Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 311 posts

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#171

Post by adolph »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #72
bad_username wrote: post #24

I have a hard time to take seriously any disinformation talk from the political and media establishment after the lab leak theory twist, where it had been shameful disinformation, until it suddenly wasn't. I have to be doubting publications even from reputable sources, after "The Lancet" fiasco, where the organizer of the open letter that condemned the lab leak theory was discovered to have ties with the lab in quest…

If you are on the fence then it might be worth re-reading what the NY times wrote about it back then. For example, I could not find much wrong with this from February 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru... It does (correctly, IMO) focus on the 'bioweapon' conspiracies rather than the 'lab leak' theory and mentions how the senator ended up distancing himself from the former. And actually…

With which version of Feb 2020 do you not find fault?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200217083402/https://www.nytim...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210724164846/https://www.nytim...

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#172

Post by no-dr-onboard »

uses wrote: post #156
shrubble wrote: post #73

Pot, kettle, etc. 'The new disclosure revealed that the Post and the Journal each received more than $100,000 per month to run print versions of Chinese propaganda articles. The Times received $50,000 in 2018 to place the propaganda on its website, presumably a small fraction of the revenue it made selling print space to China Daily. The new disclosures also showed that China Daily paid hundreds of thousands of dolla…

Are you going to make the same post for every nytimes article? Like yeah I guess we can dismiss the entire investigative and reporting output of the nytimes because of a troll post from a dumpster tier brietbart wannabe about how the nytimes cleaned up its advertising business? The most frightening thing is that views like this are the ultimate goal of the type of propaganda we're seeing. Convincing you of fact X is…

To be fair, just because you've noticed this user posting the same fact in various places doesn't imply that it isn't useful to _someone_.

This is my first time seeing OPs post on this. I found it to be useful.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#173

Post by tablespoon »

khawkins wrote: post #26

Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus... People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.

> Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus...

Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency."

The problem the media has is that it can't please everyone's biases. If it's appropriately skeptical of Trump, the people who hate to see Trump criticized will be unhappy (and in that case there's an ideological media alternate universe willing to capitalize on that unhappiness and turn it into mistrust). If it becomes a Trump love-fest with either muted skepticism (e.g. Fox News) or hardly any at all (e.g. OANN), then a lot of people with mistrust it (because it's arguably not doing its job).

It's a lot like Congress, actually. People mistrust "Congress" but usually like their Congressman. That's because their Congressmen likely to be ideologically similar, while "Congress" as a whole has people who are very different ideologically (and it may be controlled by those people). And to top that off, the electoral strategies of both parties often play up fear and mistrust of the other side in order to drum up votes (which unarguably helps the candidates most of the time, but hurts the institution).

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#174

Post by graycat »

grumblenum wrote: post #13
ameminator wrote: post #2

Ironic that this is from the New York Times, which has (in)famously had several years of poor or biased reporting.

In 2005 I was in a college dorm that provided the NYT in a common area. I picked up one and the first article I read was a column about Hurricane Katrina. The author interviewed a history professor who bewailed the failings of the president and the United States and how this was "worse than Antitem". In other words the esteemed Grey Lady interviewed an "expert" whose expertise has nothing to do with meteorology or di…

I used to live in New York State and, back before the Internet got very powerful, got frequent offers from the NYT to subscribe.

I had long since concluded that the NYT was junk, resented the offers, and wrote a scathing denuciating letter to the Publisher ending with I don't want your work for free.

Actually, I was a little too hard on the NYT: On paper it can be used to wrap dead fish heads.

