NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

Almost as an aside, he mentions the need for "content". The 24 hours news cycle and proliferation of Internet based news sources has created an insatiable need for content. These media personalities are so desperate for something to "report" that they will literally do anything to create it. The derogatory use of terms meant to slur a person with limited mental capacity is obviously poor taste and maybe offensive, but is it news? Is that what a "reporter" with a national audience should be focusing on? The news business is in desperate need of constriction.

> I really admire his restraint with what he’s trying to convey here despite how many people will miss reading between the lines.

It wasn't that subtle, to be honest, given the author even says "Stasi-like citizen surveillance" (and in general references Stasi multiple times throughout the article), clearly alluding to what you think he is alluding. But I agree with you, I believe even something not-so-subtle like this will be missed by the overwhelming majority.

Really well-written and well-sourced article. Glad to see someone managing to write something that is pleasant and fun to read, while, at the same time, cutting straight through all the bs with no debris of fluff to just pad up the article.

EDIT: found an even better/more illustrative quote in the article -

"The participants in Clubhouse have tried to block these tattletale reporters from eavesdropping on their private conversations precisely because they see themselves as Stasi agents whose function is to report people for expressing prohibited ideas even in private conservations"

>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room. That seems problematic.”

I'm already hearing this in local debates. It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything.

(PS: Open groups and channels are not encrypted on Telegram servers and can be reported. It is just that Telegram doesn't have a history of letting other abuse it.)

Edit: I've been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now.

Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done.

Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing.

I don't think you are missing anything substantial. While you might have missed the actual historical names and details, you got the idea right. Stasi is just a commonly used name for the Ministry of State Security in Soviet-occupied East Germany post-WW2. Which was known for creating those kinds of systems where it would be commonplace for people to snitch on their family and friends for as much as wrongthink.

On a more fundamental/deeper level, from my understanding, he is alluding to those systems and how regular people would all tattletale on each other voluntarily and out of some misguided conviction and belief in the system (except instead of getting canceled on twitter, they would get gulag'd instead). Without realizing that the system was not their friend and that they themselves were extremely likely to end up next on the chopping block the day after.

I wonder what Telegram and Signal are hosting on? Is it one of the big cloud providers? Could they be deplatformed for harboring "terrorists" on their platforms?