Even if you don't agree with Breitbart or other outlets, it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.
If Breitbart et al have earned a reputation of being white nationalists, and others use that reputation to evaluate whether they want to consume their media, that seems totally reasonable. If Breitbart wants to eliminate that reputation, they can by regularly pushing content that discredits it.
Consider Buzzfeed, who is slowly turning their reputation around. It takes work, and more than one article with good individual content. You have to show a commitment to change, regularly, before that reputation changes.
I'm not necessarily sure that's true.
The fact that were using the term "post fact voter" is pretty scary.
At one point media was more of a conscious buy, but now thats mostly auto-magic. You buy into a network and might not have any idea where your ad is showing up.
I think this is another confession that the system isn't perfect and were going to see some corrections.
I think this is an inevitable consequence of a world where anyone with a domain name and a vps can start a "news" website. It takes more effort to debunk a fake news story than it does to write it.
Businesses / customers are not required to patronize certain establishments.
However establishments are prohibited by law from denying business to people they personally find objectionable.
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.
"the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination by privately owned places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin."
If someone refuses me service as a jewish white man, that's illegal (despite jews/whites/men are not being a protected class)
My personal system of ethics is such that were I to run a service I would specifically ban some groups, organisations or uses from it, eg. peddlers or enablers of child pornography, Nazis, people engaging in deceitful propaganda to the detriment of society etc.
Organisations such as the daily mail, breitbart, anyone describing themselves as "alt-right" and more would be included in this. I'm not preventing you from doing the thing you want to do, I'm just not allowing it on my platform.
Sometimes the people who speak the loudest are actually the wrong ones. And if we only let the loudest speak, we won't find out when they're wrong.
Is there an example of a platform like the one you describe with a large audience?
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).
You're okay with letting corporations set the limits of our discourse, even as that flies in the face of the numerous quotes presented?
And the author actually presents a sort of rebuttal to what I think (I assume?) you're trying to get at, which I'll quote here:
> I’m not advocating that as a matter of law companies should be forced to allow dissenting opinions on their platform. [snip, for brevity] Rather, I am suggesting it is our duty as platform operators to allow the widest possible dissent on our platforms, and our duty as Internet citizens to hold our platforms to a high standard.
We should decide ourselves what we do and don't want to hear. Sometimes that takes the form of community moderation, like on Reddit and HN. Sometimes that takes the form of (on 4chan/8chan) only moderating to the degree that it fits within the law. There are plenty of people on Twitter that use automated blockbots and word filters to broadly block things they don't want to hear.
But all these people have set their own constraints. On HN, we give away our liberty to be gratuitously negative in the hopes that we might find a higher-quality discourse. And that's it. As long as we're nice to each other, we're allowed to hold just about whatever opinion we'd like, without even the minor repercussion of losing a lot of karma.
That ad exchange does not speak for me. Those running it don't give a shit about me. They shouldn't be the ones setting the limits of our discourse. It might be a pie-in-the-sky, ideal concept, but I think we should try our very best to hold ourselves to it.
What your rebuttal refers to is (exactly per xkcd 1357) an expected right to be "hosted" by mainstream sources -- an entirely different kettle of fish. And where it becomes a straw man is where it (implicitly) conflates "minority views" with either (1) irredeemable hate space or (2) puerile garbage (a.k.a. the bread and butter of sources like Breitbart).
We should decide ourselves what we do and don't want to hear.
Yup, that's what we already do. When we decide to spend time on sites like 4chan or Reddit, or FB or HN, or CNN or RT, we make, therewith, a decision to consume content as they've chosen to filter it. And I don't know about you, but I don't have much difficulty choosing sources from the above list to focus my attention resources on.
They shouldn't be the ones setting the limits of our discourse.
They're not. By visiting sites that certain guidelines (or make use of ad networks enforcing certain guidelines), you're choosing to accept those constraints.
That ad exchange does not speak for me.
Then... it's within you power to not spend quality time on sites that make use of those networks.
Main point being, the policies applied by ad networks can't meaningfully be called "censorship". Nor is what's happening to Breitbart anything really new (if anything, it's just a recalibration of long-existing policies to a changing media landscape).
The real problem is one nobody talks about. News today is driven by advertising revenue. That revenue is driven by clicks. Clicks are driven by headlines that cause people to click. Headlines that outrage people do that more effectively. Truth does not enter into it.
Therefore advertising driven news has a natural tendency towards exaggeration, and then eventually making stuff up. With new stuff hitting emotional buttons established by the old. And once we've seen the same themes over and over again, they become believable to us no matter what the facts may be.
