Google bans ZeroHedge and The Federalist from its ad platform | Hacker News Reader

Google bans ZeroHedge and The Federalist from its ad platform

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271 pointsthrowawaysea344 comments

Reading into the details, the rationale was because Zerohedge allegedly failed to manage their comment section to Google's standards for what other companies do. In a parliamentary system, if you want to know what a government is doing, you listen to the opposition. They are almost always a bunch of clowns slinging mud, but when it sticks, they are miles ahead of the courtiers who populate the press gallery and newsrooms. ZH is one of the fastest news reaction sites on the web, with no pretense of objectivity other than as a reliable opposition party to the sanctimonious tone that has come to characterize the recent mainstream.

I haven't seen that comment section in years, but it was so terrible it looked like people trying to plant things in it to discredit the site. ZH itself has always been farcically provocative, and at least %90 useless, but when they get it right, they really get it right. They are also to financial literacy for younger generations what punk was to music. This reflects more on Google (and previously, Twitter) and whoever else piles on than it does on ZH.

> the rationale was because Zerohedge allegedly failed to manage their comment section to Google's standards for what other companies do

Out of curiosity, is there a precedent for YouTube banning channels based on the channel comments and not the channel video? Sounds like ZH is being punished for the actions of third parties.

As someone who follows finance, I like ZH. There is a ton of noise and little signal, but when they're right, they're right. I remember ZH commenters giving away free bitcoin back in 2013 calling it the next big thing.

> Out of curiosity, is there a precedent for YouTube banning channels based on the channel comments and not the channel video?

Sort of. They've disabled comments on whole swaths of videos, like videos featuring children. I wouldn't be surprised if they've disabled comments for other problematic channels.

I'm not aware of any specific situations where they've banned channels outright as a result of problematic comment activity, but it wouldn't surprise me if it'd happened.

Youtube does also demonitize videos based on comments, rather than just the video's content.

Indeed. Comments can often bring to light aspects of a video which might not be obvious from watching the video without context. One example is videos which cater to obscure fetishes -- a video of a woman slowly blowing up and popping balloons isn't obviously sexual, for instance, but comments could make its intent more obvious.

the way that the video is interpreted says a lot more about the person that wrote the comment than the creator.

No, in this case (inflation) it's an actual fetish and many "non-obvious" fetishes post their stuff on youtube instead of normal porn avenues. These videos are created and distributed with the intent of causing arousal

I got 'into' ZH during the great recession and when things settled down I kind of forgot about it. But I was left with the impression of, as you say, a 'punk'-ish site that generally was more direct and even correct than most of the mainstream media.

I vividly remember being obsessed with the news and reading MSM articles that would basically just quote Merkel or who the fuck else saying <x>, where ZH said <x> is stupid and wrong, and sure enough a few days later even Merkel (or who the fuck else) would backtrack on or directly contradict <x>.

A while ago I checked out ZH again out of curiosity (or maybe some nostalgia because I was once again in 'read all the news' mode), and I would definitely not consider it a good source of news. And thankfully I've found better approaches to get an idea of what's going on.

But your comment reminded me of a time in my life where I started 'properly' getting interested in current affairs and politics and whatnot, and the role ZH played in all that.

No coincidence that both Twitter and Google have targeted ZeroHedge recently. The group-think platforms are making their move in tandem to smash anything they disagree with politically.

Twitter recently reversed their de-platform move against ZeroHedge because they're about to get into deep legal shit for intentionally applying different standards to different users (ZH got nuked off of Twitter for a doxxing event (that wasn't a doxxing at all) that occurred on the ZH website, not on Twitter; but Twitter has ignored some other prominent cases of doxxing that actually happened on Twitter, including an infamous case by Spike Lee in which he publicly posted an incorrect address for George Zimmermann, which could have easily gotten someone killed). The ZeroHedge ban was a prominent and obvious instance of bias on the part of Twitter, so they had to clean it up.

