I left after being hounded by trolls and sock puppets and, a year later, far from being deleted (as requested twice by email) my account was instead shadow banned.
Of course, likely as not this post itself is invisible. Likely as not the GDPR is as uninteresting as user's needs. Likely as not, Hanlon's razor applies. Although I would not brag about the last possibility.
The logical extension of your statement means the Russians should be invited to hack the DNC or any enemies of Trump forever because in your opinion leaks about debate questions and Pizzerias are so very, very critical to democracy. Perhaps denying the hacks every time they happens because, after all, they serve such a 'noble' purpose.
And I imagine I am not remotely the first one to realize this.
(Edit) My goodness but this is earning a lot of down votes. How very odd.
I just think it's very childlike and immature to blame others for your own mistakes.
The Democrats were unhappy embarrassing information they hid from voters was leaked to voters. They have no one to blame but themselves. If they didn't do the things talked about in the emails, there would be nothing to leak. How many people even viewed the emails, anyways?
I think both: [0] the info in the emails was bad and
[1] not that many people knew about it, or needed the Wikileaks info to not want to vote for Hillary Clinton.
And I think a hostile nation affecting one's internal politics is an act of war, successful or not.
This didn't just damage Hillary, although the media you so deprecate made it into just that. The hack also serves to de-legitimatize Trump. It is also causing Trump to fight with and denounce all the intelligence agencies critical to US functioning. Beside refusing their intelligence, the demoralization affect alone is huge (who will risk their life for a president who calls them a liar?). It has also thrown the whole electoral process into doubt. etc.
And they hacked the RNC too. You can bet that will be used to to maximum damage at some point.
It is no doubt that most damaging and successful attack on the US in decades.
But even more shocking is that it is condoned because it furthers certain parties political ends. What happens if both political parties start using acts by hostile nations to help them win elections?
Authoritarians will do everything in their power to replace fact based journalism with messages that support their ideology with no concern to accuracy. The very definition of authoritarianism means the public doesn't need to know what's going on and all paths to victory are acceptable.
It is a problem we have not faced in free societies but do now. It is the suppression of information and its replacement by propaganda with no connection to reality. It is the world of Putin's Russia, a world we in the west have not experienced.
And it is not necessarily driven from the top down although casting doubt on what constitutes a fact is core to the maintenance of power in a dictatorship.
There is pretense that changing Facebook's algorithm from favoring profitable self confirming nonsense to being balanced with factual posts is some an obscene from of censorship rather than a fix for a broken algorithm. This as absurd as claiming Google is censoring when it changes it's search to give results the user wants because no user wants to be fed inaccuracies by either Google or Facebook.
Incredibly we're now saying it's censorship just to adjust a ranking such that propagandist nonsense (that the user didn't want) is no longer quite the top result.
Indeed the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies because that is somehow censorship. And certainly no-one should promulgate those correction let alone use them. This is exactly the Kafkaesque logic that reveals the underling motivation is actually the exact opposite of free speech.
Allow me to correct your corrections about what is actually going on.
In other words, let me fact-check your fact-check.
You beg the question by claiming that only "self confirming nonsense" and "propagandist nonsense" will be hidden from the public, calling any position that sees cause for concern about censorship "a pretense." However, you offer no evidence for your claim that only these types of content will be affected. In fact, Snopes and many of the other fact-checkers have been shown to be politically biased themselves, and they certainly don't limit themselves to debunking propagandist nonsense. If we take their past performance as evidence of what is likely to happen moving forward, we will see, just for example a conservatives shut out of the public conversation for saying exactly the same thing a liberal is given a pass on. For claiming that nothing but truly egregious content could possibly ever be filtered, you receive 2 long noses.
Your claim that "the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies" is blatantly false and receives 3 more long noses. Pretending that the fact-checkers have never told politically motivated lies themselves—only corrections—gives 1 extra long nose. Your claim that the argument goes so far as to say that nobody should promulgate corrections to political lies is exactly the opposite of the truth, earning you 4 more long noses. The whole goal is to leave every lie open for correction, by anybody who is able to offer a compelling case and back it up such that people trust the correction.
The objection is against setting official truth-setters, because that divides people into two classes: 1. people who are allowed to think for themselves and check facts, and 2. everybody else, who must, for their own safety and well-being, have the first class filter what they read.
> If we take their past performance as evidence of what is likely to happen moving forward, we will see, just for example a conservatives shut out of the public conversation for saying exactly the same thing a liberal is given a pass on.