This was what caused the "yellow press" to be what it was a century ago. It remained so until The New York Times established a subscription model for news that actually rewarded verifiable facts. That subscription model has now broken down, and we are back to the yellow press again. :-(
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"
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?
I think it's lost meaning starting with 2011 (thanks, Obama). See: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=racist
Notice how frequency of use spikes by 500% over last 5 years. That means that either the world has got immensely more racist, we started noticing it more or the word has just got diluted to where it doesn't mean anything (by a factor of 5, to be precise).
I happen to think it's the latter.
Which derails your entire argument. Just because you call it out doesn't mean the word loses meaning.
I'd suggest you read this piece by a someone who you can relate to - a "member of a desperate and discombobulated coastal elite" that discusses how definition of the term varies:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
I suppose we've always treated fringe media outlets as what they are, to some extent. We don't place a huge amount of weight on what e.g. the Socialist Worker says, but of course we don't simply disregard all journalism from these sources. Maybe that's the answer for things like Breitbart – unashamedly biased sources should be less heavily weighted. Doesn't that seem reasonable?
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.
> To me your statements sounds strangely familiar to "I'd rather be reading both Mein Kampf ...
So to clarify, you think that someone who disagrees with third wave feminism is like Hitler and want to discuss false equivalence?
No, it's prudent policy, actually -- and what news outlets have pretty much always been doing, all along.
In the old days, you wouldn't have expected the NYT to carry "wire" stories from outlets run by American Nazi Party or Scientology. Same basic principle at play -- just that with the internet, alternative outlets have proliferated, and hence have become harder to keep track of. So if anything, this is a move back to relative normalcy.
The thing to keep in mind is that, at the end of the day, this is not censorship -- it's content curation, operating on the same principles it pretty much always has.
Ha. That's what's called brand and reputation. If you build trust over ten articles just so you can exploit that trust for one uber-damaging faux one, that's NOT frightening. That's life. And it's EXACTLY how things should work.
That said, the road of "censorship" is a slippery one. The root problem is thinking - mainly critical thinking. Spoon feeding people the "right" info is just as bad - perhaps worse - than keeping people from the "wrong" info.
Sure, stop Breitbart and the like, but it's not going to solve the problem. So yeah, here we go again, dumping a ton of time and energy into solving a symptom - disease left completely unaddressed - that will only show up again elsewhere in some other slightly different form.
If you think categorically dismissing sources is a new phenomenon, may i point you to 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' which has been around at least since the 15th century.
Whats worrying is the lack of news sources that can be trusted by people from any political camp.
Let's call this for what it is and always has been: yellow journalism. It's fake, it's damaging, and with the internet it gets spread far too quickly. And then, when enough momentum around the fake story is able to clearly paint it as false gets noticed by the majority of people, this particular source never issues a correction. They just silently let their mistake fall to the wayside, never bothering to inform their audience of their calculated mistake and what is actually true.
When you fail to acknowledge your mistakes, and when you do those mistakes repeatedly to the point where it can only be assumed to be purposefully done, you lose credence. Or at least you should. I'm not sure what's going on with this fetishization of false equivalency in American journalism. Not all journalistic entities are on the same platform; some of them clearly don't mind hiring people that have no principles as a citizen of their respective country or even principles as a decent human being, nor do they have respect for their fellow countrymen and maybe not even themselves.
>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.
I read the newspaper linked below most days. Here's them reporting on a incredibly misleading front page headline o their own: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-m...
I personally believe in global warming, but I also previously believed that major cities would be underwater by the year 2000 due to the 'greenhouse effect' (since that's what we learnt in school) so can understand someone else believing that news organisations often tend to sensationalize science.
That's a very liberal reading of that article. Like most yellow journalism and conspiracy theories, there's always of tinge of truth or credibility. The rest of it dives down into completely contrived fear mongering and conspiracy theories, as well as willfully ignoring the mountain of contradicting evidence to the point the article is trying to make. The professor's finding are a very small, small part of the overall article, and certainly a very small part of their overall narrative.
>The professor's finding are a very small, small part of the overall article, and certainly a very small part of their overall narrative.
You could say this for a ton of MSNBC and Fox News articles. Should they also be banned as fake news?
People in this thread generally aren't saying Breitbart should be considered a reputable source for anything; in fact I'd bet most of the Breitbart defenders in here are leftists or at least not far-right like Breitbart. I'm saying there shouldn't be calls for it to be censored in any way. Censorship is extremely dangerous; far, far more dangerous than Breitbart publishing their silly headlines.
