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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

> Why aren’t Democrats paying people to do this kind of thing with the truth? No idea. None. They can do it, just like that other company crushed us, but they haven’t learned.

As a casual observer, it certainly does seem like the political right in America has consistently been more willing and eager to bend the rules of the information game - up to and including willfully propagating falsehoods. This has at a minimum been repeatedly evidenced over the last 20 years, first in cable news and now online.

Is the solution - as the OP implies - for the left / center left to adopt the same dirty tactics as their counterparts? Is there any alternative? I'm sure every rational individual (a group in which I hope to include myself), would really just prefer if everyone started behaving like adults and returned to discussing issues in what at least looks like good faith. Is that at this point a pipe dream?

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If you really think the right-wing republican community is the only group spreading distortions/falsehoods then I'd say youre less casual of an observer than youre claiming.

> If you really think the right-wing republican community is the only group spreading distortions/falsehoods

First of all, you mis-read my comment. At no point did I claim the political right had a monopoly on disseminating misinformation.

Secondly, even though this (and just about everything else) can be spun as a case of "both sides do it / both sides are bad / all sides are bad / etc", there is an obvious difference of scale & magnitude - and scale matters. In modern political American discourse it's clear who more consistently disseminates misinformation, and - as this piece indicates - who is more effective at doing so.

Scale matters for results not morality.

Cool- I suppose dropping a 1 kg object on someone's head is morally equivalent to dropping a 1000 kg object on someone's head. It's really only a matter of scale.

That's obviously nonsense. Killing 1M people is worse than killing 1.

Why? Do you mean environmentally, economically, statistically or morally?

If you tell a big enough lie often enough, people start to believe it.

Maybe you didn't do it on purpose, but yours is a "Straw man argument": "A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man"."

The original comment never claimed that "the right-wing republican community is the only group spreading distortions/falsehoods". As far as I understand, it claims that it is the right-wing that has embraced it to a wider extent. And that is something that we have seen in late elections and referendums.

Maybe you didn't do it on purpose, but what you are doing is called nitpicking.

> nouninformal > fussy or pedantic fault-finding. > "nitpicking over tiny details"

> As far as I understand, it claims that it is the right-wing that has embraced it to a wider extent. And that is something that we have seen in late elections and referendums.

The original paragraph: "Is the solution - as the OP implies - for the left / center left to adopt the same dirty tactics as their counterparts? Is there any alternative?"

Clearly implies that according to the op, the left have yet to adopt the "dirty tactics".

They are paying to do it: Shareblue and Media Matters as two examples. And, with CNN, Politico and MSNBC all-in on exposing Trump's failings, the unearned media storm is intense.

this is the correct factual response here.

The problem is that the tactics work best for fake stories, because they can be pre-loaded and coordinated. True news is worked out between competing outlets and breaks messily.

Fake stories are also quicker to write. Truth requires careful research, which takes time. Fake news can be written as fast as fingers can strike the keyboard.

Fake stories can be tuned for maximal appeal to people's existing opinions, preconceptions and prejudices. Truth has a habit of telling us things other than what we want to hear.

Like the gender wage gap? (invented by the left, turns out to be a conscious misinterpretation of statistics)

A lot of the right wing "propaganda" is not coordinated by any central apparatus. The people running many of these sites are opportunists who understand that the "alt right" is a firehose of traffic, and set up sites purely to make money from ads.

The idea that there is some evil mastermind group behind the media blitz is laughable and only further demonstrates the misunderstanding the democrats have. ("The Russians hacked the election!!11!!") Fact is, where there's traffic, there's advertising revenue. Setting up a "news site" and blasting it across twitter, The_Donald, etc can be very profitable. Profit is the main incentive here.

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