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socialsecurity posted:So what would describe being anti-vax and anti-lockdown because you think covids all part of some government plot to control everyone? I mean, it’s part of a government plot to control behavior, isn’t it? We want to mandate specific behaviors (which I agree with!) it’s just a question of why, which there are a lot of not-conspiritorially inclined (or so we’d believe) who have these same insane grade of beliefs about other stuff we just don’t consider, like Brooks’ completely unscientific and nonsensical just so stories. Like, I don’t believe there are actual reptilians, but I do believe the lives of the wealthy and powerful are so different from our own they behave as though they are a higher, dominant species over the rest of us. Having known several people who became believers in conspiracy theories (as we understand them, Qanon stuff mostly) they arise from a genuine feeling of powerlessness over some fundamental part of their lives. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) selec fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 18:59
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Is it not the case that there's been plenty of evidence that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian intelligence and that Russia employed troll farms and the like to stir the pot? From like the Mueller Report and subsequent follow up reporting from afterwards? What specific claims widely reported by the media were later shown to be false?
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Dec 16, 2021 19:04
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socialsecurity posted:Has anyone here said to believe everything the NYT posts without any scrutiny? Also, op eds are not presented as factual reporting, otherwise they would not be called "op eds".
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Dec 16, 2021 19:07
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Lib and let die posted:So what are the good purveyors of anti-US Imperialism journalism? Historians, mainly. The lack of reliable primary information concerning current ongoing wars in remote areas that don't speak English means that hoping for accurate info is largely futile. Lib and let die posted:So what's a good information mediator on US military activity? The state department alone? There isn't one! That doesn't mean "There isn't one, so you can trust any source you want", though. It means "There isn't one, so give up on any hope of pretending you actually know what's going on and aren't just guessing".
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Dec 16, 2021 19:11
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Main Paineframe posted:Historians, mainly. And this would apply no matter the ideology that the media supports, right? Neutral or pro-imperialist sources also have the same problem of trying to report on remote wars in non-english speaking countries if they don't have the resources to go in and talk to native sources on the ground. I feel like this pretty much kills the reliability of any citizen reporting type outlets that are primarily aggregating from the internet but that's not surprising. Edit: to be clear, I'm not challenging what you said just trying to confirm the meaning. That when it comes down to it there really are not reliable English sources for the wars the US pushes and supports in foreign countries. Gumball Gumption fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 19:19
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mawarannahr posted:How’d you get that out of what you quoted? I made the assumption that "pushed Russiagate" means published any news article about attempted interference from Russia in our 2016 elections. I think that is a fair interpretation of what pushing "Russiagate" is. On top of that, Nucleic Acids never corrected or inquired more about what they meant or how I interpreted it, they simply doubled down and didn't object to my questions/statements  As why I chose those two news outlets, they were the only two major news outlet I could think of off the top of my head (and cross referenced with a quick Google search) that didn't publish any news articles about the attempted interference [that wasn't simply criticism of others coverage of it]. Kalit fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 19:38
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Kalit posted:I made the assumption that "pushed Russiagate" means published any news article about attempted interference from Russia in our elections. I think that is a fair interpretation of what pushing "Russiagate" is. On top of that, Nucleic Acids never corrected or inquired more about what they meant or how I interpreted it What you said was in wild bad faith, and I didn't need to correct anything.
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Dec 16, 2021 19:41
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Gumball Gumption posted:Ok, then I don't understand the difference between the idea that you can't use this to create a list of credible and not credible media but you can use it to rule out media that is not credible. Like I've read the OP and I know others are in a weird slap fight about credible sources which seems to not be the point of this thread but I really do just want to understand this concept. Forget about the Greyzone because I really don't care about them. I'm just trying to understand what criteria allows for some media to be considered so uncredible that all reporting from them is useless while other media is credible even if they also do things to push an agenda or their own bias. Is there an academic criteria here? Is it just a general "you know it when you see it?" How does that work? Is one of the books in your list a good place to start? If a student was wondering this in your class or whatever you do that allows you to study this what would you tell them? There is not a specific criterion set; I've emphasized this repeatedly, as have others. There's a tremendous amount of sources and frameworks that can inform if a mediator is either as a matter of ideology or intent (or a mix of both, as is almost always the case) providing misinformation. These are all generally pursuant to internalizing how logic and argumentation works so that you can rapidly identify abusive practices in communication. Here are some that immediately came to mind on my lunch break.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 19:43
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selec posted:It was a fundamental rejection that America is capable of anything so odious on its own, which if you know America you know 1. We are definitely capable of that and 2. We are unable as a society to see ourselves clearly for what we are Coming from the guy who said the Biden administration should kidnap and blackmail Joe Manchin's children until he falls in line, this is definitely very rich.
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Dec 16, 2021 19:51
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Discendo Vox posted:For the tenth time, Septupling, you say? Why not a proper octupling? The Washington Post itself has retracted portions of reporting on the issue, especially regarding the Steele Dossier. https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...f69b_story.html Before you jump in with, "That's how you know they're a legit news agency, they actually correct their stories," a case I've seen made in this thread before, the stories they're correcting are from 2017 and 2019. The corrections came... in 2021. Four and two years difference before admitting mea culpa. Also, you're just throwing "conspiratorial" down to emotionally frame the story, the type of media manipulation you so decry in so many of your posts if they're being done by someone you don't like. It's absolute objectivity for your opponents, relentless hyperbole from you. I see no particular reason to call you "professor" because any professor would fail a student who relentlessly references his own work as if it was the one true canon and then can't even leave up to the conclusions of their piece. Now, why don't decituple on demands that people read your OP. As the OP of far more emotionally charged threads than this one, I can't imagine demanding anyone who actually interrogated me to go to my OP and only my OP. I would simply talk to them about my topic of choice.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:07
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Main Paineframe posted:Historians, mainly. But, yeah, at the same time… Main Paineframe posted:"There isn't one, so give up on any hope of pretending you actually know what's going on and aren't just guessing".
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Dec 16, 2021 20:08
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Main Paineframe posted:Historians, mainly. And that's, forgive my lack of decorum, like, turbo-hosed. To me, the notion that we simply can't know what's going on in an age where, if properly motivated/enabled, a monitoring agency could be notified every time you took a bowel movement says that this - to borrow a term from Neil Postman - information glut is intentional. Not for some international pedophile enclave (although real-life scandals like Epstein's little operation there don't help this angle), not for some blood-of-the-newborn satanic cult's ritual sacrifice that's going to culminate in the return of satan in the flesh Any Day Now If You Don't Send $100 A Month To Mike MyPillow, but for the simplest, most banal reason of all: money (and by extension, concentration of wealth further in the hands of Those Who Already Have It). Sure, we know what Nancy Pelosi's stock portfolio looks like, thanks to the legislation that forces their trades to be a matter of public record. We can, with very little effort, see exactly how her actions as an elected official benefit her financial portfolio - it's easy to hold her accountable, even if that accountability is largely toothless because a nutjob leftie in Florida like me has exactly zero influence on if she's elected as speaker or at all. We don't know the same about the purveyors of information about American policy, be it foreign or domestic. I don't know what Phil Griffin's stock holdings look like. I don't know what Jeff Bezos's portfolio looks like. For better or worse (worse, I'd say), Trump poisoned beyond redemption any idea that The Washington Post could have an editorial slant that favors the ultra-wealthy, not because he cared about the issues facing John Q. Low Income, but because he had a personal grudge against Bezos - his utter nonsense about any good reporting WaPo did became a funhouse mirror version of itself in service of capital - if you question if its private ownership creates an implicit bias towards the wealthy you're automatically assumed to be stating that Jeff Bezos has virtual presence devices embedded in every journalist's office area and lords over them monitoring every word they type. Maybe Bezos is doing nothing more than "bog standard" insider trading - knowing a bad story is going to come out and selling before it prints. Or maybe he's telling the truth, and Jeff Bezos the person is as divorced from The Washington Post as an investor/owner could be - but the lack of knowing this in the age of information glut is, again, concerning. Gods help me, this is going to be extremely loving goony, but when it comes to media consumption, I can't help but think of the conversation between Raiden and Monsoon about halfway through Metal Gear Rising: quote:Kill or be killed Jack. Phnom Penh taught me that. Yes, you aren’t the only one to grow up on the killing fields. War is a cruel parent but an effective teacher. Its final lesson is carved deep in my psyche: that this world, and all its people are diseased. Free will is a myth. Religion is a joke. We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: memes. The DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture — they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair... All memes, all passed along. We see some real-life version of this in how things propagate through culture wars and long before Kojima ever had a fever dream about robot dogs and cyborg ninjas, it was an idea codified by decades of studies showing that victims of abuse have a higher-than-baseline chance of going on to become abusers themselves. This is what I'm worried about with, well, "mainstream" media - CNN and MSNBC, the Guardian, pick your poison, all do a fine job on reporting on the pandemic, on social issues, and disaster-related issues. I might take issue with some of the cultural tie-ins that get conveniently left out (like the availability of a vaccine simply meaning that COVID is essentially "over" and it's time to Get Back To Work, America!), but their coverage of scientific fact and procedural events are fine. If you expose someone to pro-war narratives for long enough, I think you run the risk of maybe not fully turning someone into a lockeed-loving warhawk, but into someone who accepts that occasionally, war is just a thing we have to do, and we have to do so much of it lately because the world is such a dangerous place because the reliable folks at [news outlet] that haven't lied to me about these other things wouldn't like to me about this, right? Absolutely nightmarish foreign policy missteps become credible when they're presented by a credible mediator with a history of credible reporting on other issues is, I don't think, a controversial take, and it runs both ways: someone looking for Aaron Maté's coverage on Syria is just as likely to get sucked into the covid-as-social-control narrative as someone looking for Chuck Todd's breakdown of the Rittenhouse verdict is to get sucked into the "well we're just gonna have to fight Russia in Ukraine!" narrative that seems to be starting to bubble up in those same lanes. I fuckin' hate it
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Dec 16, 2021 20:11
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Coming from the guy who said the Biden administration should kidnap and blackmail Joe Manchin's children until he falls in line, this is definitely very rich. 1. You’ve misread, I was lolling that the Dems won’t do even as much as I listed there, much less actual kidnapping. I was not advocating kidnapping. 2. How’s all that coloring inside the lines working out 3. Please respond to my posts in this thread
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Dec 16, 2021 20:14
