Comment by l9k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by l9k | Hacker News Reader

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I used to think the same a few years ago.

But nowadays, with the state of politics, the spread of fake news and false narrative on social media... this is what we have.

"they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper"

This is not what people do. This is applicable to 1% of the population.

Trump got elected and keeps supporters with dozens of 140-character messages everyday. There is no details, no analysis, lots of lies and inflammatory comments. But this is what works.

Whether you agree with him or not, this is the winning method to gain influence. This is also because escaping news on social media and TV is harder and harder, and the more susceptible to get trapped are not the one that would make the better choices for everyone.

So you need to use the same tactics to fight him or support him or support something in general. Or you virtually don't exist.

And the opinion and vote of the people is more important than we realized just ten years ago when he wrote that. Would Swarz stay silent and disconnected in the Trump era?

You are talking about some different. Aaron was talking about reading news to learn about the world. You are talking about political activism. For your activism goals, reading Twitter might help (although your time is likely better spent with algorithmic summarization than with reading garbage tweets one at a time)

Swarz was an activist himself. You might say, not a "political" activist, but today even acknowledging science is political...

I think reading Twitter is generally a terrible idea, unless you carefully select who you follow, but you risk staying in your bubble, and adventuring yourself outside of it is even worse.

Just because WaPo and NYT are more verbose doesn't mean what they are feeding you isn't lies you know.

Which of Trump's tweets do you take issue with? That the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt (it is)? That FBI agents were used to infiltrate Trump's campaign in an attempt to submarine it (they were)? That all of this behavior was highly illegal (it is). That foreign spy apparatus (5 Eyes) was engaged to spy in the Trump campaign (it was)? That anyone who colluded with 5 Eyes committed treason in doing so? This is what is really at stake, this is really what took place.

And oh, by the way, I would really like to know who murdered Seth Rich and how his attempted leaks about the shenanigans by the DNC got him killed, because you know, that guy was a hero to bringing to light that corruption. Which, by the way, NOTHING has been done about.

What is most disturbing about everything going on right now is how muddied the waters are and it is the MSM doing the muddying. Journalism has failed us. If you can't see that, you are part of the problem. The media needs to follow the story wherever it goes, even if it implicates their friends and colleagues. If they don't, our next step is an uprising to right this ship.

At least lately, it's become pretty obvious that WaPo and NYT are feeding us crap on a regular basis. If you go look at the source materials, you'll realize that their "neutral" summaries aren't close to neutral, or aren't factual at all. Many times you don't even have to go to the source--the articles/headlines themselves aren't even internally consistent. ("Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong...")

Maybe it was always this way, and I never noticed.

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