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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

#171

Post by slibhb »

xoa wrote: post #66
endymi0n wrote: post #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 polit…

> I used to be a free speech absolutist myself back in Snowden times FWIW, there is no reason you shouldn't still be a Free Speech absolutist (I still am) so long as you don't fall for the disinformation that Free Speech means freedom from social consequences. When individuals or other fully private entities decide they don't like someone's speech and choose to not associate or support that person/entity any longer,…

Greenwald's argument is that the repercussions being discussed are not the result of genuine freedom of association. He thinks that there exists a powerful ideological movement in the media that is using its power to get people fired (or banned but at least punished) for reasons that are 1. unreasonable 2. have nothing to do with anything the general public cares about.

You seem to not understand (or not care) about that latter point and, as a result, I find your worldview shockingly amoral. To you, apparently the whole point of discourse is to destroy your ideological opponent in whatever ways are available. The only restrictions are legal. To regular people, it's simply below the belt to try to get someone fired because they said the word "retard". You might decline a dinner invitation over something like that but not e-mail the offender's boss.

> The whole point of Free Speech is to allow arguments/counter arguments and social repercussions and so forth to go round and round to try to inch towards truth without the boot of physical force freezing it all.

"Social repercussions" is doing a lot of work here. Is it just a coincidence that the "social repercussions" under discussion so often involve the targeted parties being less able to express their views? Also, your creepy use of "social repercussions" is certainly not any part of any defense of Free Speech I've ever heard.

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

#172

Post by hackissimo123 »

throwawaysea wrote: post #18
eitland wrote: 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?

> Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend?

I pay for Andrew Sullivan's Substack and reading his weekly column is always a highlight of my Friday.

He's not really a "journalist" but John McWhorter's Substack is excellent too.

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

#173

Post by djrogers »

newacct583 wrote: post #102
vorpalhex wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Greenwald points out, these journalists work at major outlets and have huge followings which they can use - and have used - to shut down speech. Cancel culture is real and we must not allow it to be tolerated. I've been told that I'm "problematic" and should reconsider blogging... because I recommended a $40 pair of hair shears. Greenwald is being a bit melodramatic, but his substance isn't wrong. A reporter lied…

> A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted: "@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything" Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied: "Thanks for clarifying that it was F…

She was completely wrong about who used the word (their voices aren't even similar), and left out critical details about the context in which it was used (it was not used casually - the person who said it was quoting /r/wallstreetbets).

And when confronted on it, she said 'thanks for clarifying' and doubled down on the lack of context. No 'whoops, I was wrong', no apology, no retraction.

What part of that sounds like good journalism to you?

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

#174

Post by dogman144 »

eitland wrote: 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…

God I'm pretty lefty but "problematic" is becoming... problematic.

On top of that, just completely asinine tech reporting is becoming problematic.

Bloomberg supermicro? Never retracted, lead reporter on it is now BBG's cyber reporting czar.

NYT's NSA hacked Baltimore author? Came out with that smooth brained "Jetbrains == SolarWinds" story.

The wear and tear from a complex field only getting more complex, it governing a larger and growing share of our civil society, and already substantial roadblocks to explaining the layman "how to HTML," is really, really, really showing these days.

Sorry for the rant. I work in infosec, and this dynamic has been brewing for a while. Once the "r/WSB, a sometimes alt-right subreddit for stock trading" stories started hitting from all the otherwise top tier news outlets, I lost it finally.

I'm not barking up a MSM tree, but legitimately when and how does this dynamic start to change? It's getting absurd.

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

#175

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

kgog wrote: post #147
betwixthewires wrote: post #132

If NYT or any big dinosaur media company has any shred of integrity left they'll fire and blacklist every single so called journalist engaging in this sort of behavior. They represent your brand, their behavior is your behavior. It reflects on every other employee you have, including any presumably honest ones. If you're an honest journalist and you work for one of these companies, know that their behavior makes me a…

Does that mean your employer should fire you for your HN comments and tweets from personal accounts?

The HN hive mind appears to believe that if all the HN readers in the world refuse to work for companies that they don't like, then a new age of love, peace and libertarianism will dawn across the world.

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

#176

Post by throwaway894345 »

xoa wrote: post #161
throwaway894345 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other fully private entities While I agree, I think it's possible for those entities to become so massive that they become de facto public entities and ought to be regulated as such. The prominent example being social media: such a tiny handful of companies are responsible for such an enormous portion of our collective speech that they are de facto public squares. In such cases, these technically-private entities s…

> While I agree, I think it's possible for those entities to become so massive that they become de facto public entities and ought to be regulated as such. FWIW I said "fully private" specifically with organization "quasi-government power" in mind since there is none of that involved here and I didn't think it worth getting into there. That said, I disagree with you that mere size at all makes a company quasi-governm…

> I disagree with you that mere size at all makes a company quasi-governmental and in particular disagree with your chosen example of social media.

It's not size, but power. Twitter's curation algorithms have massive unilateral influence on public opinion (reaching far beyond its own user-base) probably including the ability to sway national presidential elections. I'm not aware of any utility companies with such power.

> "Responsible"? Every single method of speech we had in 1791, 1891, or 1991 is still with us, far easier and cheaper than ever, along with a host more.

What proportion of your speech is by telegraph these days? I'm guessing it's a lot less than it would have been in 1891. For much of America, much of our speech especially our political speech takes place on social media, and thus "traditional" channels enjoy a much smaller proportion.

Moreover, social media introduces an entirely new dimension: it's multicast. Your telegraph or phone call conveyed information to 1 other party at a time. A Tweet can be seen by millions or more. The volume of communication on social media dwarfs that of other channels.

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

#177

Post by baryphonic »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #137

So, an NYT reporter snooping on a Clubhouse conversation got her facts wrong (although she later corrected them), and the entire thing seemed relatively trivial to start with. And... this is exhibit A for the prosecution about how no one is doing real journalism anymore, they're just playing hall monitor. Or turning into the modern Stasi. Sure, those two things don't seem very similar, but we always forget how the SS…

> So, an NYT reporter snooping on a Clubhouse conversation got her facts wrong (although she later corrected them), and the entire thing seemed relatively trivial to start with. And... this is exhibit A for the prosecution about how no one is doing real journalism anymore, they're just playing hall monitor. Or turning into the modern Stasi. Sure, those two things don't seem very similar, but we always forget how the SS started out as elementary school crossing guards, don't we.

Taylor Lorenz is apparently so focused on Marc Andreesen blocking her on Clubhouse that she admitted (in another since-deleted tweet)[1] that she had created a "burner" account, a violation of Clubhouse rules ("We [Clubhouse] prohibit the creation of duplicate or multiple accounts by one individual, whether representing themselves or another entity")[2]. She has a long history of tweeting at Andreesen on Twitter about her block. An argument that she's simply a neutral reporter soberly seeking out "abuse" and "harassment" strains credibility (especially given that her behavior toward Andreesen on Twitter is actually harassment).

How would you characterize an organization that sends its agents out to harass and stalk perceived enemies, trying to catch them in any act that can be portrayed as wrongdoing or wrongthink, and even going so far as to spread demonstrable lies about them? Stasi seems only mildly hyperbolic.

[1] https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1358349374749769730

[2] https://www.notion.so/Community-Guidelines-461a6860abda41649...

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

#179

Post by betwixthewires »

Spivak wrote: post #106
eitland wrote: 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…

> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything. Jeez. At least give your opponents a charitable take on their argument. This stuff isn't some make-believe silencing of online Socratic circles that just happen to have "non-approved" viwes or "wrongthink". I don't think you get how scary some of these mobs are. They're online witch-hunts fueled…

It would be much easier to take this argument seriously if the most recent example of "deplatforming" (and the prime example in the very article we are discussing in this thread) wasn't a bunch of well funded publications coming to the defense of hedge funds and calling meme culture aware day traders evil Nazis.

Seeing as of late the only prominent examples of the terrible behavior you describe are by exactly the people trying to warn the world of these evil people and save us from them, I'm going to have to file this in "baseless scaremongering."

This is the moral panic of our day. This is our satanic panic, and the people you're defending are our Tipper Gore.

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

#180

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

genericone wrote: post #119
newacct583 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted: "@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything" Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied: "Thanks for clarifying that it was F…

Are you kidding? 1 public figure, a freaking journalist, reads something and immediately decides they need to do a hot-take-cancel-op on a public figure they didn't like, libeling him in the process. Greenwald takes a much more measured approach, he writes a blog, like 1000 words, explaining his thoughts. There's a non-thinking person on one side and an articulate person on the other, and you want to denounce the art…

It really doesn't seem accurate to characterize this blogpost as a measured approach. A few quotes that jumped out at me from just the first section:

> the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks

> The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC — who refer to their twerpy work with the self-glorifying title of “working in the disinformation space”

> they clearly get aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations and lives

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