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Probably Magic posted:Septupling, you say? Why not a proper octupling? The very retraction story you link states that the retraction was based on information in an indictment eight days before its publication. Your quotation of your own source is Probably Magic posted:Also, you're just throwing "conspiratorial" down to emotionally frame the story, the type of media manipulation you so decry in so many of your posts if they're being done by someone you don't like. It's absolute objectivity for your opponents, relentless hyperbole from you. The source you are citing from the greyzone is literally alleging a conspiracy. Probably Magic posted:Now, why don't decituple on demands that people read your OP. As the OP of far more emotionally charged threads than this one, I can't imagine demanding anyone who actually interrogated me to go to my OP and only my OP. I would simply talk to them about my topic of choice. I don't demand people only go to "my" OP. I provide the sources I rely upon and note their limitations. I provided the material in the OP because a mod asked for material for the OP.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:17
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I'm not particularly interested in granting Grayzone absolute supremacy, I don't even read much of their writers other than the occasional Mate article, but when it becomes a priority to undercut them in favor of obvious misinformation outfits like major American news outlets like CNN and Washington Post, I'm inclined to call into question the priorities of those who criticize them. Lo and behold the people who feel it so important to disprove them also have high investment in all their opponents being "tankies," that opposition to American Imperialism is automatically Stalin apologism, etc., despite over and over again American narratives in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, so on and so forth being proven to be completely fallacious. You'd think after the fifteenth time falling for an obvious bullshit story people would start realizing that America has little credibility in its official foreign policy stances and that outlets that do things like routinely invite generals on to discuss American firepower or outlets that Tom Cotton write op-eds in them may not be on the up-and-up. Perhaps things like the New Yorker calling BLM a flash-in-the-pan even in 2015 or the Washington Post run such a slew of attack ads on Bernie Sanders you'd think the Clinton campaign personally owned them would cause some concern. These concerns are noted in word in this thread, yet when push comes to shove, they are given credence over far more legitimate sources. I don't really give a poo poo about the Grayzone's reporting on the COVID quarantine because I don't think any source, ones I like or dislike, has any idea what to do with it, so I'm not going to defend its conclusions there or any a lot of places, but when I see people trying to completely undercut any reporting from them, including reporting that has borne out pretty well like Russiagate not impacting the election, something Washington Post itself just admitted in its infamous conspiracy article, I'm inclined to say they're more investing in owning their forum's enemies than actually dealing with reality. Which, you could do that in any thread. I don't know why you need a thread under a veneer of academia to do what you're going to do in USPol or whatever. Probably Magic fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 20:18
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Discendo Vox posted:I don't demand people only go to "my" OP. I provide the sources I rely upon and note their limitations. I provided the material in the OP because a mod asked for material for the OP. This, I would say, was a severe mistake. I made a similar mistake where I tried to use a thread in CSPAM to promote someone's thoughts who I respected but it just left no room for anyone else to think. The thing is, people have wanted to contribute to this topic, and you just keep popping in and saying, "AS WE'VE ALREADY ESTABLISHED." Established like that Twitter can't ever be a news source? I would find that to be very suspect conclusion, like a grade school teacher saying to never use Wikipedia when you can use Wikipedia just like you can use Twitter, as an index to find sources. There are arguments against that you don't allow because you think you're the supreme authority on this subject. And no one, myself included, is a supreme authority on any subject.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:23
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Probably Magic posted:Established like that Twitter can't ever be a news source? Not what I said, I said log off and get other sources of information. quote:I would find that to be very suspect conclusion, like a grade school teacher saying to never use Wikipedia when you can use Wikipedia just like you can use Twitter, as an index to find sources. Twitter is not in any way an index. Wikipedia doesn't use an algorithmic structure to prioritize information that either supports your views or make you mad. Wikipedia has its benefits and significant limitations. What instructors actually say, and have said for years, is to not cite wikipedia; good instructors with the time then get into the limitations and caveats in using it to find other sources. quote:There are arguments against that you don't allow because you think you're the supreme authority on this subject. And no one, myself included, is a supreme authority on any subject. I have at no point made the claim that I am the "supreme authority on the subject". Have you noticed how often you misrepresent what other people are saying in order to shore up your claims? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 20:27
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Discendo Vox posted:I have at no point made the claim that I am the "supreme authority on the subject". Have you noticed how often you misrepresent what other people are saying? Discendo Vox posted:From the OP: Discendo Vox posted:From the OP: Discendo Vox posted:Again, you seem not to have read my post, or the OP materials, or the posts following my post about Frank too closely. Hmm. Anyway, this isn't the Discendo Vox thread, and I already gave you an opportunity to pontificate about things by asking you about concrete media, which you couldn't be bothered to do because you were too busy denying the 2000 election was stolen and not understanding that Ted Cruz is a populist. If you just want to snipe at your forum enemies, go ahead, but don't pretend that isn't what you're doing. Discendo Vox posted:Twitter is not in any way an index. Wikipedia doesn't use an algorithmic structure to prioritize information that either supports your views or make you mad. Wikipedia has its benefits and significant limitations. What instructors actually say, and have said for years, is to not cite wikipedia; good instructors with the time then get into the limitations and caveats in using it to find other sources. You just described any search engine on the internet, and for that matter, Twitter is better than Google, etc. because it has a harder time hiding links in its searches. It just feels like "new thing bad" to me, especially since this forum was all about Twitter during the Arab Spring but when it became a haven for Bernie Bros, suddenly it's something to be feared and suspected. How convenient. But no, it's just an index, Twitter is more than a feed, it's a database like anything else.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:37
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Twitter’s entire technological thesis is to present content in a way that maximizes the magnitude of its reader’s emotional reaction. That’s the furthest thing possible from “just an index.”
