New York Times is taking down its paywall for World Press Freedom Day
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/technology/facebook-alex-...
Now I get they are using platforms which can indiscriminately ban whoever they want. Fine lets say infowars makes their own platform.
Doing okay on their own platform when all of a sudden...
Now common payment processors ban them from being able to receive funding through traditional methods.
When all banks ban you where do you go? Crypto currency of course.
When all common outlets ban you at the same time it doesn't seem much like "World Press Freedom Day" it is more like "Globalization Freedom Day" where you talk against the mainstream opinions and will be silenced. No freedom for you!
Just my 2 cents, not that I endorse infowars I just believe in true and honest discourse and to let the idiots keep talking to be able to show how stupid they are. Banning them only reinforces their audience and empowers them to be more fringe.
You can express all the counterculture views you want, right up until you start to harm people with those views, then the conversation shifts.
No one is trying to take out the time cube guy, for example...
Jussie Smollett fake hate crime to instill more divisiveness?
Both of those I see doing harm to others in the real world yet they get a free pass?
Infowars peddles in hate. CNN comes by it occasionally. There is a difference, and it's huge.
I also agree that all platforms can ban who they want on their private platforms.
It still doesn't make it the correct action as it just emboldens their audience.
If what they are saying is truly so horrible and shocking the public would be able to see this and easily make the choice to ignore them.
Also what has infowars done that has caused real world harm other than the example everyone uses with Sandy Hook. Not that I'm again endorsing or defending him, but Alex Jones did retract and apologize for his coverage during that time. What makes his apology any weaker than that of CNN's apology for the harassment the Covington kids had to endure?
Most of the public does recognize this as horrible and ridiculous, and ignore him. Deplatforming is the corporate version of ignoring him.
I imagine it's somewhere between deceptively yelling fire in a crowded theatre and expressing genuine, if provably false, concerns about vaccines.
Deplatforming from social sites and banks is the least we can do when it's not clear where the law should step in and claims dispute overwhelming evidence.
As someone whose had a comprised immune system I'd prefer to err on the side of stopping the spread of false medical information.
Does not compute. Genuine, but provably false statements are negligence at best, fraud at worse.
Not just lies, because the homeopatic suplements he peddles on the store.
Maybe the rise of the internet would have given birth to the anti-vax movement anyway, but my recollection is that Wakefield's fraudulent research was the catalyst that got that ball rolling. Prior, there had been an anti-vax movement in response to the first ever vaccine (for small pox) around the 1800's. It took society time accept the idea of vaccination. Regrettable, albeit understandable. For most of 100 years there wasn't much anti-vax sentiment until DTP faced criticism for a limited time in the late 70's early 80's. The things were calm again until Wakefield's fraud, and the rise of the internet has sustained it since.
Fire that person and there's no more problem.
I used to edit a small newspaper. It wasn't uncommon (a few times a year) to receive advertising orders from Holocaust deniers. I did not run those ads. Maybe that was deplatforming, but I don't think it was wrong, or against the interests of free speech to do so.
We've also seen registrars canceling domain registrations. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/14/1830223/google-canc...
Should they have this power? https://www.newsweek.com/it-legal-hosting-companies-ban-hate...
By analogy, what if the electric utilities started banning people from using electricity based on their speech? Or maybe gas stations refusing to sell you fuel? How far do we let that go? Boycotts are great and all, but the power of the internet is that it gives everyone a voice. So today, are we so dependent on that voice that the 1st amendment needs to apply to it? Or is it okay to limit politically incorrect opinions to meatspace and save the internet for only approved speech?
If you want to pull in something like the electric utility, you need to change the example from a trollish media figure to someone messing with the power grid via their utility hookup. Doing that might very well get you banned.
When it is just idiots, fine.
The problem is when it goes beyond idiocy and into dishonest discussion, spreading lies, and state actors weaponizing dezinformatsiya, and such lies being spread either directly by state actors, by their compromised assets, or merely manipulated Useful Idiots.
At that point, it is beyond the question of Free Speech and into yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
It is already getting people killed, undermining democratic institutions around the world, and deplatforming is the least we can do to protect the society.
There is also the paradox of intolerance. If the intolerant people are allowed free speech, they will not tolerate anyone else's free speech, and will bring the end of free speech.
Being absolutist about rules (e.g., absolute free speech for everyone) makes it easy to think about, but reality is messier than that, and we need to deal with the complexity.
Hell if my subscription made it possible for others to read it for free and that was sustainable, i'd be 100% ok with that.
That's how it works for public radio and public TV, I feel like they're a thing I want to support, but at the same time share as much as support.