My short recommendation for the NYT and the rest of the mainstream media is, first, to get the level of quality of writing and information up to common standards for high school term papers.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#175

Post by kenjackson »

uses wrote: post #156
shrubble wrote: post #73

Pot, kettle, etc. 'The new disclosure revealed that the Post and the Journal each received more than $100,000 per month to run print versions of Chinese propaganda articles. The Times received $50,000 in 2018 to place the propaganda on its website, presumably a small fraction of the revenue it made selling print space to China Daily. The new disclosures also showed that China Daily paid hundreds of thousands of dolla…

Are you going to make the same post for every nytimes article? Like yeah I guess we can dismiss the entire investigative and reporting output of the nytimes because of a troll post from a dumpster tier brietbart wannabe about how the nytimes cleaned up its advertising business? The most frightening thing is that views like this are the ultimate goal of the type of propaganda we're seeing. Convincing you of fact X is…

100% this. There is this push, which seems mostly from the right, to say, "do your own research. you can't trust mainstream news media!". Yet they'll then push tweets from random people as facts.

Even this example of news reporting doesn't point to a single article/advertisement? Were these articles denying facts about the Uyghurs or were they about the rising popularity of cruises available on the eastern seaboard of China? The article tells me virtually nothing and provides little in the way of actual proof (although I'm inclined to believe they did stop state sponsored editorial advertising).

And reading a bunch of sources and forming your own opinion is hardly an improvement when you read Breitbart, the Washington Examiner and the NY Post and feel like you've done your due diligence.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#176

Post by SavantIdiot »

tester34 wrote: post #4

Ehh, I don't like current state of the Internet In last months I've started wondering why do I even pay my internet bills 60% of the reason I still do it is that I need internet for my job the rest is HN, two or three subreddits, music and some video games, wiki/google/maps and the fact that I still need to learn a lot in order to advance in career. It's insanely hard to avoid that main stream media content (celebrit…

> It's insanely hard to avoid that main stream media content (celebrities, dramas, dramas, dramas and $bad_stuff/propaganda) that affects the mood, even when I don't use "normal" social medias.

It's f---ing trivial: don't visit sites that traffic in it.

I mean seriously, show some willpower.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#177

Post by fortuna86 »

giantg2 wrote: post #69
rbanffy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a useful rule of thumb, the New York Times prints retractions. And, yet, a lot of the US public opinion is shaped by Fox News...

Do other tv/cable news networks print retractions? I can't remember any, but maybe they have a specific webpage you have to go to in order to see it? I doubt any of the non-news programs on those networks do, and those comprise the majority of the programming. So maybe it's just hard to find for the little bit of actual news.

Stories online, when altered, are labeled as such with corrections.

Several outlets have been caught scrubbing past headlines that were proven false, but that's more an indictment on them.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#178

Post by fortuna86 »

babyblueblanket wrote: post #146
emptysongglass wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the NYT was also behind the podcast series Caliphate, which I wept to on hearing the first hand accounts of murder and violation perpetrated in the name of ISIS. It came to light later that their primary source they relied on for the story fabricated the whole thing. [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55375277

I believe the NYT also published their own failing there, widely, on its own front page.

Correct. The bar isn't "we never make mistakes". They are human, everybody messes up. The question is, what happens when you do? Issuing a correction is the best standard we can hope for.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#179

Post by [deleted] »

wussboy wrote: post #100
Covzire wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way outlets like the NYT slant their credibility into the ground is by always giving Democrats the benefit of any doubt, and never giving it to anyone else. Everything that could be good for Democrats is amplified to 11, everything that could be a bad look for everyone else is amplified to 11 in the other direction. They appear to be a lot more reliable than they actually are.

Your comment is neither an example nor evidence.

[deleted]

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#180

Post by fortuna86 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #63
chewmieser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias is in every source (although I'd give Reuters an AP a general pass there). Being biased is not a "bad thing" just because it doesn't fit your world view, it expands horizons if you allow other views into your narrow view. And poor? Laughable. NYTimes is a high quality source on-par with WSJ.

"Nobody is perfect" is always true, but also a common intellectual defence mechanism that is only applied to your ingroup. When the outgroup shows their imperfections, a whole other set of cognitive tools are used.

If your side "owns a mistake" and the other side doubles down on a lie, that's not the same thing. You can't both sides that.
Post reply on HN