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Dec 16, 2021 20:44
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Probably Magic posted:You just described any search engine on the internet, and for that matter, Twitter is better than Google, etc. because it has a harder time hiding links in its searches. It just feels like "new thing bad" to me, especially since this forum was all about Twitter during the Arab Spring but when it became a haven for Bernie Bros, suddenly it's something to be feared and suspected. How convenient. But no, it's just an index, Twitter is more than a feed, it's a database like anything else.  You really should understand how different search algorithms work. This is absolutely inaccurate. Twitter tailors the algorithm based on the individual's followed accounts/actions/prior search results/etc. Google/search engine algorithms produce results based on those immediate words searched/page relevance/etc and does not use machine learning to tailor results based on the individual user.Here's some details about Twitter's search algorithm: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent. Here's some details about, for a single example, Google's search engine algorithm: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/algorithms/. Kalit fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 20:46
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Probably Magic posted:You just described any search engine on the internet, and for that matter, Twitter is better than Google, etc. because it has a harder time hiding links in its searches. It just feels like "new thing bad" to me, especially since this forum was all about Twitter during the Arab Spring but when it became a haven for Bernie Bros, suddenly it's something to be feared and suspected. How convenient. But no, it's just an index, Twitter is more than a feed, it's a database like anything else. It is correct that other search engines also have selectivity problems. Twitter is not better than google as a source because it has a known and documented tendency to encourage self-selectivity of sources of information through its personalized feed, and because the limited capacity of tweets means that people tend to react to the tweet itself and not the linked material. A big part of why the thread was started was an ongoing issue in USNews of people posting inflammatory tweets and reacting to them without providing context and, frequently, without reading the linked material. e:f;b. Alas, I am not the supreme arbiter and authority on the subject, so these other posts may actually have useful information. I know that at least in the past, a big problem with twitter research was that the company doesn't let researchers get complete tweet datasets, which makes SNA research basically useless. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 20:48
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raminasi posted:Twitter’s entire technological thesis is to present content in a way that maximizes the magnitude of its reader’s emotional reaction. That’s the furthest thing possible from “just an index.” What is the site’s technological thesis anyway? I’m not really sure of it, and I don’t see what disqualifies it from being an index that’s addressable by username, hashtag, keyword, date, and location. Some of these are pretty close to the kind of things I’d expect in an index so I don’t see how it’s the furthest thing possible. Kalit posted:
You can sort the results and feed by date on Twitter. I think Google does tailor results to the user these days but will look for a source.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:53
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raminasi posted:Twitter’s entire technological thesis is to present content in a way that maximizes the magnitude of its reader’s emotional reaction. That’s the furthest thing possible from “just an index.” Jesus christ, yes. Social media does not show you the truth about the world. Social media is brain poison that confirms your biases and works to make you as angry as possible to keep you on the site and keep you clicking and scrolling.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:57
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raminasi posted:Twitter’s entire technological thesis is to present content in a way that maximizes the magnitude of its reader’s emotional reaction. That’s the furthest thing possible from “just an index.” It presents me the posts from the people I follow, in chronological order. Are you sure you don’t mean Facebook?
