Breitbart news site blocked by ad exchange

There are certain protected classes of people you cannot discriminate against. I'm having a really hard time seeing how Breitbart could fit any of those definitions. You can totally refuse to serve customers acting in a way you find objectionable.

>Always, but always, it has been about the cynical exploitation of mass crowd hysteria and about the sly manipulation by activists and crony capitalists of the political system in order to advance the cause of global governance.

Let's not be disingenuous. There's tons and tons of stories like this.

My suspicion is that the people trying to muzzle Breitbart have never read it extensively. It has a very obvious conservative slant to it, but I've never seen flagrantly false articles by them (like the one claiming that Trump actually won the popular vote).

As an aside, I think that if we were to nitpick CNN, FOX, or any of the other "real" sources we would find just as much "fake news" as they are claiming exists on alternative news sites. Of course it would be in their interest to discredit those sources when they fear losing viewership to them.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/18/global-wa...

> Yet as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has noted, many of the recent climatological events and trends “can be explained by the natural variability of the climate system,” without excluding an indeterminate influence from atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. In the same report, the WMO said that, at this time, researchers have not yet been able to ascertain “the respective roles being played by climate variability and human-induced climate change.”

The report is six years old, the first quote is taken out of context, the second doesn't even exist in the paper, and here's the first paragraph of the paper's conclusion:

> Understanding the Earth’s climate and trends in temperature, precipitation and extreme events is of vital importance to human wellbeing and sustainable development. As the report The Global Climate 2001–2010 confirms, climate scientists can now link some natural oscillations to seasonal climate trends. They also understand the mechanisms by which humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions are raising global average temperatures.

Regardless of where you stand on climate change, this is a pretty gross abuse of the source.

Repeat this kind of thing across most articles, throw in some editorializing to push your opinion in "news" pieces (see paragraph 3/4 of article), add "PHD" to your byline even if your field has nothing to do with the material being covered...

Bad sources aren't about deliberately lying, they're about constructing an alternative, semi-plausible reality that meets idealogical goals. Frankly, I'd class most anti-AGW articles as provably fake based on the scientific consensus for the last twenty years, but who am I to judge.

Being wrong != being fake. I thought Brexit wouldn't happen. I wasn't faking anything, I was just wrong.

This is a misunderstanding of what was statistically probable. It's extremely unfair to say that the "mainstream press" called it for Hillary, when it was always going to come down to key battleground states. The exit polls weren't even wrong, it was just an astoundingly low voter turnout: and there could be many reasons for this, that's irrelevant to the topic at hand.

What you see now though, is most news sources trying to explain how the election turned out the way it did. You see them investigating actual facts and figures, and sometimes even taking a retrospective look at their own articles! Show me one Breitbart article that takes a retrospective about "what went wrong" or one time Breitbart issued a bonafide correction to an article they published.

>If you're not judging content by the content itself, than you've got blinders on.

And where did anyone advocate not doing that?

There's a big difference between reporting something that turns out to be wrong either due to later developments or mistakes in the research, and reporting things you know at the time are not correct but are reporting just to push your position.

There is also a significantly small number of people that most likely use Buzzfeed as their primary news source, especially in relation to politics. So I'm not sure why you're attempting to draw a comparison there.

On what axis? This stuff isn't single-dimensional.

Yeah, Buzzfeed may produce a lot more stuff, and maybe also a lot of fake stuff. However how much of that is harmless fluff versus hate speech and incitement to violence?

Also, frankly, looking at buzzfeed, i question that even on the dimension of truth/lie they fare worse than breitbart, particularly when normalizing against the total post count.

Says who?

> take a look at their front page

I do see and have seen their headlines often in a news feed I read; I strongly believe they promote racist ideology and are brazen liars.

Needless to say, Bannon might make their front page more amendable at the moment but he can't erase history.

In short, the problem isn't fake news. That's easy enough to spot. The problem is the rampant propaganda as embraced by just about ever major mainstream "news" outlet. Most are perceived as legit, but few, at this point, actually deserve that level of respect.

Milo: How To Make Women Happy: Uninvent The Washing Machine And The Pill

https://www.google.com/amp/www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/08/29...

https://www.google.com/amp/www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08...

2) That was a the Bush administration, why would the "liberal mainstream" be colluding with the GOP?

If your goal is to stop spreading lies, I suggest an introspection to begin with.

As a gay man, no it doesn't matter. You can have completely off base opinions no matter who you are. He panders to an audience, and damages the rest of the community in the process.

Calling those articles "exaggerated" is extremely forgiving. The article I quoted uses a combination of outdated pseudo-science and philosophically iffy reasoning behind its pretext. As someone who struggled to come out, I can't tell you how absolutely disheartening and difficult it is to get past your family when they read pieces like that, and clearly don't have the skills necessary to understand why the rationale is bad in the first place. It makes me want to just yank Milo by the neck and show him what irreparable damage he is doing to people (if I could); if he even has the morality to care.

>http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08/birth-control-makes.... cites multiple real university studies.

And then you have things like this. Is this supposed to make up for everything else they do? You gave me a list of articles, but these aren't contradictory to their other practices. To my original point: why bother with the source when you can consume that information elsewhere, from a source that is far more likely to be reliable?

To your point about other publications such as the Washington Post being on the other axis of bias, I have trouble understanding how you can simply say they're just on the other side. From everything I've seen from the Washington Post, they're nowhere near as advertently dishonest as Breitbart is, accidentally or otherwise.

This is sort of like pointing out (correctly) that a lot of junk food in fact also contains perfectly healthy ingredients. At the end of the day, it's a quality issue. And as applies to Breitbart, what it comes down to is that a lot of their stories are just really insipid (and basically contain way more noise than signal), even though (snippets of them) may make reference to more "reasonable" sources.

