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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

#51

Post by tclancy »

fallingknife wrote: post #49
Cybotron5000 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why though? What is it that has changed their business model or people’s minds? Ask yourself that. What is it that is particularly biased? Opinion pieces and ‘advertorials’ etc. that they are forced to adopt because of falling revenues and fragmented attentions are bound to be biased.

The NYT is actually doing great financially. They lost their credibility because they did the one thing that a journalist can never do, lost their neutrality. They let Trump get under their skin, lost all skepticism, and started printing anything negative about him even if it was only a rumor. It's basically an organ of the Democratic party now.

Oh for the love of Buttigeig, if the Democratic Party had an organ, I would hope it would do a better job of stating policy and sticking to it. If The Times is your idea of a lefty boogie man, life must be pretty easy.

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

#52

Post by jancsika »

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.

> People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.

What is the relationship between more trust in a mainstream source and susceptibility to disinformation you are implying here?

For example, IIRC Rush Limbaugh's audience gave him a lot of credibility and was less informed because of that.

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

#53

Post by hereforphone »

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…

Email, online bill pay, stock quotes, monitoring your security cameras, one can make good use of the Internet while avoiding most of the web. I think that (some) people eventually mature beyond contentious and arguably toxic things like reddit (I know I am, slowly but surely)

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

mc32 wrote: post #6
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.

Ah, the pot getting jealous of losing influence and calling the kettle black. As someone pointed out upthread, these media take money from foreign interests (China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and quite a umber of others) and it's all good according to them, because they apparently are "good" by self-definition. They are part of the problem!

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by ameminator »

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.

Bias is in every news source, but let's not pretend it's a "good thing" - I would rather everyone be less biased and more open in their reporting. I still do occasionally read the New York Times, but I find that reporting from Axios and local news sources is usually superior, because they have less of this bias and seem to stick to clear, direct facts.

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

#56

Post by dd36 »

the-dude wrote: post #34
chewmieser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair but that also stemmed from their own reporting that their own coverage was flawed... It makes me trust them more since they're auditing themselves like that. Shows high journalistic integrity.

What do you mean? They did not uncover themselves that the WMDs did not exist.

They shared it with their audience. The standard isn’t always be right, it’s have integrity.

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

#58

Post by ameminator »

rschoultz wrote: post #10
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.

Even credible news sources are bound to have an implicit bias, to a certain degree. There is, however, quite a few other types of media sources ranging from media bias, to fake news, misinformation, disinformation etc. I recommend reading the Cornell university library guides to learn about how to distinguish one from the other.

Generally, I wouldn't rely on any one method - critical thinking and critical reading are skills that each person must develop. It seems a little trite to just recommend the one Cornell guide, even if it is of high quality...

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

#59

Post by rbanffy »

iamadog1029 wrote: post #46
ttctciyf wrote: post #11

It's not really a new phenomenon is it? > Cambridge Analytica, the British political consultancy caught up in a huge scandal over its use of Facebook data, has boasted that they ran the successful campaigns of President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan elections. In a secretly filmed video, Mark Turnbull, a managing director for Cambridge Analytica and sister company SCL Elections, told a Channel 4 News’ un…

This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while. There are articles dating back to 2007 kind of dabbling into this, and I remember years ago a whistleblower, I think she was a journalist employed by one of these companies, and if I recall did a TED talk exposing a commercial enterprise built to both whitewash and smear people, and probably companies alongside it. One of their mediums was Wikipe…

> This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while.

This is technically true, but the damage unleashed in the past decade is unprecedented, multiplied by social networks that didn't exist in the past. Just from the top of my head, we see the defamation campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, the coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Trump's election and the subsequent erosion of American democracy, the continuous propping up of far-right extremists in Europe and the election of a fascist lunatic in Brazil that caused record-breaking COVID mortality and unprecedented rainforest destruction.

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

#60

Post by dd36 »

iamadog1029 wrote: post #46
ttctciyf wrote: post #11

It's not really a new phenomenon is it? > Cambridge Analytica, the British political consultancy caught up in a huge scandal over its use of Facebook data, has boasted that they ran the successful campaigns of President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan elections. In a secretly filmed video, Mark Turnbull, a managing director for Cambridge Analytica and sister company SCL Elections, told a Channel 4 News’ un…

This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while. There are articles dating back to 2007 kind of dabbling into this, and I remember years ago a whistleblower, I think she was a journalist employed by one of these companies, and if I recall did a TED talk exposing a commercial enterprise built to both whitewash and smear people, and probably companies alongside it. One of their mediums was Wikipe…

What is history’s solution?
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