I'm absolutely in favor of supporting great papers like the Times as well, so I'm not sure what my point is here. But it seems misguided to compare news corporations to public institutions.
Beyond that there is an element of wanting to support an industry that I think is important to maintaining a healthy democracy, thus I don't care so much how much anyone else is paying.
A payment that doesn't directly benefit you is a donation.
I'd really like the takeaway to be less "stop supporting the New York Times" and more "start supporting Propublica". The latter is doing great work!
I haven't heard of this, what is the hoax?
As far as I can tell they're attempting the following:
1. Poison the OK hand-sign in political contexts
2. Wait for a politician to use it, be it as a stooge (unaware of the new association) or as a dog-whistle.
3. Wait for the media to tie the white-nationalist association and politician's use of the symbol together
4. Cry foul: "You liberal media dogs are crazy, that's just the OK hand-sign!"
5. People who are unaware that white nationalists have been using the symbol grow their distrust of the media and may become more sympathetic to white nationalists. After all, the media was 'wrong' about the hand sign. What else could they be wrong about?
Because the white nationalists are inherently duplicitous, they see no problem communicating like this - in the open until challenged, at which point it becomes a 'joke', or a 'misunderstanding', or 'media overreach'.
It's not much of a hoax.
No they're not. People have been doing this for decades. They're not white nationalists.
It's a prank by 4/8chan users. Like 'rainbow parties' and 'thigh bridge' and any number of other things created to waste time. That you (and the NYT) believe it is falling into the trap and doing exactly what they want.
Yep. 8chan is trash. There's undoubtedly some actual white nationalists there, there's also a massive amount of losers who need attention.
You and the NYT are taking what they say at face value, giving them exactly the attention they want, and rewarding their behavior ensuring there'll be more of it.
Modern, colloquial usage has strayed very far from original usage (right = pro-monarchy, left = pro-democract or anarchy)
That's why writing business news is where it's at. The ability to slant writing becomes harder, but not impossible, when you're talking about finance and prices.
One thing that may have influenced the NYT's decline into that strategy was their new editor, who's proudly out to poke bears: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/sarah-jeong-new-york-...
I find stuff like this more emotive and more suited to activism than informative, and I'm more interested in information than feelings when I read the news in the morning.
The browser experience is ok with an ad-blocker. But why not reward your subscribers with a great reading experience? Remove the ads, focus on good typography, etc, and I would pay whatever you ask. Preferably through an app.
Edit: I’ve been a subscriber for years, and I’m willing to pay regardless. I just think they could improve by making the subscription meaningful to a generation that doesn’t want to see ads.
If this were something like Earth Day, a company vowing to recycle it's waste, but only for a day, would immediately seem just as ridiculous as this does after brief reflection.
The conflict would be resolved if they kept the paywall and said something like "remaining solvent is a necessary requirement for press freedom. In honer of World Press Freedom Day, we will do X instead." Where X might be something like sponsoring independent journalists in areas of the world where press freedom is much more of an issue.
But I’m not one to look a horse in the mouth if it was given as a gift.
> everyone who registers
Nice move, to celebrate “freedom” by collecting personal data that will most definitely be used for marketing and upselling subscriptions.
"Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode."
Beyond that, what they don't realize is that other news sites will simply report on what is reported in the NYT, and those sites will forever be free. From time to time I will copypaste a NYT url to a single-use non-private FF instance to read (and then immediately clear history) whereby I invariably find that the article only has a few bits that expanded my knowledge. Most of the articles are those few bits of new info followed by summaries of days or months old information that I am already fully aware of. And the same goes for the WaPo.
I understand that we need to support good journalism and I will when I find some really good journalism, without auto-play vids and ridiculous amounts of ad content and making sure the readership on "both sides" is fairly represented. The WaPo has potential but Bezos' quest for all the dollars is ruining it.
What they don't get is that they can't control the information and that information has no intrinsic price, for our primary advantage as human beings is our ability to spread ideas and information from person to person. Their information is going to get aggregated and there's not a damn thing they can do about it, and I'm willing to wait 12 hours for it to get to me secondhand.
The MBAs are digging their own graves every single day and they don't have anyone to blame but themselves. That they have gone all in on the advertisers is only hastening their demise.
Examples?
The opinion writers are purposely selected to oppose and challenge the viewpoint of the editorial board. Assuming that the editorial board is largely truly correct, there is going to be some degree of intellectual dishonesty among the opposing opinion writers.
I do sympathize with you; I do not enjoy many of their opinions.
Edit, for those of you unfamiliar with this particular editor you can read her own words on Twitter: