did it). I'm not quite sure how to correct that notion. I suppose we could hyperlink "[flagged]" to an explanation...but would people click? It's not as if this isn't in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . Explanations don't seem to help much.

Or change the text itself to [flagged by users]?

That would indeed be unambiguous. But it would also be verbose and there's something about that which doesn't fit the HN spirit.

I don't know that unambiguousness would even be all that helpful. I have a feeling that all the same complaints would continue, they'd just route around it, as the old internet adage goes.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#488

Post by shlant »

Kephael wrote: post #451
shlant wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you refrain from making such hyperbolized false equivalencies if you want people to seriously consider your perspective. People can empathize with your frustrations around the seeming lack of agency available to individuals in some democratic countries (in the US especially) without you comparing it to some authoritarian country.

It's not hyperbole, and we do live in authoritarian countries across most of the "Western" world. If you question the Leftist narrative in a public manner you will lose your professional job. If you tweet facts that the Left does not like, it will be deleted (and possibly result in the aforementioned termination of your employment). We don't presently have camps, but we absolutely have an undocumented social credit s…

you are clearly super biased and just painting the same old reactionary picture that doesn't actually exist. If you think a few examples of misdirected cancel culture and a couple private companies choosing some very specific sources/articles they don't want on their platform is akin to "authoritarianism" you either need to read up on the definition or you are being completely disingenuous to support your regurgitated narrative.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#489

Post by Fnoord »

thu2111 wrote: post #453
dlp211 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a valid criticism if these companies didn't hire top tier operatives from both parties and donate substantial amounts via their PACs to both.

Do they? As far as I know the only example of any identifiably Republican person high up in Silicon Valley is Joel Kaplan, and we know from leaks that Zuckerberg spends a significant amount of his time trying to stop his workforce from lynching the guy.

> As far as I know the only example of any identifiably Republican person high up in Silicon Valley [..]

"Thiel is Silicon Valley's most outspoken Trump supporter" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#490

Post by luckylion »

chowchowchow wrote: post #77
luckylion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that’s the sort of thing that most news organizations would gate reporting on. I don't think that's true. The Steele Dossier ("Trump pays Russian Hookers in Moscow to pee on him") wasn't treated special in any way, and it was much more questionable at the time than this story (where the unclear part is what they got for their bribes, not whether they payed his son for access to the VP). Of course, one argument…

You’re making my point aren’t you? You think the NYP story is as reputable as the dossier ? All the same, I don’t know of any newspapers which published stories treating the dossier as a source. As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes. As corroboration: please share if you have any. Actually I think what happened is Rudy etc got a little too desperate and excited and blundered tactically: surfacing the c…

> You’re making my point aren’t you? You think the NYP story is as reputable as the dossier?

My impression is that it's less made up than the juicy parts of the dossier. The dossier contained more truth though, but it was lame stuff that nobody cared about or reported on.

> As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes.

That's just moving goal posts. It's essentially "Now, I'm not claiming A did Z, but I hear a lot of people saying that A did Z. Did A do Z? What do you think, dear viewer?" Of course they're running the story, even if they throw a "this hasn't been independently confirmed" in the footer. That's the beauty about propaganda, you don't need to claim that it's true for the effect to be achieved.

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