Are they worried about their monopoly in this space? With opinion pieces, click bait and hit pieces on selective topics and sides, they've successfully managed to portray any image of politics and society they want.
Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
231–240 of 311 posts
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies)." These agencies have huge conflicts of interest in that their funding depends on how afraid the government is of the t…
> "we could never know if they were telling the truth" Depends on your epistemology, but I'd like to believe that most people could. At some point you have to draw a line between an unsatisfiable skepticism and believing third party, independent observer. In my example an electric company suffered an outage due to an attack. Certainly linemen, switch operators, NERC-CIP-familiar personnel and other people would be ab…
Ok, we could know about some large-scale events where there were lots of witnesses that something happened, maybe even mostly what happened, but I don't see how we could know who was ultimately responsible or why.
Secret agencies can pin blame on anyone or any country they like, and there's ultimately no way to tell.. especially when double agents, false flag operations, and provocateurs are taken in to account.
The intelligence field is the proverbial hall of mirrors, and that a spy agency said something or was in any way involved is my cue to give up any hope of ever figuring out what was really going on.
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 pl…
No, more than that. The problem the media has is that it wasn't enough to merely be sceptical of Trump or to oppose him based on what he actually did; in order to be sufficiently anti-Trump you needed to believe an endless cavalcade of things that weren't true. Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory abo…
> Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server.
Do you have an actual link to that?
Another problem is that some people have the mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.
> Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
Maybe, to make my point more explicitly: the main issue with the media nowadays seems to be many of the people who consume it. And frankly, most criticism of the media's trustworthiness that I see online is the kind that will only make whatever problem that's being complained about worse.
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#234Pot, 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…
>The most frightening thing is that views like this are the ultimate goal of the type of propaganda we're seeing
Why is this the de facto response to anything the far left dislikes? Sorry, but disagreement with their strange ideological cultish beliefs isn't always propaganda and/or racism.
What's really frightening is the authoritarian rhetoric coming from their followers anytime someone points out the hypocrisy of these main stream media organizations.
>Are you going to make the same post for every nytimes article?
Yeah that's how you fight disinformation and make sure your point is heard. You just don't like it when it gets used against disinformation you prefer. Why is it ok to post multiple articles on HN about "disinformation" but not ok to respond to them the same way multiple times?
Also, I'm not sure how your comment is still unflagged since it's breaking all sorts of HN's flamewar rules....
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#235Classic 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/
That asks for LOTS of permissions.
It's closed source too? The website itself has two trackers installed. What could go wrong?
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#236There shouldn't be any legal description of "disinformation" in a country with free speech protections. ALL skepticism is crucial. Even ridiculous viewpoints should see the light of day to allow them to be investigated or dismissed. The push to suppress opposing views is really only coming from one direction right now. If someone supports limiting free speech, I can probably guess which political party they identify…
To defend free speech you need to fight propaganda. Propaganda is literally the opposite of free speech. People being paid to say this or that is not free speech.
The opposite of free speech is censorship, not propaganda.
Lying is not illegal.
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#237As long as WaPo, CNN and NYT continue to spread disinformation social media is of a lesser concern
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#238Ironic 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…
You used the term "column," which insinuates an opinion piece. All news publications have purposely-biased opinion pieces, and in the case of The NY Times, they will be limited to the clearly-marked op-ed section. And they also offer countering views, in many cases. Very different from news.
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#239Earlier 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…
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.
Yeah, I knew Free Beacon was a far-right tabloid but didn't know it was founded by John McCain's 2008 deputy communications director, so it's useful to see it pasted again. Their editor in chief is a former Fox New producer too!
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read both for a while and consider WSJ more reliable and far far less sensationalist than NYT (as of maybe 5 years ago).
I still read both and consider them two of the most reliable sources of domestic journalism. Their non editorial sections are of very similar qualities. Their editorial sections are both political hackery.
Agreed. I believe the lines between editorial and news has become (purposefully?) blurred, or at least many no longer recognize the difference. It can be interesting to see how headlines and emphasis on news stories in both publications can differ for the same topic, but they both follow a predictable standard. As you suggest, the editorial boards are echo chambers, but they both give time to opposing views there, as well.