There are definitely examples of fact checks of very similar claims being resolved very differently, and the further left person in question being the one given gentler treatment. I'm not sure how you'd effectively test the dataset to determine whether this is just statistical noise, though.
On the other hand - whether you can test it or not, the question at hand seems to be about perception of bias rather than actual bias. I wonder if an adversarial style system wherein, say, both supporters and detractors wrote up their best cases for why something was true/false and then the best arguments were presented as some sort of a ... duel? ... would provide better information. Crowdsource the arguments well enough and the classes go away at that level, and using the resulting information to filter might be rather more useful.
The only things I'm really sure of here, sadly, are that doing nothing doesn't seem to be working particularly well, but every time we attempt to do something we find that doing nothing looks increasingly like at least a local maximum.
Your whole post is a huge straw man. You say 'the objection is against setting official truth-setters' but nobody was proposing that and the post you're replying to to never even mentioned Snopes.
The reality is that Facebook - responding to consumer demand - is partnering up with several commercial fact-checking outfits, in addition to tweaking its algorithm to select from something other than sensational content that generates lots of reactions (not an easy problem). IF those research/fact-checking service suppliers don't do a good job, market theory suggests they'll be displaced by a competitor.
divides people into two classes: 1. people who are allowed to think for themselves and check facts, and 2. everybody else, who must, for their own safety and well-being, have the first class filter what they read.
How does some 'possibly fake' tag on a shared article on social media prevent anyone from thinking for themselves or checking facts? They can still do that by choosing to ignore the 'possibly fake' tag and clicking through to the source and researching it further. You're crafting a narrative here in which people in group 1 restrict the freedom of people in group 2, but that's not actually happening because in reality nobody is being forced or has to give up any options. I'm oddly reminded of the meat industry objecting to country-of-origin labels on the grounds that consumers don't need to know that stuff.
You adopted a very high handed tone to the poster above, saying that you would fact-check their fact-checking, but then you made multiple misrepresentations of that poster's argument, interspersed with groundless claims of your own.
Can you prove facebook is really responding to consumer demand ?
The whole fake news narrative popped up over night to explain Trump winning at impossible odds.
Id say people were fine with filter bubbles truth be damned as long as the outgroup got smeared.
Its also disingenious to say its not hard to see how the fake tag could be abused. Oil companies have spent fortunes trying to get climate change labeled as fake, and look how successful it was.
No, only about 10% of billionaires are self made, as in not having inherited wealth or come from wealthy families. And even this is a record high up from a more typical 3%. (and remarkably, these are numbers that forbes feels excited about)
The article explains that they rank the level of "self-made-ness" out of 10, with 10 being from a poor family with no advantages. Then it says " A total of 34 billionaires, or 8.5%, scored as 10s".
The period you describe was marked by revolutions, civil wars and world wars not stabilized until after WWII.
Things did indeed come out well eventually but that better world most definitely did not emerge serenely and rationally. It took the utter annihilation of the pre-WWI world order through decades of enormous violence. Indeed, the egalitarian socialist plan and the response of populist fascist to crush it emerged exactly because of industrialization.
There can be no doubt that displaced workers are not going to smoothly transfer to become professional athletes: a 50 year old unemployed coal miner with no social safety net is not going to peaceable become a wedding planer in a big city even if he could.
Until then, there will be increasing political disruption and radicalization as the advantaged group holds the disadvantaged down believing it's their own fault for not changing careers. And just like last time, the fighting will continue until adequate social safety nets are in place.
It would be better to honestly face the events of the past and not try to convince ourselves that an idealized smooth economic shift is how it's going to work out. But unfortunately we are just at the beginning of this and likely most people in the advantaged group will ideological despise the level of social security that will solve the problem. Indeed, in many quarters, there is a fetishization of and desire to return to that pre-WWI unconstrained economy that caused the nightmares in the 20th century. So, polarization, demagoguery, extremism and eventually violence loom for now I fear.
In the 1800s after even after Napoleon there were sporadic uprisings scattered through Europe and around the world, especially in the 1830s and 40s. The Franco-Prussina war was a prelude to WWI. Brits fought Russians, Turks fought Russians, Spain had multiple civil wars, Germans fought each other constantly. Even the US had a civil war. And the seeds for 1914's WWI did not suddenly appear in the 14 years of the 20th century before it.
>...is not even remotely in the league of anything in the past. Not even close...
I wish this were the case. And while Brexit is only one referendum, possibly recoverable, the Front National, AfD, PVV and Trump use rhetoric that is completely indistinguishable for Eastern and Southern European fascism of the 1920s. Some of it is verbatim quotes translated. And the economic policies of these parties will only worsen the economic well being of the electorate angering them further.
