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Comment by norikki | Hacker News Reader

The important thing to note here is that the 'mainstream' news sources and Blue Checkmarks have all that influence because their political adgenda is aligned with advertisers and so they have tons of money to self-promote. (See the adpocalypse on YouTube) They dont have all that influence because their political slant is vastly more popular or more accurate than non-corperate (aka alternative) news sources. That's why the niche for alternatives to them exist.

Plenty of fake news on both 4chan and CNN, just different fake news. "Hands up don't shoot!" vs. naming the wrong man as the Vegas shooter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/0...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/googl...

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> Plenty of fake news on both 4chan and CNN, just different fake news. "Hands up don't shoot!" vs. naming the wrong man as the Vegas shooter

Those two sorts of things are vastly different. Major outlets like CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. publish fact-based news that contains inaccuracies as a component of intrinsically imperfect reporting and a business motive to publish quickly. 4chan pushes inaccuracies as the essential component of propaganda to advance narratives that are not guaranteed to be supported by reality.

So in a sense, yes, both do contain inaccuracies. But in one case, inaccuracy is the chaff, and in the other, inaccuracy is the seed.

NB since I get the feeling people might jump down my throat about this: I believe the 24-hour news cycle requires filler to stretch the news through the entire day, which makes it such that that television news and web outlets for newspapers have to rely on opinion and analysis to get there, which will probably contain more inaccuracy since it's indirect. But at least in those cases, it's people spinning a story that is originally fact-based, rather than fabricated from whole cloth.

>Major outlets like CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. publish fact-based news that contains inaccuracies as a component of intrinsically imperfect reporting and a business motive to publish quickly.

Funny, I'd swear they told me that some dude at Google published an anti-diversity manifesto, only that turned out to be a bald faced lie easily disproven by even a quick skim of the source material. They manufacture things for their own purposes just the same, and you don't need to make stuff up wholesale when you decide what gets reported and how much is focused on.

> Plenty of fake news on both 4chan and CNN

Ridiculous false equivalency.

Yeah, 4chan doesn't really blackmail people anymore.

Not at all. Clearly you like one of them better, but both use the same tactics for different benefits.

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