You're kidding yourself if you don't recognize that ZH and The Federalist are both exceptionally irrational groupthink cults.

> ZH and The Federalist are both exceptionally irrational groupthink cults

So is Google.

The federalist isn't, it's articles are closer to national review but maybe more populist. It was a shock to see it was mentioned; it's not something like Unz or anything.

Uh, the NE has done a great job of turning itself into a clown show of late...

Zero hedge for some reason had a crazy downward spiral in their comments. Many years ago I don't remember them being out of the ordinary, but one or two years ago I checked back and they were full of insane alt right conspiracies and super pro trump adoration.

The reason is that they're one of the few sites that doesn't moderate comments into the dust.

Trump is your elected president (assuming yo are in the US), plenty of people voted for him, why would it be unusual that a lot of people are pro Trump? Especially considering the vast majority of the media seems to be against him.

I read ZH pretty regularly. It carries a wide variety of opinions, and they often have the scoop many hours before any MSM.

Yes, the comment section is useless. They don't do any real moderation, and it's filled with, well, a lot of inappropriate material. So, I don't read the comments. (They don't even show by default.)

Is this really a good reason to "cancel" the site, though? Yeah, unmoderated free speech isn't pretty, but how much do you really hate it?

Unmoderated/fully-self-moderated free speech for political content trends towards extreme ends of either stance.

I've seen it repeatedly in reddit, 4chan and others. Reddit attempts to walk the balance of site-moderation vs user-moderated and it's extremely difficult on that knife edge.

The hope with ZH that it would span the political divide and allow proper discourse and exchange of ideas from both/any side of thinking.

But without moderation, it trends towards mud-slinging, vitriol where arguments become so divided that it's no longer discourse.

Given the choice between Reddit moderation and ZH, I'll take the latter. Really, though, I rarely read the comments on either platform anymore.

> But without moderation, it trends towards mud-slinging, vitriol where arguments become so divided that it's no longer discourse.

I think of it as performance art of insane babble, satire, potty-humour. Should "proper discourse and exchange of ideas" be the only thing allowed to exist?

(I have no problem with advertisers pulling away from it, either.)

No site, not even ZH, has a worse comments section than YouTube. Seems to me that it's going to be really hard for Google to escape charges of hypocrisy by banning sites not because of news content but because of unorthodox and offensive comment threads.

The site isn't "cancelled" though. Google has chosen not to do business with another business because advertisers that pay Google don't want their ads to appear on ZeroHedge, whose comments section features language that said advertisers don't want associated with their brand. ZeroHedge still exists, is still listed in Google's search results, and can still make money -- just not on Google's ad network. This is the free market at work.

I'm willing to bet that

businesses that pay Google to advertiser

is not a homogeneous whole.

So it seems plausible that Google could put ZeroHedge in a bucket tagged with, well, whatever seems appropriate, and let advertisers decide. If they wanted to. Which they appear to not.

And here we are.

I don’t buy that. I’m not going to cry over Google not doing business with someone, but let’s call a spade a spade: this was a partisan choice. Google’s entire business schtick is that advertisers can use Google’s ad platform to target who they do and do not want to serve ads to. If advertisers really don’t want their ads to show up next to a site’s content, it won’t. Ironically the only people that would see the ad are the people that actually go to the website, so presumably they want to be on that site, and presumably advertisers would like to be where their audience is, wherever they are, unless they themselves are worried about getting “cancelled”.

EDIT: Forgot the other half of the point.

It doesn’t matter if Google makes partisan choices, it’s a free market, and we’ve got choices in life. It does matter when a company makes partisan choices and tries to pass themselves off as objective. Are you objective or do you have a bias? It’s a simple question: we all have biases, they do affect our choices, so be upfront with them rather than passing yourself off as something you’re not.

I think you forgot a very important element.

Its a free market, they can do what they want. In a normal market

However they enjoy specific liability protections (230),unlike most market participants. So, if they exercise choice, they also forego the liability protection.