I interpreted your statement here to mean you should group it along with other fake news distributors and which Facebook and Twitter are now beginning to block. If you didn't mean that, then I apologize.
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).
You would be astoundingly wrong. I get the pleasure of reading Breitbart articles every single morning, thanks to my Facebook feed.
And is it the same mechanism that keeps you from clicking "Hide" on such content?
If this mechanism could be isolated and productized, we could make a fortune on it!
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.
Like all the mainstream press that called it for Hillary for months before the election? If you're not judging content by the content itself, than you've got blinders on. Let the content stand on its own.
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?
Assuming pollsters are systemically altering their own polls at the very end of campaigns, I could argue that the news articles written about those altered polls are sorta fake news articles.
[0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-clinton-...
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.
This is not exactly fake news, but the colluding between major MSMs and the DNC on debate questions (and other things as well) is quite troubling.
What happened to ethics? You know, those things the pajama media doesn't have but 'we' do?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...
These other reports, CNN claims they do it for both sides ...
http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-wikileaks-update-did-dnc-help...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/democrats-n...
Rather than taking your opinion of Breitbart from the companies who stand to profit from the destruction of their competition, take a look at their front page right now and find just one example of fake news. Feel free to post your findings here.
The argument that "these words are too dangerous to be in the hands of the masses" is the same one used to justify the book burnings in WWII and similar thought policing throughout history.
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.
edit: in response to the second part about Buzzfeed, just in this thread there is someone with your stance on this who is advocating for them as a news source. Maybe a coincidence, but I'd say that speaks to it not being a "significantly small" amount.
To claim I am calling for censorship is really kind of a cheap shot and completely distracting to the actual issues being discussed.
If your ISP refused to carry, eg, The Guardian because of the fake Duggan headline, would you be pissed off? I would.
This isn't an ISP blocking free speech, discriminating against minorities, nor assaulting anyone. It's an ad network that stopped doing business with a company that violated policies.
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...
It's a (I think, false) belief that traditional gender roles led to a more cohesive society or something. It's quite a stretch to jump from there to misogyny. Perhaps sexism, but not misogyny.
Further complete idiocy:
Yes, he gets his claim of "women unhappy" from an actual study, but either ignores or misrepresents the results of said study, which concludes largely that women consider themselves to have better lives, and have better lives, but feel unhappy because they now compare themselves to a larger scope of possible achievements.
And while he's correct that the pill is shit and does a lot of harm in women, it's utterly disgusting to turn that around into "the church is right". No, the conclusion here is that men need to "man the fuck up" and get their tubes tied, and their rubbers on. (And the refusal of many here probably also is a good source for the unhappiness above.)
I could go further, but to properly address how much of that article is vile lies would require a post bigger than the article itself.
At the end of the day he is absolutely posting with a fucking agenda, and that is misogyny. Trying to deny that is utterly incomprehensible and reprehensible.
misogyny/mɪˈsɒdʒ(ə)ni/noun
dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
I mean, are we scrubbing all this stuff? Is this 1984?
Also, you're strawmanning yourself am entire farm there, even if you didn't intend to.
I refer to these other articles because I'm saying there is a double standard. Why are we suddenly talking about banning Breitbart? For writing a provocative article on why women would be happier in traditional rules? If we look at the articles I mention and replace the word 'woman' with 'man', I can't see a lot of difference between what we now are supposed to be outraged by.
How is pointing out a double standard in these contrasting articles a straw man?
The article IS saying women aren't as smart as men, particularly not smart enough to handle freedom and responsibilities without being unhappy.
Then you try to bring "capable" as an example, which is ... just a superset of smart?
Then you say bb is being censured for that one article, when it's the fact that they're constantly and almost exclusively producing similar hateful stuff.
Then you start bringing up imaginary examples that are not at hand, which is honestly the purest kind of strawmanning.
And then you try to bring up articles that you claim should be deserving of the same reaction, but are very dissimilar.
I hope this helps you grok things, and if not, there's nothing left to say to you.
I am not fan of Breitbart, but when Reason magazine is labeled "fake news", this is not a crusade for truth, but to stamp out opposition "Stalin style".
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.
NYT has its share of "fake" stories, where they either willfully misguided or parroted the White house talking points because of pressures of the day.
At the end of the day, NYT is a propaganda machine most of the time leaning left, except when it is uncomfortable.
My point was broadly that labeling Reason as fake news demonstrates this whole news stories about fake news is in itself fake outrage.
