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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed that if you even try to talk about the manipulation of HN, things like abusing flags to get posts buried, the comments get downvoted. Certain posts disappear very quickly, and there's almost always a clear political reason for why some group wouldn't want people seeing that post.
Its contrary to policy, to talk about voting in posts not about voting. I shouldn't even be posting this.
This is why I believe it is important to teach our children from first principles; we can no longer rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. I am old enough that the cliche "believe only half of what you read" is still good advice. Too many people glued to their devices, knee-jerk responses without much thought and propagate misinformation at almost the speed of electrons without consultin…
There are very few false news actors on the left. Most fake news is either corporate or state-sponsored, and /somehow/ that heavily skews very right.
The scary part is that there is a significant contingent of people in tech who believe Youtube is morally justified in doing this because it's a private platform, and therefore and not subject to human rights standards like freedom of speech. Want to criticize an abusive regime? Build your own Youtube clone!
But the same persons would be scandalized if youtube would censor US politicians propaganda. Because I tell you, looking at Fox News as a European, I can't understand how it qualifies as "news", yet many americans are very attached to it. I'm sure there are plenty of chinese people that feels like Fox News viewers about their own news sources. And they think they are right just as much. And each camp will say "you ca…
But, so are the rest of the major corporate news outlets. In the US, they're all garbage, and Fox isn't any worse than the others.
The best way I can describe this is by analogizing to Canada, where I'm from. In Canada, when you watch or read the news (eg CBC), for the most part it just tells you what happened. In the US, when you watch or read the news, for the most part, it tells you how you're supposed to feel. Of course, Fox tells you you're supposed to feel conservative and (eg) NBC tells you you're supposed to feel progressive. But they all do this. They all editorialize. They all try to manipulate your emotions. None of them are willing to just present facts and let you think for yourself.
The scary part is that there is a significant contingent of people in tech who believe Youtube is morally justified in doing this because it's a private platform, and therefore and not subject to human rights standards like freedom of speech. Want to criticize an abusive regime? Build your own Youtube clone!
Retweet a few more retired generals that do the same thing...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which makes talking about manipulation of HN on HN very difficult.
No, just start a post about it.
You can talk about manipulation of any other social network here, but suggesting HN is being manipulated is oddly taboo.
And now this story has been flagged on hacker news... It's already off the front page despite 103 upvotes in 1 hour
The scary part is that there is a significant contingent of people in tech who believe Youtube is morally justified in doing this because it's a private platform, and therefore and not subject to human rights standards like freedom of speech. Want to criticize an abusive regime? Build your own Youtube clone!
There's a startup idea... Build a platform for free expression of ideas that caters to a Chinese market and then wait for the Chinese government to pay you to give them censorship privileges.
This is why I believe it is important to teach our children from first principles; we can no longer rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. I am old enough that the cliche "believe only half of what you read" is still good advice. Too many people glued to their devices, knee-jerk responses without much thought and propagate misinformation at almost the speed of electrons without consultin…
> left or right There are very few false news actors on the left. Most fake news is either corporate or state-sponsored, and /somehow/ that heavily skews very right.
In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money.
They didn't care about the political content, the incentive was to figure out what would get shared the most/fastest so they could drive traffic. They tried fake news targeting the left, but it wouldn't get very far because people would call it out in comments and then the posters would delete/remove it.
Fake news targeting the right (primarily crazy anti-hillary stories) would spread without any resistance and drive a ton of traffic, so they ended up focusing their attention there.
I think this is pretty good evidence that there's a bigger problem on the right since the Macedonian teenagers didn't care about the politics and just wanted to drive traffic for money.
There are lots of other interesting details in that book - it's good.