They can choose to editorialize, at a cost of losing regulatory priviledges

It feels to me like the word 'partisan' is doing a lot of work in your argument. What if we replaced it with 'ethical'? Google's policy says they will not run ads against certain types of content that they find abhorrent (this is apparently enforced at the site level). Sure, enforcement of those standards is inevitably somewhat subjective, but, so what?

Calling those standards 'biased' or 'partisan' implies that Google's business practices are somehow unfair, or targeted at a particular group. But I don't see the evidence for that here. Just having ethical standards for who you will do business with is not in itself a bad thing!

Partisanship and ethics are not mutually exclusive. Not to drop a bomb on this thread, but post Roe v. Wade there’s been an ethical debate about abortion and a partisan debate about abortion, and if you get two polar opposite groups of people in the same room to discuss it, it will devolve to screaming and bloody murder as both sides claim they are making a moral argument and the other is a partisan hack that cares nothing for the lives of babies|women.

Ethics are often an excuse for partisanship, and claims of partisanship are often an excuse to dismiss the other side’s ethics. It’s entirely possible that I’ve fallen into that trap myself, but I’ve never viewed Google as an apolitical animal. Maybe in their earlier days, but I was a kid in their earliest days. By the time I was politically self-aware, so was Google, and they’ve made plenty of political choices that from a certain perspective, a motivated person could argue they made from an ethical perspective.

The trouble with politics is most people don’t have political beliefs that they think are wrong. They have political beliefs because that’s what they friggin’ believe, and one of the reasons we consider free speech so essential under natural law and protect it from Congress in the 1st Amendment and the States through a process of incorporating the 1st Amendment against them is because it’s not an easy distinction to make. We made that choice back when partisans were calling themselves Congregationalists and Catholics and Anglicans and whatnot instead of Democrats and Republicans because the history of the reformation was one of Protestants and Catholics trying to seize the Armies of State power and wield them against their ecclesiastical enemies, in some cases literally burning them at the stake.

It is true that private corporations don’t have the same obligations as the State to respect free speech. They’re not governed by natural law, nor restricted by the Constitution, they’re actually protected because at the end of the day, a corporation is nothing more than a group of people pooling their assets to advance their own interests. Things like Section 230 are ultimately a liability shield against their users engaging in criminal activity, not criminal speech, but activity using their platforms to do it. The only problem is Google and Twitter and Facebook aren’t any better at making the distinction than you or I or Congress. There’s less at stake if they try, they don’t have the lawful power to stop, detain, arrest, jail, try, imprison, execute and kill that the State and it’s Officers do. But they’re putting themselves in the middle of a fecal hurricane by doing so and they’re not going to come out looking like upstanding moral citizens, they’re going to come out of this looking like unreliable, well, more unreliable business partners that will terminate contracts over partisan disagreements.

Partisanship is fine, and I certainly hope Google thinks it has some ethics, and whoever pulled the trigger on this undoubtedly thought they were doing some good for the world by doing so, just like all the Protestants and Catholics thought they were doing some good for the world by killing each other in bloody conflict after bloody conflict after bloody conflict. They all thought they had morals, and the moral high ground, but they also used politics to achieve their goals.

What isn’t fine, and I would argue ethically isn’t fine, is making partisan and even ethical choices, and being less than upfront about why you did so. You shouldn’t deceive people.

How can't you foresee the argument people (me, in this case) are going to immediately throw back at yours : "so a company can find it unethical to do business with X, Y or Z, right?".

And then you will go to the legality argument: "no , because that would be against the law".

So why not give that argument directly? Because it's less noble.

Yes, of course google is partisan : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za4tsfdpeMw

I bet you don't think Philip Morris is a far-left company, right?

because advertisers that pay Google don't want their ads to appear on ZeroHedge

There’s no evidence that this was driven by advertisers, it was a unilateral decision made by Google, influenced by a taxpayer-funded British pressure group. Does that count as election meddling by a foreign power I wonder?

Google has precedent for demonitizing people on the basis of their advertiser's "partisan" preferences... this one was super unpopular in the LGBT community:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17424472/youtube-lgbt-demo...

On the balance, these decisions don't seem to be driven by radical policies from either side; they seem driven by Google's love of money.

How do you feel about the strong pro-Russia influence on the site?

They were easily a MONTH ahead of everyone else on the covid-19 crisis. The talk about the Fed's USD impact, like no one else today.

If you can sift through the bullshit, there's a LOT of good content - especially in the finance space - that you simply cannot find anywhere else.

I have not seen a lot of content about Russia - and when it's there, it's not flattering - so I'm not sure why you think it has a specific Russia slant.

The thing with ZH is you need a good BS filter.

> The thing with ZH is you need a good BS filter.

Independent thinking and drawing your own conclusions from lecture is too painfull for most people...

As for Russia influence ZH is very much dead set against US troops and weapons close to Russias borders (Baltic States, Central Europe). This is exactly Russian line. But perhaps ZH genuinely wish for world peace...

Isn't ZH generally oriented against foreign meddling by the US?

> The thing with ZH is you need a good BS filter.

Sadly, these days that's as true with NYT, WaPo, etc. One of the reasons that sites like ZH have become more popular is that the "papers of record" have abandoned their historic standards.

I'll second this. Tons of financial info from JPMorgan (e.g. Marko Kolanovic, their top quant), DeutscheBank, UBS, Merrill, etc.

That content is usually not available to people unless you spend tons of money with those firms.

And yes, a BS filter definitely is needed, and I've found reading through a newsreader makes that much, much easier.

I disagree with the punk analogy because Zerohedge always seemed decidedly right wing or libertarian at best. Always heard the Ron Paul types talking about it. It’s basically conspiracy theories for economics and finance.

I tend to regard punks as libertarian. e.g. Ramones.

But they're a mixed bag.

Punk is mostly left-wing with a lot of anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, pro-feminist, anti-racist themes. There are exceptions to the rule (TSOL), but for the most part it was not right wing. They were on the far end of the spectrum to yuppies in the 80s and have only moved further left. Think of Dead Kennedys, Crass, and other classic punk like Bad Brains. There were definitely nazi-punk and other exceptions, but still a minority.

Downvoters are free to explain why I’m wrong instead of downvoting since they are upset with facts.

>anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, pro-feminist, anti-racist themes.

Well, based on wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture) anti-authoritarian is right rest a bit more debatable. Putting punk into box is kind of anti-punk.

I've no idea about punk, but our parent didn't talk about wings but about libertarianism.

I also believe that those themes you listed in your first sentence are there to imply that they are somehow inherently left-wing, which would be a partisan statement.

For example: there is certainly an authoritarian left and an authoritarian right as well as an anti-authoritarian left and an anti-authoritarian right.

But, more generally I think that "left" and "right" do more harm than good for describing political content dimensions.

Historically, punk has definitely been on the left than the right, but I somewhat agree those aren't the best terms (but they are what most use, so I used them). A better way to see the political spectrum is the the Political Circle or Horse-shoe theory. Zerohedge would be in the lunatic fringe area.

I don't read Zerohedge often and never read the comments.

So I did just then, to check. For maximum controversy sake, I chose a Pat Buchanan article and looked at the comments sorted by 'worst' first.

There's nothing there that is too outlandish or objectionable that I could see. The top rated (worst) comment was from a leftish perspective.

Shrug.

After some brief experimentation, sorting by 'best' might be a better strategy to find controversial comments.

I also only checked one article (https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vote-mail), and the 'worst' comment:

> Vote by mail is the best option.

The 'best' comment:

> This November ends in civil war no matter who wins or loses. The other side wont accept the results because of vote by mail. I don't know about you, but I am glad I'm on the side with all the guns, ammo, land, tools, water, food production and tradesmen. They've got big cities and computers. Ha. Enjoy kiddos.

Given that I live in a state with an incredibly successful history of vote by mail, I tend to love that worst comment and hate that 'best' comment.