On your suggestion of spreading lies, I sure do introspect, and in this case, I find you acting childish and narrative driven rather than facts.
How much you guys wanna bet this guy watches MSNBC 24/7.
Most of Breitbart's inflammatory-headline stories are based on real scientific studies.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08/birth-control-makes... cites multiple real university studies.
Also supported by studies conducted by reasonable sources, if you read the articles:
http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/01/not-sexism-women-ju...
http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/05/fat-shaming-is-good...
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/17/gay-right... (the writer himself is gay, if it matters)
Exaggerated, sure, but it's not fake news by any means. It's biased news, like many other news outlets.
Ad agencies are perfectly free to not associate with them anymore, but calls to mark them as fake news is extremely dangerous and would be a clear case of censorship. 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.
People just need to treat media sources with a grain of salt. Facebook and Twitter should only ban the websites that are clearly just fake article mills, posting nothing but completely fabricated information.
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.
>When I express views like this, I’m sometimes called a reactionary. People say I want to go back to the 50s. And they’re right – but it’s the 650s BC I want to return to, because Sparta had the right idea about male love. You can spend all day wrestling and wanking each other off if you want to, chaps, but you still have to get married, have kids and go off to fight wars.
Sure it combines "outdated pseudo-science and philosophically iffy reasoning behind its pretext". But it's not fake news. It's just shitty news, like so much other shitty news out there. I'm not defending Breitbart, I'm just saying it is a press outlet and it should be allowed to exist as one. It shouldn't have to suffer from censorship. No media source should have to suffer from censorship. Fake news mills aren't media sources.
>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.
Milo is a partisan asshole but he's not a total idiot. Instead of calling for his website to be blacklisted, why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject? You could probably even get him to agree with a lot of your points, and perhaps even empathize.
Healthy dialogues are critical in a democratic society. Censorship is the antithesis of everything our society stands for.
>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.
I don't have any particular examples right now, but just as Breitbart will group together articles of alleged attacks by immigrants or minorities, I've often seen WaPo group together articles of alleged attacks against immigrants or minorities on their top bar. I think Breitbart is probably more biased on average, but they both spin things pretty heavily. Between Breitbart, Fox, Drudge, Huffington, NYT, NBC, WaPo, there is not a single source of objective and neutral news analysis out there. It's probably more fair to put Breitbart and Huffington Post at the same bias degrees than Breitbart and WaPo, but the point is that all these sources are pretty shitty and biased and calling for just one of them to be censored is quite silly.
Also, degree of ideological bias is not the same thing as degree of journalist integrity or factual falsity. A "news" outlet can have no particular ideological bias and be completely disconnected from the truth, or it can have a strong ideological bias and be completely reliable on facts and even have high integrity in presenting all relevant facts in the stories it covers (while, or even would assume, being quite selective in its selection of which stories to cover at all.)
So, saying Breitbart is no more biased than HuffPo is not an argument that they are no more fake than HuffPo.
You really don't see anything incongruent about the article's premise and his "conclusion", nor do you see that it's a preposterously philosophically-foolish position to take? He's okay with marrying a women I will not love nor have any emotional stake in. She'll just marry me, we'll live together, and she'll just be a semen vessel? Spare me the willful ignorance.
>But it's not fake news. It's just shitty news
Can we stop nitpicking? These publications often rely on crappy news in aggregate to push a narrative. It doesn't matter that an article here and there is seemingly rational, or has bits of truth cited by 10 year old studies with whimsical interpretations of those studies, while completely ignoring those studies were never replicated again. Those stories in aggregate begin to build up a narrative. That narrative then becomes accepted by certain people and sometimes unfortunately unquestionably so; the narrative is surrounded by a maze of complete and utter drivel. For some people, it's too much to shift through so they don't even bother to self-critique. The "maze of crap" can even have the nocuous effect of lending credence to the publishing organization. It's the same thing with anti-vaccination people, it's the same thing with flat-earthers, or people who want to claim evolution is fake. The problem becomes muddled when you get into something grey, like politics. But it's still the same pattern.
>why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject?
You are effectively asking for a dialogue "reset" Not only would that be extremely exhausting to rehash the past couple of decades of why we are where we are in regards to certain subjects, but also would basically be a waste of time. People like Milo have no interest in honest debate, or "truth" if you will. If they did, they'd write far more eloquent positions addressing the actual evidence and perspectives that exist in whatever subject is being discussed; they certainly wouldn't take willfully ignorant positions on those subjects either. They'd also conduct themselves accordingly when being filmed. Watch any of Milo's interviews on video and watch him twist himself in circles. He spends the majority of the time backpedaling on things he said rather than take some affirmative position with evidence to back it up.