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Dec 16, 2021 20:58
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mawarannahr posted:You can sort the results and feed by date on Twitter. I think Google does tailor results to the user these days but will look for a source. As that link I provided stated, there are some user influenced things Google does tailor to, such as user location and search settings. That's much different than machine learning over time based on prior search results/prior site interactions/followed accounts/etc like Twitter. This is why when 2 different people search a specific phrase in the same search engine, the results will more or less usually be the same. However, if they do that same thing in Twitter (and don't have similar views/people they follow/etc), there's a decent chance they will get very different results. Kalit fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 21:00
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selec posted:It presents me the posts from the people I follow, in chronological order. Are you sure you don’t mean Facebook? And how and why do you choose the people you follow on Twitter? How do you think most people choose who to follow on Twitter? It sure isn't random chance. You're soooooo close to getting the point being made here. So achingly close. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 21:00
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Kalit posted:
That hasn't really been my experience, where Google results are heavily disposed to blogs, conservative blogs at that, versus actual news sources on stories I knew had reputable agencies behind them. My experience with Twitter isn't much better, but it doesn't have the same "catered" feeling to it, where Twitter will have a variety of posts when I'd rather just get authorized check marks on it, while Google feels very, very specifically blog-based. This is, of course, personal anecdotal experience, and that probably isn't due to Google doing machine learning, but it still feels very "driven" in what it pushes, especially with plenty of stories over the years of pay-to-push. I'd rather take machine learning over paid-to-push to be honest, but neither is very good. Discendo Vox posted:It is correct that other search engines also have selectivity problems. Twitter is not better than google as a source because it has a known and documented tendency to encourage self-selectivity of sources of information through its personalized feed, and because the limited capacity of tweets means that people tend to react to the tweet itself and not the linked material. A big part of why the thread was started was an ongoing issue in USNews of people posting inflammatory tweets and reacting to them without providing context and, frequently, without reading the linked material. I'd say people not going to the linked material would be more "user error" than specifically an effect of the site, that can't be used to blame the medium itself. It goes back to the whole, "You don't cite Wikipedia, you cite the articles Wikipedia draws from," that you eluded to, that's still not the problem of the site so much as the user. I still don't see how you can separate that Twitter is how most journalists (and streamers and what have you) draw attention to their work, so just avoiding it seems to be negative. As for inflammatory tweets, I've seen stuff called inflammatory and dismissed before in this forum that I felt was more spinning than anything. For instance, there was an article about some school corporation ending emergency free lunches, but it didn't mention it was an emergency measure in the headline, so mods themselves downplayed it as, "Oh, that was being hyperbolic." Except you can easily say that if you can do something during an emergency, you can do it indefinitely, which gets into a bigger topic than just the article, but it wasn't as simple as, "Oh, well that was being hysterical." People still depended upon that emergency measure. It soured me on the supposed fretting about inflammatory tweeting on this forum. Also, this forum loves to invent context for actions that isn't there, like Biden's long-game that just isn't there, but that's a broader topic. Still, this actually feels like a conversation about medium and I'm learning things, so... thank you for engaging with me. And I'm getting too heated, so I do apologize for that, but this is what I wanted post about, how mediums interact with our ability to interact with news, not just the umpteenth grudge match about how much legitimacy the establishment writ large has.
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Dec 16, 2021 21:05
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Probably Magic posted:That hasn't really been my experience, where Google results are heavily disposed to blogs, conservative blogs at that, versus actual news sources on stories I knew had reputable agencies behind them. My experience with Twitter isn't much better, but it doesn't have the same "catered" feeling to it, where Twitter will have a variety of posts when I'd rather just get authorized check marks on it, while Google feels very, very specifically blog-based. This is, of course, personal anecdotal experience, and that probably isn't due to Google doing machine learning, but it still feels very "driven" in what it pushes, especially with plenty of stories over the years of pay-to-push. I'd rather take machine learning over paid-to-push to be honest, but neither is very good. Do you have a specific example? Whenever I search for terms that I know are in official news stories, those seem to always come up before individual blogs. Honestly, it sounds like you're describing how/why Twitter is an effective echo chamber.