Indeed! I realised that after posting. So I went back and sorted by 'best' and 'oldest'. But I think the comments server is getting hammered at the moment and did not return.

That 'best' comment is extremely pessimistic, but nothing particularly objectionable.

"Stochastic terrorism": if enough people talk up a civil war long enough, they can make it happen. Or at least get some mass shootings to happen. e.g.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/steven-carrillo...

or https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/09/three-nevada-...

Kind of like how the main stream media talks up war with the middle east.

"We came, we saw, he died."

Rather than a has been demagogue look at the one where they report Rep Illhan Omar father passed away from Covid-19.

There must have been a thread that tipped the scales. Anyone know what it was?

To be fair, I assume that a lot of Google advertisers would not want their ad next to that. So while it smacks of censorship (and it may be) there are also a lot of valid reasons to stop the ads. Google has to sorta police their ad partners' content.

sounds like they should just have another bucket for more controversial properties like porn sites and this

I'm sure Google studied the numbers and not worth the taint. Google also removed a while back ads from domain parking and controversial content always is a checkbox away from being left ad-less.

There's tons of extreme left wing content out there too, Google never seems to care about that.

I think the problem is that the left cancels, the right doesn't. So it's always the left attacking and it's always the right being attacked, but never attacking back. Doesn't seem stable or sustainable: this is how countries end up being taken over by communist revolutions run by extreme minorities.

> So it's always the left attacking and it's always the right being attacked, but never attacking back.

Please tell me this is satire. Because I don't think being calling eachothers bullshit out on the internet is an issue. The problems begin when people take actions on it. You talk about 'attacking' but I can give you 2 examples from 2019 where right-wing extremists literally attacked. Those ideas were perpetuated in right-wing echochambers and eventually led to the deaths of many.

- Christchurch mosque shootings

- El Paso shooting

Both had right-wing extremist motivations, citing garbage such as 'the Great Replacement'.

But yeah, go ahead and crawl into the victim role because we don't want to read racist bullshit.

I'm not talking about incredibly rare events like shootings, which are at any rate a very US centric problem. I'm talking about social dynamics around the world, the sort of more mundane 'attacks' that happen every day and in many societies.

How many conservatives have threatened firms by mobbing their advertisers?

How many people have conservatives got fired for expressing mild left wing views?

How many statues have they torn down?

How many forums have they de-platformed?

How many of them have refused to take part in a debate because another participant disagreed with them?

This sort of thing happens all the time and it's very conspicuously always the same sort of people doing it.

I read ZH regularly for the nuggets of truth found nowhere else. They have changed a lot over the years. And, not for the better.

The comment section used to be an equal opportunity Fight Club with omnidirectional contempt for mainstream orthodoxy regardless of source. The U.S., Chinese, and occasionally the Russian governments met with distrust and ridicule. So balanced was ZH that ZH (and HN) used to be available in China without a VPN. But now both ZH and HN are blocked there.

But, over the past two years or so, ZH content has become much more partisan and white nationalist; and the comment section has morphed from Fight Club into Racist and Anti-Semitic Sewer nonpareil.

The racism free-for-all in the comment section could be laid at the feet of non-moderation if ZH's comments section were indeed a free-fire zone. But ZH manually approves all commenter accounts and it consistently violates its stated policy on racism by refusing to remove blatantly racist comments or commenters.

> Racism, to include any religious affiliation, will not be tolerated in ANY FORM on this site, including the disparagment of people in the comments section.

> To report any form of discrimination, please right click on the comment number, copy the link to the comment, and send the comment link to abuse [at] zerohedge.com.

> Any user found to be discriminating against ANY race, religion, or affiliation, will be banned immediately, and have their comments removed from the system. https://www.zerohedge.com/help/notice-racism

I don't think being allowed in China without a VPN is a sign of being balanced.

