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Comment by chadlavi | Hacker News Reader

Fox News, being a stridently partisan media outlet, is a somewhat incendiary example (I edited that sentence a lot to take out more pointed insults about Fox News). A more neutral one is: imagine Google invests in Media Org A, and de-ranks competing Media Org B's sites. Bye bye, Media Org B.

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We're ignoring the fact that there is an active malicious campaign by elements fueled by the Russian government in order to artificially inflate the visibility of news articles that the Russian government wants people to see. Deranking these articles in response is totally justifiable.

Replace "Russian government" with "French government" or "German government". Would you still support this move so strongly?

We've entered some strange twilight zone where countries pushing their interests is somehow considered "wrong".

Well actually it has been so for a long time. And this is a good thing. There is only one reason why a country pays money to push news in anothet country. French television has been bannef in many African countries several times for the same reason. And many countries prevent their media from being bought by foreign agents.

How did they artificially inflate visibility?

Replace "Russian government" with the name of any news organization and your claim is (still) true. So your conclusion is based on the presupposition that the Russian government has such incredibly bad things to say that all the world's naive people need to be protected from it. Really? Are they spreading a new global communism ideal or something?

It's worse than that. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

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