The world we are moving to is one where ad exchanges, google, and facebook get to decide what can survive on the web. This doesn't seem like a good thing.
If a company like Breitbart cannot survive without Google's ad network, the onus is on them to figure out they can support themselves. Especially if supporting white nationalism undermines Google/Facebook's ability to hire and retain their own employees or impacts their reputation in a negative way.
[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.
Can you give examples of fake news, or what I'd consider to be biased propaganda? (this last category I'd suggest something like climate change denial) in the NYT?
Even just now the NYT decided they would "rededicate [themselves] to the fundamental mission of Times journalism" because of how greatly they messed up the election coverage. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reader...
It doesn't matter what source you read from. The vast majority of news is bullshit, especially in today's day and age. It's not enough to say "oh, Fox News/MSNBC, it's obviously trash". Individually inspect articles for their truth. Look for the other side of every argument. Because brand loyalty is bullshit.
Everyone has bias, and everyone lies, and sometimes people just make mistakes, but there is a scale to this that I personally see breitbart being further along than the NYT from the limited evidence I've seen overall.
Closest thing with the Graun would be the Duggan headline the PCC ruled misleading: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-m...
I can remember seeing the headline and how it didn't match the finding in the article - which was that there was a gun in the car, hence the subject being armed - and thinking all someone who needs an excuse is going to do is read the headline, not buy the paper, and unleash more violence.
The Guardian also kept saying reports that Duggan was a criminal were inaccurate as he had no record: he was a self confessed member of Star Gang and posed as such all over his Facebook. Either he was an adult human lying about being a member of a serious gang (which would have severe consequences) or he actually was involved in organised crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mark_Duggan
It does seem like it's going to be hard to know what actually happened at the incident.
The Guardian may have had a left/right bias here certainly, though it doesn't seem totally clear cut in this instance. It could as much be a case of "the reporting could have been more considered" rather than "deliberately misleading".
However Russia has form for brutality, wether they are liberating or conquering, or both. Russia might mean well (I don't believe they do, as with a lot of government actions), but I would tend to believe reports that whatever their motives they were going about it in an un-necessarily violent way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#Fascism
Have we seen the start of this in the UK with Brexit, or "post-fact politics" too?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/10/michael-goves-gui...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...
As to why this is specifically white nationalism, I'll pull some more quotes for you.
> 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.
"Natural conservatives" here are a group that the authors have identified as a key member of the alt-right coalition.
> This follows decades in which left-wingers on campus sought to remove the study of “dead white males” from the focus of western history and literature curricula. An establishment conservative might be mildly irked by such behaviour as they switch between the State of the Union and the business channels, but to a natural conservative, such cultural vandalism may just be their highest priority.
Here, alt-right members are concerned specifically by the removal or dilution of white culture. They might respect the promotion of other cultures in other countries, but in America they support their own culture only, which as we have seen, is white culture.
> Although the alt-right consists mostly of college-educated men, it sympathises with the white working classes and, based on our interviews, feels a sense of noblesse oblige.
Notice that white working classes specifically are worthy of sympathy, not all working classes.
> 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.
Here, the Establishment is accused of not caring about white extinction. There is no concern about the extinction of other racial cultures, in fact that is the goal. Other races can stick to their own countries.
There is a section about neo-Nazis, but the authors dismiss them as generally unwelcome in the alt-right movement.
Yes, this article does promote the idea that racial nationalism is a natural impulse for people of any race, but it is written from a white American perspective, and promotes the idea that America should be a culturally white nation with limited immigration. I encourage you to read the whole article. I am not taking things out of context or twisting words, this is a description of the alt-right movement as a bunch of white people who want to preserve their own culture and halt immigration.
There's a little more to it than just nationalism in a predominantly white country, though. Nationalism generally means support of national identity above all else. This article promotes white identity above national identity, but the outlet for that feeling is to make the nation into a white nation, so that supporting white culture and supporting the nation are one and the same. Note that the article never talks about American culture. It talks about white culture and white identity politics.
I'm not using white nationalist as an insult, I'm calling Breitbart white nationalist because that accurately describes the beliefs that they cater to. Maybe Steve Bannon wouldn't call himself that because it's obviously a politically and emotionally charged term, but if he agrees with the views described in this article, he is a white nationalist.