It's a possible sign that the Chinese have not determined that the media outlet is being used for (semi-)automated astroturfing propaganda operations such as:

Earnest Voice: > Operation Earnest Voice is an astroturfing campaign by the Federal government of the United States.[1] The aim of the initiative is to use sockpuppets to spread pro-American propaganda on social networking services based outside of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice

and

JTRIG: > The scope of the JTRIG's mission includes using "dirty tricks" to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt" enemies by "discrediting" them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

I look for balance in my news sources and since many powerful governments employ online propaganda ops, I look for signals of relative neutrality or non-bias. ZeroHedge used to have those in abundance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propa...

ZH follows the narrative of RT and Sputnik so close, it’s scary.

Exactly. It's so obvious.

“Anonymous” journalism is a great way to feed disinformation into the West, right and left fringes.

See also, QAnon, Steve Bannon, 4chan, etc.

I run a diverse set of acquaintances. Whenever my far-left and far-right friends suddenly share their (identical) opinions I take that as a sign of something.

In this case I wonder who follows who. I remember, when I still read ZH, they often broke news I only found on other outlets days later.

Can't find it now, but there was an article (the guardian I think? follow the money) that stated that the owner of zerohedge was getting divorced and that was causing his financial details to become public. The journalist then started to receive threatening calls from the owner's father (from an eastern European country.. Bulgaria? Can't remember). But basically the details becoming public, or her testimony basically revealed that the change in tack by ZH was due to the fact that it paid better than simple financial blogging, now that the Financial crisis was over. So ZH now actively courted right wingers and possibly Russian financiers.

Really need to find that article again, it was a real eye-opener to the motives of people financing these sites.

I used to read ZH a bit during the FC, but recoiled in horror the last time I was there.

https://newrepublic.com/article/156788/zero-hedge-russian-tr...

Do I understand correctly? So Google is demonetising a site because it considers it responsible for what the users post on its forums? Isn't that contrary to Google's (and all internet giant) own policy of not being responsible for what users post on through their platforms?

No, because one is about private accountability and the other is about legal accountability. The bar to legal accountability was expressly adopted to enable private accountability measures without incurring legal consequences, so there is absolutely no inconsistency in applying private accountability measures while supporting the existing exemption from legal accountability.

It has been years since the media ecosystem split into multiple mainstreams. There is no one canonical Mainstream anymore. Several enterprising individuals have recognized this fact and established thriving careers catering to various viewpoints across every ideological spectrum you can think of. So it is interesting to see the staying power of the narrative of the canonical Mainstream vs the underdog whose voice can so easily be suppressed.

Orwell was afraid of censorship by the government. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t envision that we’ll voluntarily out-source censorship to the private corporation. Reality stranger than fiction.

> Orwell was afraid of censorship by the government. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t envision that we’ll voluntarily out-source censorship to the private corporation.

Private publishers pushing an agenda in what they choose to relay via their resources wasn't a new concept in Orwell’s time or one be was unfamiliar with, nor was audience pressure on publishers as to how they would exercise that power. It would have surprised Orwell not at all. Which can be easily seen, because he wrote an essay in which he addressed private censorship as a then-current issue, noting, in part:

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

The timing of this is a day after Twitter reinstated ZH, admitting they had made an error banning them.

Hard not to read this as a reaction to that.

ZeroHedge isn't the best news source if you're looking for high quality, well sourced reporting, but if you're looking for hot takes on breaking news, ZeroHedge is a great site. As a trader, I use it quite a bit primarily because they're not afraid to get things wrong and tend to have different (and even controversial) takes on current events.

The stance Twitter, and now Google have taken against ZeroHedge I suspect will come to define how tech companies will treat the media (and the public) in the years to come. It's become very easy for companies to convince the public that they're taking these actions for the public's own good, especially when the main stream media are more than willing to paint these stories in a positive light to help bury any competition.

Who knows, perhaps these trillion dollar companies will curate the news in our interest. Perhaps it's true that we can't be trusted to decide fact from fiction. Perhaps we need Twitter to restrict tweets and tell us when the president of the US says something they don't agree with. More and more this seems to be the narrative I'm hearing.