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Dec 16, 2021 21:15
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Gumball Gumption posted:And this would apply no matter the ideology that the media supports, right? Neutral or pro-imperialist sources also have the same problem of trying to report on remote wars in non-english speaking countries if they don't have the resources to go in and talk to native sources on the ground. Yeah, exactly. Government announcements relying on secret information are largely impossible to verify one way or the other. It's not like CNN sent investigative journalists in to personally verify the existence of Saddam's WMD caches. It's not like there's tons of citizen journalists strolling down the street past a sign saying "SADDAM'S SECRET NUCLEAR STOCKPILES, DO NOT ENTER" every day and posting photos on Twitter. And even if there were, there's still the matter of verification, as respectable Western media outlets have been fooled by fake tweets, fake Twitter accounts, or even just real people who were wrong in their interpretation of events. If the only source we have for a claim is the CIA, well, they don't show their work publicly - instead, it gets filtered through several layers of ambitious officials, bureaucrats, and political figures with an agenda to push, only to finally make its way to the public eye in the form of a press release. Typically, the actual sources the CIA got that info from are concealed until long afterward. In the end, at the time, it's unverifiable with the information reasonably available to people who don't have security clearances and need-to-know positions. Typically, it's only later that more info begins to trickle out and more sources begin to be discovered. But even then, that doesn't mean that every source that emerges is necessarily accurate either. Investigations have suggested that intelligence officials in the US and UK deliberately exaggerated or fabricated parts of the public case for the war because they knew much of their evidence was uncertain or inconclusive...but there were also aspects where they had simply believed forged documents or lying informants that told them what they thought the political leadership wanted to hear. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of trust, and the mainstream media inherently trusts the US government on some issues for various institutional reasons. But even if you entirely reject the US government as a source of reliable information, all that really means is that the government claims lack evidence and can't be independently verified. It doesn't magically grant reliable knowledge to those who author rival theories that claim even more certainty despite having far less access to any evidence at all. People tend to fall into conspiracy rabbit holes when they use their distrust of one source or perspective as an excuse to unconditionally trust rival sources or perspectives. Lib and let die posted:And that's, forgive my lack of decorum, like, turbo-hosed. To me, the notion that we simply can't know what's going on in an age where, if properly motivated/enabled, a monitoring agency could be notified every time you took a bowel movement says that this - to borrow a term from Neil Postman - information glut is intentional. Not for some international pedophile enclave (although real-life scandals like Epstein's little operation there don't help this angle), not for some blood-of-the-newborn satanic cult's ritual sacrifice that's going to culminate in the return of satan in the flesh Any Day Now If You Don't Send $100 A Month To Mike MyPillow, but for the simplest, most banal reason of all: money (and by extension, concentration of wealth further in the hands of Those Who Already Have It). Well, yeah, the people who have money can probably spend a hundred million bucks on investigators or mercenaries to go sneak into Iraqi military facilities and do horribly illegal and extremely dangerous things in the course of trying to find out whether he has WMDs. But why would they go through all that trouble only to turn around and tell the public for free? The US yearly intel budget is more than forty times CNN's yearly revenue. Between 24-hour news, Wikipedia, Twitter, and the general proliferation of pocket-sized devices with cameras and constant internet connections, Americans have gotten used to expecting instant news about everything at the tips of their fingers. Spending a whole hour not knowing the cause of a mass shooting leaves people desperately searching through social media for any hint of anything, leading to crowdsourced nonsense taking root. The thing is, public worldwide knowledge of literally every single thing that ever happens is not the default state of affairs. It's not like you'd know exactly what was going on in Iraqi military bases if not for the evil billionaire capitalists covering it up. The problem here is with our own expectations... ...and also with the extreme lack of nuance which lets you somehow make a giant flying leap from "we simply have no way of accurately knowing the exact events of Syrian Civil War massacres" to "just asking questions about Jeff Bezos' stock trades".
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Dec 16, 2021 21:16
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This is a very rosy recoloring of how the news was reported back in 2002. The news agencies weren't just duped, they allowed themselves to be duped. It didn't take much research to throw doubt over known antagonist of Saudi Arabia Saddam Hussain making deals with an Al-Qaeda organization largely funded by Arab sources. Keep in mind Iran was thrown in as a collaborator in all this despite them being Shiite (something the CIA does to this day!) It was a very questionable framework for work that the news media simply did not question. There's a reason for that too - in the documentary Control Room that was mainly about Al-Jazeera, you can find interviews from non-Fox News correspondents bemoaning that Fox News got exclusive access to Bush administration briefings etc. even during the war. That was the MO for the Bush administration in general, and all the other companies were desperately prostrating themselves to buy back in to that kind of access. Actually questioning the war got people fired. That's a bit more than just, "Well, the CIA told us one thing, and what could we do, get our own people to verify that was a lie?" It specifically eliminated criticism of the invasion.
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Dec 16, 2021 21:32
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Main Paineframe posted:Yeah, exactly. Government announcements relying on secret information are largely impossible to verify one way or the other. Given their performance over the last even 5 years, I don't think it's outrageous to entertain the notion that some of the most disgustingly rich motherfuckers in America have investments in lockheed martin. These are some of the richest people you can conceive of, with the most hyperconnected of financial advisers looking for advantageous market trends - any fiduciary not advising their client to invest in defense companies while the US and its media mouthpieces saber rattle for war simply isn't acting in their client's best interest. I simply don't see it as a stretch for someone like Bezos or Zucker to be enriched through this way when America goes to war (even more, because we've never not been at war as long as I've been alive) Your attempt to frame it as JAQing off is in extreme bad faith, and I'm frankly surprised to see it coming from you. The kinds of questions that are fundamental to literacy - especially as it relates to propaganda - is a basic understanding of who the audience is, who the transmitter is, and if the transmitter has any personal stake in influencing the thoughts or actions of the audience. eta: Hell, I'll even de-escalate the Probe: Would it be outrageous to presume that Tucker Carlson has investments in arms companies while going on broadcast TV to saber rattle about China? Lib and let die fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 21:37
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All you have to do is watch coverage during the Trump administration between his (admittedly stumbling) peace talks with North Korea versus his bombing of Syria. From the latter, we get Brian Williams' infamous quote about the beauty of our weapons, a series of generals coming and talking about how cool our weapons are, and general support for the president. The former? Absolute disdain from CNN and MSNBC reporters. This has continued into this administration, where negative reporting did not begin on Joe Biden, despite his fumbling on several issues, up until, you guessed it, he withdrew from Afghanistan. The media is invested in war. It sells. It gets people to tune in. It helps their funders and owners. It helps the military people who regularly give access to those media.
