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NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#12
From the outside, if a society fires their best reporters because they use a "forbidden word" it is already over the edge. Everything else that will probably follow (reeducation camps, etc.) is barely driven by momentum. In the end, there will be a revolution. Given the fervor of the zealots, it will probably be a violent one.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#14
post #6

>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 ch…

The "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?" article doesn't actually demand (or even propose) censorship as asserted by Greenwald, as far as I can tell.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/t...

> So what’s your take? Are you concerned?

> KEVIN Honestly, not really?

and

> I’m not as worried about Signal. Similar to WhatsApp, Signal set a limit so that you can forward messages to only five people at a time. So it would be time-consuming for misinformation spreaders to make a message go viral. Also, Signal limits group chats to up to 1,000 people. That’s large, but not as huge as a Telegram group chat.

It's an article about how misinformation can spread here, but probably less significantly than on other platforms.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#15
It's interesting how polemic Greenwald has become, bringing with it the same magnitude of reality denial as the actors he is going after.

A title like "The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows" coming from an investigative journalist like himself really sounds like a sore loser's version of "investigative journalism needs to die if it doesn't share my narrative and political opinion."

I used to be a free speech absolutist myself back in Snowden times, but having seeing the flip side of anonymous, unverified, amplified and maliciously orchestrated communication of lies by unknown actors myself over the past few years, his ad-hominem attacks and inexact comparisons surely lack the subtleness this topic demands.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#16
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Perhaps I'm dense, but what is he alluding to? Beyond a communist/1984-like system where everyone informs on each other?

On twitter, Taylor Lorenz accused Marc Andreessen of using the "R-slur" in a Clubhouse discussion. In fact, some one else said the word in the context of some /r/wallstreetbets folks calling themselves "retards" in a self deprecating manner.

Taylor Lorenz's issue is that she is blocked by Marc Andreessen and several others on Clubhouse. So she is blocked from entering many key rooms (i.e. the one where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were on)

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#17
> "But this is now the prevailing ethos in corporate journalism. They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit — tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways — is all they have. It’s all they are. It’s why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them."

This should be the real concern: that journalism may be dedicated (and some would say, specifically incentivized) to performing non-valuable work, at the expense of valuable work the public needs journalists to perform. In this media landscape, everyone loses except for the people with actual power, who gain more.

Where does this lead? And how much of this nonsense is driven or encouraged by the very establishment that journalists are supposed to be keeping in check?

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#18
post #6

>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 ch…

Thanks for the reminder on subscribing. I agree good journalism is extremely important, and a diverse set of sources is important as well. I've been feeling like we need alternatives to massive mainstream news media houses that increasingly seem like a battleground for ideological war in the newsroom.

Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend?

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#20
The NYT is hardly beyond criticism. But Greenwald's whole schtick these past few years has been little more than a more articulate Trumpian "the press is the enemy of the people" anti-intellectual nonsense.

I don't think Greenwald is a Russian agent. But it's hard to imagine a Russian agent behaving a whole lot differently, if their motive was to sow discord and distrust in our most historically credible institutions.

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