We can keep making optimistic guesses about the next score years but there is also more realistic outcome:
We do not in fact live in a magic time at the end of history. The post WWII (relative) peace is not remotely an inevitable state of affairs. It is an incredibly delicate thing maintained by moderate democratic global nurturing. Inept leaders set on dissolving alliances and treaties combined with aggressive rhetoric and random hostilities executed solely to excite a demagogue's support base could break that peace in any of a dozen powder kegs world wide faster than the bullet that killed prince Ferdinand. Indeed, if NATO weakens enough, as many on the far-right wish, and Putin starts loosing popularity, god help the Baltic states.
Much of the apparent quality is the prohibition of topics that will attract controversy _regardless of their importance_ and regardless of the authenticity of the commenters who spam nonsense on it.
For example, I imagine this item[1] would be of some interest to anyone dealing with ad revenue yet it is unworkable on HN as is essentially all discussion of Russian hacking.
Casting doubt on what constitutes a fact is core to the maintenance of power in a dictatorship.
Those who now believe there is an equivalence between far-right propaganda (some of it originating form a hostile power) and the NYT, are a lost cause. It is identical to equating the bulk of the scientific community to a few climate change deniers. You obfuscate your own view of reality.
You will find that individuals emerging from behind the iron curtain were more stunned by the accuracy of information and the absence of a surreal reality in the west than by anything else.
As an aside, it's interesting the stunning amount of interest in guaranteeing the wide circulation of utterly false propaganda on a site that instantly mob censors any discussion of Russian hacking. A site called Hacker News (apparently ironically).
Dictatorships also commonly decide what is fake news, not just casting doubt on truth. Thats why they limit media companies and control the news so closely.
This fake news narrative seems far more comfortable in a dictatorship then a free country.
The new yorks times was clearly pushing an agenda this election which is what ruined its reputation and made it on par with various propaganda sites. A poor decision which has ruined its credibilty.
If accurate information is in fact one sided, it will look like the purveyor is pushing an agenda.
And in fact every competent news source including the Atlantic, WaPo, CNN, the Guardian, Forbes, the BBC, NHK and the Economist reported the same things.
Free societies decry false propaganda and always have. Authoritarians decry accurate information as equivalent and any information contrary to their goals.
But unfortunately there is no force on earth to dissuade the indoctrinated that there is no world wide conspiracy out to get them. That their facebook feed and extremest websites have no connection to reality. Particularly if they have found a charismatic leader to focus on who has no interest in accuracy.
>...what ruined its reputation and made it on par with various propaganda sites...
The is false. Generally, a thing does not become true simply because someone tweets it.
Free society isnt pushing a false news narrative, that is the mainstream media in its death throes.
The google trend analysis shows how artificial the fake news narrative is.
As for the new york times, they published a plea for subscribers, large losses, and even down sized their real estate. That is all very strange for a once trusted institution, outside of our hackernews bubble there is real sense the times is now just propaganda.
Given that the topic is about a German government action, it's safe to say it very much is a concern for free societies and not a product of US media. And therefore I fear you conjectures about google trends, the Times financials and a conspiracy of failing media to gain market share is as flawed as it is distracting.
>...outside of our hackernews bubble there is real sense the times is now just propaganda...
And that is exactly backwards, unless you're living in a especially un-innovative and low achievement area of the country. If so suggest you'll have more success moving to a city with bright people than pinning your financial hopes on a demagogue.
I wish that was true, but I live in PA, and the hitjobs on bernie sanders really ruined the times credibility with alot of young people.
Im in college in philly. and hear moaning about the mainstream media from people on both sides of the political spectrum. Credibilty is shot for my generation. Times are changing.
Not necessarily astroturfing but high quality topics are easily swept from the front page or the replies turn into an endless slop of loony-spam by people who's ideology is threatened.
And so hiring managers simply reject older candidates out of hand.
No matter what level of training/education the candidate has (and likely his existing skill set far exceeds the value of a ruby boot-camp), the preconception will preclude it ever being seen at certain shops.
Rather than pretending there is no ageism and it's all the candidate's fault, what is needed is a list of companies that simply will not hire people over 35. That way we can all stop wasting eachother's time.
Unfortunately being right is of small consultation if the situation is plunged into economic, diplomatic and military disaster by an ill-informed tweeting leader.
Of course, likely as not this post itself is invisible. Likely as not the GDPR is as uninteresting as user's needs. Likely as not, Hanlon's razor applies. Although I would not brag about the last possibility.