A decade ago I used to have so much hope that internet would be liberating for humanity. That seems laughably naive today.

> Perhaps it's true that we can't be trusted to decide fact from fiction.

A lot of us have seen friends and family lose their minds to the conspiratorial "news" like Zero hedge, Fox, etc. I too thought the internet, and all of humanity's knowledge at your fingertips, would be liberating. Instead it has enabled the ignorant to believe their conspiracies over expert opinions. I for one welcome these sort of moves. Zero Hedge has every right to spread their nonsense and Google/Twitter have every right to refuse to support it.

Which experts? Galileo was a heretic at one time. So slippery I'm finding it hard to tap this out.

I’m glad that you acknowledge that the move is obviously politically motivated. I don’t think that dissenting voices should be silenced. The free marketplace of ideas used to be an American ideal. Now it’s a fireable offense, or in the case of businesses, a capital one.

Google had a monopoly on internet advertising. They should have no such right to decide who uses their Ad platform based on political affiliation or leanings.

There’s plenty enough blame to spread around both left and right for fake news. See just most recently Fox doctoring photos of CHAZ versus many MSM sites falsely misrepresenting a conciliatory Trump quote on Floyd and the recent protests.

If ZH is committing libel they should be sued for it and held liable. Taking away their basically sole source of income and blaming it on their comment section is flimsy doublespeak in my opinion. There is a similar effort within Google to try to demonetize Breitbart and other right-wing sites.

A higher claim to the truth is no justification at all for silencing dissent. IMO this is just another step in a growing and dangerous trend of politicized de-platforming which I find extremely worrisome.

Racism is antisocial behavior. Racism is not dissent.

Who said anything about racism? But even still, we see cases [1] where questioning any aspect of the BLM movement is falsely equated with racism.

[1] - https://www.vnews.com/Windsor-High-School-Story-34741525

>The free marketplace of ideas used to be an American ideal.

At what point in American history could you expect to use someone else's platform, regardless of your content, in the name of free speech?

That's right, never.

Freedom of speech is about government censorship and nothing else.

Telephone lines.

Telephone line owners were forced into being a public utility in the US.

If a train company back in 1850 had a near monopoly in the whole country or a whole state and decided who could or not use their "platform" based on what they say, would it be alright? They sale ads. If no advertiser wants to put an ad on a website, fine. But they can't decide to not offer their service.

> A lot of us have seen friends and family lose their minds to the conspiratorial "news" like Zero hedge, Fox, etc.

And how many liberals do you know lost their minds when Trump won the election despite the media assuring them Hillary had the lead, or were convinced that impeachment would finally get him out because the media covered so much "highly suspicious" activity? These were both equally "conspiratorial" stories pushed by the media,just from the other side. Delusion is just going around.

> I for one welcome these sort of moves

Sure, everyone welcomes oppression that works in their favour. Doesn't make it any less short sighted.

As someone viewing this sociological catastrophe from afar (Australia) and who is nominally "left" on most social issues, it's clear to me that the past three years represents the utter failure of the American Left to understand their own country. To use a computing analogy: while the left is buggy and flawed, the right are now hackers cynically exploiting those bugs rather than filing bug reports.

Society is complex and requires everyone to act with some goodwill in order for us to reason our way through challenges. But while both sides used to act like white-hat hackers ethically exposing flaws in their competitor's algorithms, the pattern is now much darker. The left is seeing flaws where they don't exist in the right, while the right is straight up exploiting the left's flaws without concern for overall system security.

The irony, of course, that in pre-Obama times situation was somewhat reverse. Notice that Trump is outsider. Establishment got too complacent and detached (first right, then left, which is mostly indistinguishable from centrist traditional right anyway) , and current right essentially is “new” right that uprooted the traditional one.

What flaws of the left are being exploited here? I genuinely don't see that (and I'm also viewing this catastrophe from afar).

