Mark Zuckerberg is struggling to explain why Breitbart belongs on Facebook News
theverge.com
theverge.com
Just take a look at the NBC scandal with Matt Lauer, or the fake Syrian war footage ABC was spreading around that turned out to be a shooting range in Kentucky. Not to mention the Project Veritas releases concerning CNN and others.
Trust is low with all news organizations and I think The Verge is just continuing to push their own bias onto users with this article.
*edit - I see downvotes but no comments. I'd love to have my mind changed if someone has good reasons other than they don't like right wing media.
Of course, the good sources are the ones that do not publish errors or misinformation at all in the first place. But if that is used as the criteria, then most of the mainstream media would not even be legitimate candidate.
1. You want representation of both sides of the political spectrum, otherwise you'll be accused of bias. The number of right leaning news sources is relatively few (from what I have observed), I don't imagine there were many for the pick.
2. If you actually read the front page, the majority of their news appears to be reasonably good [1] (at least compared to other popular new sites). It's hardly the Daily Stormer [2].
3. There are more right-leaning people out there than the majority of people realize. In fact, they number roughly half the population in most Countries. As a left-leaning person you should also be aware of what the other side thinks, rather than being subjected to news source that reinforce your own bias.
4. I think the "negative" impact of Breitbart is largely reduced when depicted side-by-side with other sources of news. If anything it simply allows people to know that there is more than one opinion on the subject.
In my experience, the difference between publications isn't so much in the opinions they express, but in which stories they choose to cover. Go to reason.com for stories of government abuse of power, and motherjones.com for corporate abuses. They can cover their stories accurately, but simply by choosing which they cover, they will paint a very different picture of reality.
As my parents once told me as a child, the truth is often somewhere in the middle.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-h...
To be clear, Wikipedia's definition is:
> White nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-
> nationalism which espouses the belief that white people
> are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white
> racial and national identity.
Also the words "alt-right", "right-wing", "far-right" and "alt-lite" are used so interchangeably and often incorrectly, I've given up taking them seriously. They're often used as stand-ins for "not-left".
> Being “edgy” is just a way Of being a bully or bigot under
> the pretense of a joke.
The term "edgy" is to be on the edge of what could be generally called socially acceptable through some kind of content (such as a joke or opinion).
The reason it is a joke and not just a statement of opinion is because there is some mutual understanding that the intention is to be funny and the setup subverts your expectations in some way.
For example, the joke (chosen for being simple and controversial): "How do you make a postman cry? [Person thinks] Kill his family". The joke is funny not because you or I have some deep unsettled hatred for postman, it's funny because it subverted your expectations for how the joke should have ended. In information theory this would be "maximizing expected information gain" - or simply things are interesting. Postman might not find the joke funny, especially if they so happened to be on the receiving end of violence for example - but that not every joke is funny to everybody.
The point is, if you find a comedian unfunny, stop paying for a ticket to go see their shows. If you dislike Breitbart's authors, don't read their content and bump up their ad revenue. This circles back to the benefits of capitalism - reward what you want to see more of, your money is your vote.
> It’s not a new thing, just a new term for “dog whistles”.
I'm not entirely sold on the term "dog whistle". Every joke is tailored for a specific audience and you may or may not be the target demographic. I wouldn't call jokes intended for children to be "dog whistles to children".
If you mean that they are "secretly not meant to be jokes" - then why wouldn't they just outright say it? Why go to the effort of dressing it up as a joke? Especially in somewhere like America where their freedoms are protected up until the point of calls to violence.
If anything, to me the term "dog whistle" exists only to write somebody off completely without having to think critically about the actual meaning behind what they have said. Saying something like "they are all nazis" allows somebody to write off a large group of people and their opinions in the same way a racist might against a race of people they don't want to debate with (which I can't give a good faith example of because this platform has it's own biases).
The real political divide in many Countries is growing because people have become intellectually lazy. Platforms like Facebook are rewarded with return visits if they keep feeding you exactly the content you want to see, not the content you need to see. Perhaps Facebook and other social media platforms have realized that they do need to show you the other side of the argument, even if they risk driving user retention down.
Can you say that you’ve never experienced or said something yourself where it was cruel and when confronted there was an attempt to walk it back as it being a joke?
That it’s meant to be funny is somewhat irrelevant. I remember when hearing “black jokes” was much more common, but black people didn’t find them funny and they often played to very harmful and racist stereotypes.
Capitalism alone as a solution does nothing to help the minorities being denigrated by the majority. In fact, it likely means it will continue to perpetuate.
I don’t have the expertise to definitively say why someone would choose to use coded language rather than be overt, but I suspect that “We want to keep our country white”, doesn’t play quite the same as “we’re trying to preserve our traditions and way of life”, even if the policies behind both statements are identical.
I suggest looking into the history of the use of dog-whistles in politics. People often repeat things without knowing their origin or truthfulness and that’s why I think it’s important to seek understanding and take things in context.
Learning takes a long time. People are incompetent at doing it by themselves even with health, wealth and intelligence. They need Skilled Teachers, Coaches and Counselors to do it well, which is why we don't leave kids at the Library for 18 years but at Schools. And even then they take time to learn.
The News Industry never will play that role. But some of them pretend to do it and we can't let them.
I think the left/right debate hides the fact there are a class of people these days who have discovered they can pay their mortgages by pretending to "inform and educate".
They need to be filtered out irrespective of being on the left or right.
> Copernicus and Kepler next to those of the Church, and
> allow the people to figure things out for themselves, it
> takes a few hundred years.
I think that's a false equivalence. The Church actively tried to hide their work and were essentially state censors (over multiple states). Not only this, but the work of Galileo for example essentially threw doubt on people's core beliefs. I don't think Breitbart can be seen as powerful as the Church was.
> And most often those paths of learning, involve violence
> and domination by both sides.
That's a miserable outlook on your fellow man, I choose to believe people are fundamentally rewarded for selecting good ideas over bad, which is why society seems to work. Ironically, it's groups that supposedly exist to fight violence and bad ideas who are the first to engage in it.
> They need to be filtered out irrespective of being on the
> left or right.
How on earth do you create such a filter and manage it? Say you let the government control the filter, do you really trust any government whom gets into power to control such an important filter? How about a private company? Is there any group out there you really trust to control what news source/stories you get to see?
If there was some 100% perfect way of achieving this - I would back it every day. The problem is, if there is a way to game/corrupt a system, there appears to always be people willing to do so. I believe that in the face of their not being a better solution, we should let the individual decide.
Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot possibly be considered a "high quality news site."
On a side note, from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else you could get news. The best suggestion I've ever gotten was "Wikipedia", and the best wrong answer so far was "books." Most of them don't even seem to know what news are, they seem to confuse the term with "political opinions that I like." We live in crazy times.
Yet the founder, Andrew Breitbart, was raised Jewish, the co-founder, Larry Solov, is Jewish, as is the editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, and the senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak. That's 4 out of the 6 key people at Breitbart [1].
In the words of Alex Marlow: "we're consistently called anti-Semitic despite the fact that we are overwhelmingly staffed with Jews and are pro-Israel and pro-Jewish." [2]
> were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible
> in the US.
This is the reason that the comments section of almost every news website was removed. Unless you have the resources to moderate the comments, you'll simply end up with ultra polarized views.
> Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot
> possibly be considered a "high quality news site."
Because of a single experience in 2015? I saw this sort of thing on the BBC website too back when they had comments.
> from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have
> never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else
> you could get news.
So, shut up and accept it? I think everybody should be aware of the potential for bias and/or incorrect news produced by mainstream media.
For example, just look at how many mainstream news outlets rushed to "lynch" the Kentucky high school student for supposedly confronting a native American [1]. The large majority of them did zero fact checking. The first rebuttals I saw online came from independent news sources that got hold of the original video and saw how it had been clipped.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/kentucky-student-seen-in-viral-co...
No, because it is basically a tabloid/yellow press version of Fox News and Fox News is already very low quality in terms of actual informativity - too much editorializing, combined with garbage interviews. I thought the latter was somehow implied, but should have been much clearer about it.
> This is the reason that the comments section of almost every news website was removed.
Breitbart hasn't removed theirs, though. I just checked and the first comment on the first randomly chosen story was that "Hussein Obama created ISIS" with the reply "This. We need to exterminate the enemy within" - talking about assassinating a former president.
The comments are atrocial, check them out for yourself. And these are Breitbart's readers.
> I think everybody should be aware of the potential for bias and/or incorrect news produced by mainstream media.
Your position is not very coherent, because you are (i) agreeing that there is no viable alternative to "mainstream media" (most of the time, you can only correct them on the basis other mainstream media), and (ii) everybody is biased, has always been, and will always be. It matters how you deal with your biases, not that you don't have biases. I can get my news from the most biased news site on earth - Breitbart or Fox News or CNN, if you will, and be fully informed, as long as I'm able to distinguish news from editorials. It's no problem nowadays, with access to multiple news sources on the Internet. That doesn't make the source high quality, though.
In the end, all the news comes from journalists who film, photograph, write news at the place where something happens or as close as possible to it. New agencies and a few larger papers/TV channels can afford a large network of correspondents and freelancers - the remaining news provider just copy&paste/paraphrase, including Breitbart, of course.
Although I'm much more on the "NYTimes is Truth" side, I read Breitbart daily to gain perspective of what people who voted for Trump think.
Content moderation and factual determination at internet scale in the face of state-sponsored propaganda and multiple divisive nonfactual news agencies is definitely non-trivial. Zuck has started out with a stated philosophy and is attempting to be consistent with it, while also trying to avoid appearance of liberal bias. Some of the consequences of that will not make many people happy.