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Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

nytimes.com

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

#181

Post by md_ »

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…

Is your point that running ads is equivalent to the deceptive practices described in the original article? If so, can you make that a little more explicitly than your three-word argument ending in "etc"?

It seems to me, on its face, that this argument is laughable. The entire premise of concerns about disinfo is that disinfo is (by definition) deliberately deceptive, typically--as in the cases mentioned in the article--deceptive in posture (claiming to be opinion rather than paid propaganda) and origin (claiming to be from organic sources, like real voters, rather than sock-puppets controlled by political actors).

This criticism is, of course, not applicable to paid advertisements that disclose their source.

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

#182

Post by tablespoon »

sremani wrote: post #154
im3w1l wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you happy and content with the mainstream sources you wont feel the need to look for other perspectives from fringe sources.

that is not my gripe. I could care less about NYT being slanted but real travesty is the 'omission', omission of important news stories, omission of events of consequence etc. Your esteemed Main stream does not have an army of jurnos running around the world, they are throwing hissy-fits on their tweeter feeds and article about article and opinion about opinion - the circular reference of their own in group is mind b…

> that is not my gripe. I could care less about NYT being slanted but real travesty is the 'omission', omission of important news stories, omission of events of consequence etc.

1) The mainstream news media is under enormous economic pressure, because the internet kneecapped their economic model: people got used to getting things for free (including bread and butter stuff like classified ads), and "engaging" crap (e.g. ideological hot takes) can be produced far more cheaply than valuable journalism (and is far more "viral"). That means the media often literally doesn't have the resources to even cover the number of stories they used to, let alone everything they arguably should.

2) It's important to be specific about what stories you think are being omitted. Are they actual stories of import, or ideological smears that happen to tickle your biases? We can't know unless they're specified.

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

#183

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

chewmieser wrote: post #37
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.

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.

I read both for a while and consider WSJ more reliable and far far less sensationalist than NYT (as of maybe 5 years ago).

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

#184

Post by fortuna86 »

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…

> 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.

The "lab leak" theory hasn't actually changed any. Intelligence has the same conclusions as they had last year, they don't know. The only thing that has "changed" is the rabid reporting on the subject, either calling it 100% not true or "highly likely". Both conclusions are false, and any outlet reporting it as either one doesn't deserve your time.

> and some signatories confessed they'd signed it only because Trump had been promoting the theory

Source?

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

#185

Post by fortuna86 »

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…

This is a good point I feel is often lost. There is a difference between "it's possible a coronavirus that was being studied leaked from a lab" vs. COVID was a bioweapon the Chinese Gov purposefully unleashed on the world.

Because the bioweapon theory was the prominent one early on (and it was spread at a time when hate crimes against ethnic Chinese were exploding) you can see why it was shut down.

The more reasonable idea of a virus taken from nature, studied in a lab, then escaping, was not the narrative labeled as a "conspiracy" last year.

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

#186

Post by knownjorbist »

moistrobot wrote: post #130

Classic projection from mainstream news. With the amount of disinformation put out by NYTimes, it's easier to point the finger elsewhere. If you want to block NYTimes and all contributors on your account, try this: https://www.blocknyt.com/

Give a tangible example of the NYT putting out purposeful disinformation that's even in the same sort of ballpark of the kinds of sources that millions of people are consuming on a daily basis via Facebook & Twitter. It's not even close. Stop with the false equivalencies.

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

#187

Post by FpUser »

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."

I personally do not have this impression. I truly do not give a flying fuck about "mainstream" (whatever that means) and just read what I want.

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

#188

Post by fortuna86 »

refurb wrote: post #86
Cybotron5000 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?" ― John Maynard Keynes

The facts didn’t change, only who was stating them. If the story was “Trump points to Covid leaking from lab in China, evidence is a sparse” then ok cool. But the story was “Lab leak conspiracy theory has been proven false but Trump continues to claim it’s true increasing Anti-Asian hate crimes” Then Biden starts to comment on it and like a light switch the theory becomes credible, even “likely”. And all the newspape…

I feel the story was your former example, not the latter. If anyone dismissed it as "proven false", they were wrong. But at the time (and now) there still is no evidence for it, which is an important detail when discussing.

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

#189

Post by giantg2 »

rbanffy wrote: post #127
giantg2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure since I get most of my news online. I thought they had like 2 hours per day that were non-opinion news.

The HN crowd is not the typical Fox News audience.

I don't just mean Fox. MSNBC, etc seems to mostly be talk shows too.

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

#190

Post by tablespoon »

kenjackson wrote: post #175
uses wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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.

Which is an attitude that makes one far more vulnerable to the kind of disinformation-for-hire the OP describes (a lot of it is astroturf, fake fact-checking, fake personal accounts of "what's really going on", etc.).

However, many people here aren't discussing the OP, but using the word "disinformation" in the title as an excuse bring up some hobby horse complaint.

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