He and Breitbart are free to publish what they want, in whatever manner they choose. That doesn't mean they deserve people's attention or money. That doesn't mean people need to respect them.
>I think Breitbart is probably more biased on average, but they both spin things pretty heavily.
There is a difference here. Everyone is biased, so let's not use it as a talking point. The principle behind all this is willing to admit when you got something wrong. The principle is having the integrity to inform your readership of the wrong, and correct it. The principle is not ignoring blatantly well supported positions on certain subjects just so you can tickle your audience's emotions and fears.
And to the overall censorship point: No one is calling for censorship. Private citizens and companies don't want to deal with Breitbart. Companies like facebook probably just don't have the ability nor the resources to sort through every single thing that starts trending from Breitbart, only to have it be removed because it's fake. We are talking about a publishing source that posted so many fake news stories, Facebook and Twitter decided to hell with it, we'll just get the story from elsewhere. Breitbart is in this position because of their own actions, not because there's some conspiracy theory to silence one side.
I see many, many issues with it. Did you not read my post?
>Can we stop nitpicking? These publications often rely on crappy news in aggregate to push a narrative.
Yes, that's true. Again, so do other sources, including many left-leaning ones.
>Watch any of Milo's interviews on video and watch him twist himself in circles. He spends the majority of the time backpedaling on things he said rather than take some affirmative position with evidence to back it up.
Right, because he's mostly going for clickbait and ad revenue and just general attention and self-aggrandizement. But the point is that he has a right to do that, and you have a right to challenge him on it.
>And to the overall censorship point: No one is calling for censorship. Private citizens and companies don't want to deal with Breitbart. Companies like facebook probably just don't have the ability nor the resources to sort through every single thing that starts trending from Breitbart
It seems we agree on most things except this.
First off, as far as I'm aware, Facebook and Twitter have absolutely no plans to block Breitbart. They're only blocking fake news outlets. Outlets that completely fabricate stories and evidence and interviews etc.
Facebook is a private corporation, but like it or not they are a massive monopoly.
No, it's not censorship in the sense of government censorship, but it has a similar effect. We don't have to call it censorship for the horrible effects to become apparent, so I'll stop calling it that.
Facebook has so much reach that you could equate them to a state in many ways. Blocking Breitbart would only solidify conservatives' beliefs that liberal elites are trying to stifle their voice and prevent them from sharing any contrary opinions, and make them feel even more marginalized. It would be a major boon to Trump and his administration. I think that one single action could be the start of a path that makes our country much more divisive than it is now. Zuckerberg was 100% right to be extremely wary about blocking any news sources pre-election.
An advertiser dissociating with Breitbart is one thing, but major social media outlets that effectively act as common carriers should not ban things without a very good reason, like law-infringing material or scams (which fake news outlets generally are).
Exclamations like that are just baffling. There's this continuous hateful, spiteful and just awful bigotry being spewed, but when one labels it as such, suddenly one is being unreasonable and one has to engage. I won't take the bait. No sir, thank you.
Also, for whatever reason or other, I have at least one openly gay friend (who isn't even that conservative) who agrees with him. Clearly there's room for open debate here.
Ignoring him is probably better than engaging, but that's different from calling for social media providers to censor references to him.
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.
https://twitter.com/melbournecoal/status/797171598163898368/...
Here's the NYT letter that recently talks about this to their subscribers. In the letter they admit they published dishonest news stories and after the election have rededicated themselves to "honesty".
We know we totally weren't honest during the election, but guys, we are now! You can trust us! Said the media establishment losing control of the narrative.
I'm sorry, but I don't trust any news from ANYONE nowadays. Not breitbart, not the NYT, not ANYWHERE. If you do, I feel bad for you because you have been fed somebody's propaganda.
It's hardly new that news organizations have to be a bit friendly to anyone they cover in order to preserve access. I cannot waltz into the White House press room and expect equal access, no matter how fair and intelligent my non-existent media empire is.
But the scope and severity we have been promised is an order of magnitude worse.
It's curious how many forms this "equal time" complaint comes in, but it's almost universally used as a bludgeon to imply that left-leaning news has an obligation to offer a platform for all sorts of things.
I'd like equal time on Rush Limbaugh's show to talk about how health care should be socialized. I think I have a cogent case that would demand scrutiny and be convincing to his audience. Will you help me petition for time there? I'll of course expect his advertising revenue for the time there (who works for free on this day and age?)!