You keep inventing stuff. None of the immigration comments referred to race/ethnicity in any way. You do realize that white people immigrate too, right?
A couple more quotes to elaborate the immigration thing:
> Immigration policy follows a similar pattern: by the numbers, cheap foreign workers on H1B visas make perfect economic sense. But natural conservatives have other concerns: chiefly, the preservation of their own tribe and its culture.
We don't have to guess what tribe and culture mean here. The very next paragraph says they're talking about Western Europeans, so Western European immigrants would not be a problem. If you're still not convinced that "tribe" has anything to do with race or ethnicity:
> The alt-right do not hold a utopian view of the human condition: just as they are inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe, they recognise that other groups – Mexicans, African-Americans or Muslims – are likely to do the same.
> 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.
Clearly the immigration concerns are directly linked to concerns about racial and ethnic mixing.
> 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.
The movement dislikes immigration specifically because of demographic displacement. As the rest of the piece makes explicitly clear, that demographic is "white".
Actually it's the world we've already been living in for quite some time. A world not flooded with pop-up ads for hardcore porn ads, for example (like the internet actually was, not too many years ago) -- but in which you're more than welcome to go to certain sites (whose names and URLs everyone knows) to blast your eyesockets with exactly those same images, 24x7, if that be your inclination.
And it's not such a bad world, actually.
Yes. You can stand towards Trump as you want, but he deconstructed the media in a textbook example of the Socratic method, for which we all should be a bit grateful.
Breitbart claims it isn't: Breitbart responded saying it "has always and continues to condemn racism and bigotry in any form".
The exchange refuses to say what triggered their action: "We use a number of third-party standards to determine what is and isn't hate speech, and if we detect a pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group, we determine that to be non-compliant and we simply won't serve ads against it," AppNexus's spokesman Joshua Zeitz told the BBC.
"I'm not going to put the examples out there because I'm not going to engage in a tit-for-tat on what is compliant."
The article lists some headlines that they consider somewhat questionable, but you can easily google similar headlines focused on other groups from sites like the Huffington Post; e.g. "White People Are Too Dumb to Know They're Racist". Do you think we will see similar action taken against those such sites?
Breitbart got its big start, I believe, from the atrocious hoaxes itperpetrated on ACORN, NPR, and other organizations to destroy their reputations unfairly. It has come a long way; it's now simply a very biased news organization that sometimes does decent reporting on undercovered topics.
Yes, it is every ad network's right to refuse to associate with Breitbart or anyone else for that matter. But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in? Do we want ad networks taking activist stances about news websites? Do we want everyone to have to pick a side? Do we want people's careers destroyed for holding relatively mainstream opinions that happen to contradict the majority opinion?
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.
Incidentally, Breitbart himself was Jewish, as is the CEO. Neo-nazi seems a particularly bizarre term to apply especially given for a site that was specifically started by Breitbart and Solov to be pro-Israel.
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?
I think the idea that the only time censorship matters is when it is done by the government is a little silly. Free speech is something we work toward as a society. The First Amendment does not ensure free speech; it ensures the preconditions exist for free speech to be possible, i.e., the government cannot itself restrict free speech.
If every single person in the United States of America refuses to speak, associate with, or do business with someone who believes the world is flat, and consequently such believers cannot find a place to live, can't buy food, can't live a normal life, free speech does not exist, whether or not the government does anything.
Yes, there has to be a balance between the two extremes of total shunning and total acceptance. It has to be OK sometimes, for some people to refuse to associate with people solely on their views. The extremity of said views should probably be a factor. So, maybe, should be the relationship and power of the entities involved. But the absolutist position that there is no problem whatsoever with things like this happening is extremely dangerous: a self-censoring society is in practice no different from a tyrannical government - a democratic government is, after all, no more than one of many enforcement mechanisms of the people - and the principle of free speech and the spread of ideas is dead.
I don't agree with Breitbart's positions - which again, are fairly mainstream - but I don't want these tactics normalized and used against you and me, and end up in a world where everyone has to pick sides or face immediate financial consequences. And I think this is a people-problem, not necessarily an ad-network problem: I'm pretty sure they're only doing this because of pressure being put on them directly or indirectly by interested consumers.
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.