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Dec 16, 2021 21:53
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Probably Magic posted:All you have to do is watch coverage during the Trump administration between his (admittedly stumbling) peace talks with North Korea versus his bombing of Syria. From the latter, we get Brian Williams' infamous quote about the beauty of our weapons, a series of generals coming and talking about how cool our weapons are, and general support for the president. The former? Absolute disdain from CNN and MSNBC reporters. This has continued into this administration, where negative reporting did not begin on Joe Biden, despite his fumbling on several issues, up until, you guessed it, he withdrew from Afghanistan. Tbh this also has to do with the news wanting to drive views and have people tune in. It's been a constant thing since what the 80s with the old punchline of fear and blood sell and gets people to tune in. While this also may have pull from wanting to push a message about the military, much of it also is about making people want to be invested and rely on pure emotional response and not actual thought process. I wouldn't count cable news reporting from anyone as actually useful for anything. CNN MSNBC or fox are all worried about getting people to tune in and everything else is secondary. You honestly could have a whole thread dedicated to how cable news runs on sensationalism and how that was evolved further through social media to drive engagement, and has been used to radicalize entire subgroups of the population. The ramifications of the 80s and 90s fear mongering of violence in the streets and stuff can be directly linked to alot of issues that have come up. Or my favorite on how jenkum was sensationalized in the media and literally no one was huffing there own poo poo fumes.
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Dec 16, 2021 22:06
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Probably Magic posted:That hasn't really been my experience, where Google results are heavily disposed to blogs, conservative blogs at that, versus actual news sources on stories I knew had reputable agencies behind them. My experience with Twitter isn't much better, but it doesn't have the same "catered" feeling to it, where Twitter will have a variety of posts when I'd rather just get authorized check marks on it, while Google feels very, very specifically blog-based. This is, of course, personal anecdotal experience, and that probably isn't due to Google doing machine learning, but it still feels very "driven" in what it pushes, especially with plenty of stories over the years of pay-to-push. I'd rather take machine learning over paid-to-push to be honest, but neither is very good. Other users have provided specific information about how the two sites differ. Probably Magic posted:I'd say people not going to the linked material would be more "user error" than specifically an effect of the site, that can't be used to blame the medium itself. This is literally a media effect. The mediating source changes how the recipient interprets the mediated information. You are expressing disbelief about the thing the thread is about. Probably Magic posted:It goes back to the whole, "You don't cite Wikipedia, you cite the articles Wikipedia draws from," that you eluded to, that's still not the problem of the site so much as the user. Yes, users citing sources without context is a problem that this thread was intended to address. Probably Magic posted:I still don't see how you can separate that Twitter is how most journalists (and streamers and what have you) draw attention to their work, so just avoiding it seems to be negative. Most information is in fact available from other sources. Twitter is a mediator with little value. Journalists rarely publish their material on twitter. As the OP states, you can actually read newspapers. Books also exist. There are other ways to find information than the site that is effectively using your rage and attention as a product. Probably Magic posted:As for inflammatory tweets, I've seen stuff called inflammatory and dismissed before in this forum that I felt was more spinning than anything. For instance, there was an article about some school corporation ending emergency free lunches, but it didn't mention it was an emergency measure in the headline, so mods themselves downplayed it as, "Oh, that was being hyperbolic." If it was misrepresenting the source material, this is in fact a problem with the mediating source, and that means both the headline and the user who shared it without that context. Probably Magic posted:It soured me on the supposed fretting about inflammatory tweeting on this forum. Also, this forum loves to invent context for actions that isn't there, like Biden's long-game that just isn't there, but that's a broader topic. "The forum" is not actually in love with "inventing context". You should consider why, here and elsewhere, you have repeatedly defined yourself by your opposition to "the forum" to the point of targeting me, attacking the thread, and uncritically redistributing conspiracy theories.
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Dec 16, 2021 22:30
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This is the second time I've tried to de-escalate with you only for you to renew your vitriol. This is the last time I'm going to bother engaging with you, Discendo Vox.Discendo Vox posted:Most information is in fact available from other sources. Twitter is a mediator with little value. Journalists rarely publish their material on twitter. As the OP states, you can actually read newspapers. Books also exist. There are other ways to find information than the site that is effectively using your rage and attention as a product. This is an incredibly antiquated perspective on modern media. "Journalists rarely publish their material on twitter." No, they publish links to their pieces on Twitter, and also, plenty of journalists outright do threads with their findings. (I find this a very poor use of the medium considering its value of concision, but that doesn't mean people don't do it). I'm not going to have a subscription to the Atlantic, but I do follow Elizabeth Bruenig on Twitter, and when she props up something she's done or some podcast she's been on, it's her account that lets me know that, not my non-subscription to the Atlantic. Also, journalists get on a variety of platforms, audio, visual, etc., and where does all that get promoted? Twitter. Your view of Twitter and journalism comes from 2010.
