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The Onion buys Infowars

nytimes.com

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Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#811

Post by troad »

tootie wrote: post #234
tgv wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful news. I'm glad their CEO recognizes the great value of CEOs. My only worry is that this acquisition makes Global Tetraeder so large that it attracts the attention of those pesky EU bureaucrats, who will want to split it up into multiple imperfect solids.

The actual CEO, Ben Collins, has been running The Onion for a short while and his background was as a reporter for NBC. He covered a lot of internet topics very, very well (IMO).

Ben Collins' personal Twitter presence did real damage to the credibility of modern political journalists, imho.

His tweets were soaked in that glib faux-distinterested mid-2010s hyper-online style (but he would still tweet four times an hour, carefully calculating the most likely-to-trend level of ironic detachment for his 'epic' dunk on whoever Twitter's victim of the day was). He had a memorable feud with Nate Silver, in which he (Collins) demonstrated utter ignorance of elementary math, to farm likes off of the then-'out' Silver. Collins treated Twitter like he was the starring character in a high school melodrama.

For almost any 'bad Twitter take' cliché you can think of, there's a Ben Collins tweet (which, to be fair, is still much less bad than the worst of the new Twitter).

The Onion is a good landing point for him.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#812

Post by keepamovin »

jsheard wrote: post #2

The announcement by America's Finest News Source: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/ Alex Jones response: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857058831135645739

This has been halted due a judge deciding it was a private sale masquerading as an auction: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857290045536780334

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#813

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

josefresco wrote: post #87
consumer451 wrote: post #18

Tim Onion's (Ben Collins) statement on Bluesky: [0] > Hi everyone. > The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars. > We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website. > We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off. > I can't wait to show you what we have cooked up. Next post: [1] > Does anybody need millions of dollars worth of…

The funniest thing would be to keep running the site as-is but swap out the insanity for stuff that reads like insanity but is legit or morally sound. The audience might not notice, and could (IMHO) easily be duped into supporting good causes!

The receptive audience would notice and then find other venues, I suspect. Especially with the warning of the former webmaster.

Crazy bullshit is only tempting if it's part of your engrieved group. A clever roleplay won't have the spiritual depravtivy needed.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#814

Post by astrange »

troad wrote: post #811
tootie wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual CEO, Ben Collins, has been running The Onion for a short while and his background was as a reporter for NBC. He covered a lot of internet topics very, very well (IMO).

Ben Collins' personal Twitter presence did real damage to the credibility of modern political journalists, imho. His tweets were soaked in that glib faux-distinterested mid-2010s hyper-online style (but he would still tweet four times an hour, carefully calculating the most likely-to-trend level of ironic detachment for his 'epic' dunk on whoever Twitter's victim of the day was). He had a memorable feud with Nate Sil…

> His tweets were soaked in that glib faux-distinterested mid-2010s hyper-online style

I think this is generational rather than decade-al. That's just how Gen X/early millenials talk about everything, and it's why Bluesky is still like that.

The other big example is that awful Cory Doctorow babytalk word "enshittification" - they love dropping in the occasional swear but only to make things sound even more smarmy.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#815

Post by astrange »

itsoktocry wrote: post #769
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Musk's acquisition of Twitter, it has increasingly become a right wing echo chamber and place to promote conspiracy theories. And Alex Jones' InfoWars and Elon Musk's Twitter are both likely to show you advertisements for supplements of dubious effectiveness and other generally scammy products. So yeah, Jones fits right in there.

You realize old Twitter was literally censoring things they knew to be true but politically damaging, right? Or are you still operating in 2022? Twitter is right wing because your country (and the world) are shifting right. Sorry.

They were censoring leaked pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.

You can't run a service where it shows every single post that someone wants to put up, even if they're "legal". It'd get full of spam, offend everyone so much they leave, or just force everyone to see Hunter Biden's penis.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#816

Post by Rendello »

jfengel wrote: post #650
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #625

In one sense this is funny, in another it's justice, but I think from a broader perspective this is just more of the same tit-for-tat nonsense that moves the needle in the wrong direction. My hypothesis is that the U.S. didn't become more divided because of moron sites like I.W. but rather because of our collective reaction to them. These groups are far easier to ignore when we stop trying to silence them.

I don't think the causation runs either direction. At most, I'd say that a site like InfoWars reflects the division, rather than either causing it or being caused by it. Divisiveness in the US goes much deeper than that, and long predates both the Internet and that kind of radio program. You could perhaps pick the early 70s as a starting point, with the US deeply divided by Vietnam and Civil Rights, at exactly the sa…

An outcome of two-party systems is polarization. A voter in a true multi-party democracy can vote in a multidimensional way, whereas a voter in a two-party system is forced into one of two "sides" on a one-dimensional line. As the values people hold dear are threatened, they will inevitably flatten their values and be pulled towards a pole.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#817

Post by astrange »

jkubicek wrote: post #781
notatoad wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I, personally, haven’t read onion content in a long, long while The onion was kind of dead for a while under various shitty owners, but was bought this year by Jeff Lawson of Twilio and is now being run by former NBC reporter Ben Collins. The new stuff since the acquisition has been a bit hit or miss, but at least they're trying again.

They also restarted the print newspaper (I'm a subscriber)

So far I've gotten two of those, and each time I've thought the lead headline on the front page was super clunky. It always tries to fit in a joke by being twice as long as it should be.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#818

Post by Kye »

keepamovin wrote: post #812
jsheard wrote: post #2

The announcement by America's Finest News Source: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/ Alex Jones response: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857058831135645739

This has been halted due a judge deciding it was a private sale masquerading as an auction: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857290045536780334

Is there a credible source on this?

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#820

Post by consp »

tightbookkeeper wrote: post #799
icegreentea2 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be specific, the suit against the mother was against the mother's estate, since the mother was murdered by the shooter... like right away. The suit was settled by the estate. The suit against the school administration was eventually dismissed (the families lost on appeal) ( https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Two-Sandy-Hook-famili... ). I agree it seemed kinda dubious, and I think the right outcome happened her…

AR-15 is merely a body style, there is no metric by which it is more dangerous than a hunting rifle.

If you want to murder dozens you do not bring a hunting rifle.
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