I strongly disagree with Breitbart's agenda but there are times when publications like WaPo post stories that are at roughly the same degree of the bias axis as Breitbart, just in the opposite direction.

MSM outlets do go a bit overboard, at times. But the extent to which (even during their worst lapses) their output resembles of the puerile drivel that sources like Breitbart produce every day, in nearly every every article -- just picking a random snippet from one of your sample articles posted above, at random:

This is a group that thinks anything ending in “salad” is health food. A pound of taco beef and a huge scoop of guac? It’s fine as long as it’s called a “taco salad”! Greens smothered in 700 calories of oily dressing? SOD OFF YOU STICK INSECT, IT’S A SALAD!

is basically negligible.

To me your statements sounds strangely familiar to "I'd rather be reading both Mein Kampf and stuff written by FDR, rather than be stuck in a left or right echo chamber".

Milo is a mysoginist provocateur who's trying to manipulate white males into believing that sexism and white supremacy are pretty good ideas. The fact that I even know this person makes me slightly vomit inside my mouth, and the way so many people listen and even respect his populism makes me pretty sad.

Which derails your entire argument. Just because you call it out doesn't mean the word loses meaning.

But the weapon of 1859 is a hatchet and the weapon of 2016 is a virus.

> Is there an example of a platform like the one you describe with a large audience?

I think the real platform is the Internet. Losing access to an advertising service is hardly denying platform access. I believe in net neutrality and believe that ISPs and IP providers should have common carrier status, and if someone wants to air an argument of prejudice and hate they can buy the IP connection and set up a web server. No-one is stopping them, but we're not amplifying fringe voices to the same volume as everyone else.

Free Speech means giving minority opinions the same access to infrastructure and audience that the majority has

is at best, highly problematic (and ultimately, basically a straw man).

I am and it's happening. [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this...

For example see http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/benghazi.asp for a fact check of widely believed and reported statements about Benghazi.

On the other side, see http://www.snopes.com/1998-trump-people-quote/ for a debunk of a widely shared statement that Trump purportedly made in 1998 about how he'd run as a Republican because Republican voters are so dumb.

Try this exercise. Every news story that you see on social media for a day, try to fact check it. Try to track down an authoritative source. I predict that you'll be shocked at how much stuff we hear that just ain't so.

> Much more of a threat is a MSM (which is highly coordinated and have a mutual interest in maintaining their control) branding independent sources as "fake"

So which is it?

Yes, this is the direction we as a society want to move in. The opposite direction from hate speech. A direction in which large commercial ad enterprises do not support neo-Nazi content and do not support neo-Nazis making a lot of money off said content; at least not on AppNexus' dime.

This is precisely the direction we want to move in.

Isn't is exactly the direction we want society to move in? What could be more free and fair than allowing anybody to publish their views, and allowing the public/advertisers to decide who receives their money?

It's been like this since at least the 18th century. People/organisations should absolutely have the right of association and I'm glad that they exercise it.

> Do we want people's careers destroyed

I'm not sure what you're referring to. I definitely have no particular issue about a news organisation going to the wall if it can't find readership or funding. If you mean people losing their jobs due to it then that's personally unfortunate but doesn't strike me as a societal problem necessarily.

If you mean someone being persecuted by the state or a powerful actor because they have a moderate view that is disagreed with then, yes, that's a very bad thing. Not sure it applies here though.

Sophisticated purveyors of hate say have always said the same. It doesn't mean much one way or another.

> Who gets to decide what 'hate' is?

This is refuge of evil people - who is to say what is evil? By that argument nothing is ever concluded to be good or bad.

There is no science to it, but like many things in life we can make reliable judgments. Breitbart isn't a difficult one.

[0] In the practitioners' own words: 1) https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became... 2) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11... 3) https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-new-yellow-j... 4) http://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/ending-fed-trump-facebook.h...

I wouldn't necessarily go so far as saying Breitbart produces fake news, however there are sites that produce fake news. Completely made up stuff targeting conservatives to make money. This is a very real problem and it needs to be solved.

I support their right to publish it, I don't support the idea of forcing people to do business with them.

Don't judge a content producer by the content it produces? What other criteria should I judge it by?

Let's see how they describe themselves.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-co...

> There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.

> Natural conservatives can broadly be described as the group that the intellectuals above were writing for. They are mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.

> The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt, includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions.

> For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe.

> Halting, or drastically slowing, immigration is a major priority for the alt-right. While eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.

> You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows. In short, they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option.

> The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.

> In response to concerns from white voters that they’re going to go extinct, the response of the Establishment — the conservative Establishment — has been to openly welcome that extinction. It’s true that Donald Trump would not be possible without the oppressive hectoring of the progressive Left, but the entire media is to blame for the environment in which this new movement has emerged.

> The really interesting members of the alt-right though, and the most numerous, are the natural conservatives. They are perhaps psychologically inclined to be unsettled by threats to western culture from mass immigration and maybe by non-straight relationships. Yet, unlike the 1488ers, the presence of such doesn’t send them into fits of rage. They want to build their homogeneous communities, sure — but they don’t want to commit any pogroms along the way. Indeed, they would prefer non-violent solutions.

This is, by definition, white nationalism. If Breitbart is the platform of the alt-right, and this is the alt-right, then Breitbart is a white nationalist news source.

The generation after millennials is more conservative.

You should look up the statistics for political affiliation of Israeli youth.

With my generation I am far right. Among the younger generation I'm the moderate.

For a counterexample: has the embargo on Iran worked?