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Dec 16, 2021 22:51
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Probably Magic posted:This is the second time I've tried to de-escalate with you only for you to renew your vitriol. This is the last time I'm going to bother engaging with you, Discendo Vox. In the last couple pages you've demanded the acceptance of a conspiracy theory from a source with a pattern of promoting falsehoods, misrepresented almost every single statement I've made, rejected the very concept of a media effect, and ignored provided evidence about differences in the mediums of twitter and google. Probably Magic posted:This is an incredibly antiquated perspective on modern media. "Journalists rarely publish their material on twitter." No, they publish links to their pieces on Twitter, and also, plenty of journalists outright do threads with their findings. (I find this a very poor use of the medium considering its value of concision, but that doesn't mean people don't do it). I'm not going to have a subscription to the Atlantic, but I do follow Elizabeth Bruenig on Twitter, and when she props up something she's done or some podcast she's been on, it's her account that lets me know that, not my non-subscription to the Atlantic. Also, journalists get on a variety of platforms, audio, visual, etc., and where does all that get promoted? Twitter. Your view of Twitter and journalism comes from 2010. Promotion is not the same thing as publication, and posting a link to something on twitter is a way of mediating it. This form of mediation has served as an intensely, structurally misleading and harmful way of gathering information, especially when taken in isolation, as others have already discussed. As I already said, this makes it a poor way to seek out information- there are in fact other ways to get information, and dependence on it causes problems with one's ability to evaluate their truthfulness. As in the OP, the point is to create a heterogenous set of sources and tools for evaluating information. Other ways of seeking out information exist than the self-selecting social media platform that's infamous for misinformation. You can get to things other than by finding advertisements for them on twitter.
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Dec 16, 2021 22:58
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Discendo Vox posted:Other users have provided specific information about how the two sites differ. quote:…ignored provided evidence about differences in the mediums of twitter and google. I don’t really buy the idea how they differ is meaningful though, and there are features of Twitter that arguably make it more like an index than Google (being able to browse rather than just search, and better sorting, for example). Like a lot else in this thread you’re pointing to explanations that don’t really explain anything, they’re just… there, not insightful, not definitive, and unclear how they might be applied. PS: the over-the-top berating and condescension make it a real hassle to read anything you post, let alone posts from months ago. It’d be better for the thread if you went back and edited every single one. I struggle to remember a more condescending person I’ve interacted with or read online or IRL. mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 23:01
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:And how and why do you choose the people you follow on Twitter? How do you think most people choose who to follow on Twitter? It sure isn't random chance. I started by following celebrities I found interesting (this was long ago) and since just find people who post interesting things. I have a few famous and non-famous people from other ideological tendencies than my own that I follow just to keep up on what the temperature is over there, but a lot of my curation is for locals and informative or interesting (usually) leftist or nerdy posters. What am I almost getting?
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Dec 16, 2021 23:04
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I mean, I have to disagree with the idea that journalists don't report on Twitter. It is incredibly common for journalists to live tweet events that they're at. Journalists live tweeting court cases as an example has become a major form of court reporting. Is it good? No, not really but if I'm learning anything from this thread it's that very few sources are actually credible and they're becoming worse because they're all trying to bombard you with information because of how much information the internet allows us to send out. Twitter is both a really common primary source and a common outlet for journalists to report things as they happen. To some degree Twitter has caused gonzo journalism to no longer be it's own thing and is just another form of journalism. And I agree Twitter is a bad source in isolation but I get the impression here anything is a bad source in isolation.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:26
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If I were a professor, I would not respond to any concern of my student with an aggressive and snide, "Didn't you read my syllabus?!" and then just do that repeatedly, but that's me. Gumball Gumption posted:I mean, I have to disagree with the idea that journalists don't report on Twitter. It is incredibly common for journalists to live tweet events that they're at. Journalists live tweeting court cases as an example has become a major form of court reporting. Is it good? No, not really but if I'm learning anything from this thread it's that very few sources are actually credible and they're becoming worse because they're all trying to bombard you with information because of how much information the internet allows us to send out. Yeah, again, I don't think it's a good use of the media because unfurling tweets is a pain in the rear end, but are we going to pretend that one of Twitter's "proudest" moments was coverage of the Arab Spring? That's just memory-holed, I guess. Journalists use twitter all the time, and I would say it is in fact suspect if one were to say never to consult Twitter as a source because that means streamlining sources down to very traditional sources, you know, the ones that have been dominated by corporate investment for decades. This isn't some huge extolling of the virtues of Twitter, there's plenty of creepy elements to it, though I would point more to its moderation policies even more than its algorithms. But such huge caveats of it feel very much like being a modern luddite.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:36
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