What I've seen is that since 2016 the left has gone into some sort of meltdown state, over Trump and Brexit primarily but now also Coronavirus. With a large helping of obsession with race and gender too.

The right seems mostly weak and timid, constantly being deplatformed, cancelled, threatened and pushed out of institutions all over the place. If there's any exploitation of flaws going on it can't be very effective.

The right currently controls all three branches of governmnent in he US. (Or well maybe not Congress, but they have more control than the democrats).

The right controls the major media source for most Americans (Fox news) and uses it to establish a false narrative that they're being censored when, by many accounts, the us right has shifted more and more in the direction of authoritarianism.

Can you give specific examples of the ways that the American left is succeeding and the right is failing at, like, their actual policy/political goals?

> Coronavirus

Compare the US covid deaths per capita is in the top 10, and pretty much all of the countries doing worse than us are in a clear downswing in cases so the number of fatalities won't increase much. The US's new case rate is flat, so deaths will continue at the same rate of 750-1000 per day for the near future. And that's despite some states (Georgia and Florida for example) appearing to lie about their covid deaths, instead misattribting them as pneumonia deaths. These states, suspiciously, governed by Republicans who downplayed coronavirus and want to reopen quickly.

Much of this was avoidable.

And that's despite some states (Georgia and Florida for example) appearing to lie about their covid deaths, instead misattribting them as pneumonia deaths

It's really the other way around - unusually for this type of virus governments have mandated drastic over-reporting of COVID. All kinds of deaths that have nothing to do with the virus have been reported as "died of COVID" for dubious reasons, which is how the New York Times managed to fill its front page with the names of 1000 COVID "victims", the 5th of which turned out to have been murdered.

Some states describing a death as pneumonia is probably just normal medical practice re-asserting itself. Unless you're arguing that no death should ever be recorded as pneumonia (as that's an outcome of a problem, not the underlying root cause itself).

It's really not.

> All kinds of deaths that have nothing to do with the virus have been reported as "died of COVID" for dubious reasons, which is how the New York Times managed to fill its front page with the names of 1000 COVID "victims", the 5th of which turned out to have been murdered.

This is a big right wing talking point, but isn't actually backed up by evidence. On the other hand, Georgia and Florida so far this year have reported Pneumonia deaths at something like 4x the rate of any prior year. This increase happened oddly and suddenly in early to mid April.

There's a large amount of evidence that COVID deaths tolls are hugely inflated. Just consider the problematic of/with confusion. The average age of the deceased in most countries is over 80 i.e. greater than the average life expectancy.

About 1/3rd of the excess deaths in the UK don't mention COVID anywhere on the death certificate at all. Of those that do, many of them have been reported as "caused by COVID" although when examined more closely the death certificate actually said something like "died of X, tested positive for COVID" or even "died of X, suspected COVID" where X is unrelated to the virus. This is possible due to significantly relaxed reporting standards, especially in care homes.

And that's before you get into the cases just openly misattributed by the press.

Georgia and Florida so far this year have reported Pneumonia deaths at something like 4x the rate of any prior year

Ironically enough that's a left-wing talking point, but it's not actually backed up by evidence. In fact it's fake news.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new...

"A theory that spread on Twitter and Reddit this week insinuating Florida health officials have masked the toll of the coronavirus by labeling thousands of deaths as caused by pneumonia is not supported by facts, said experts who study morbidity statistics.

Nevertheless, the idea has spread rapidly, appearing to originate with a couple of widely shared and poorly sourced screenshots. It was picked up and swallowed along partisan divisions"

"In an analysis he ran for the Times using publicly available data, Andrew Noymer, a professor who studies population health and disease prevention at the University of California Irvine, did not find major discrepancies between pneumonia and influenza deaths in early 2020 compared to recent years. He found about 1,485 such deaths in 2020, which was within a few hundred of the same period in any year since 2015."

The of/with confusion is highlighted in this story as a key problem:

"People, [Howard, the University of Texas at San Antonio professor] said, frequently die from multiple causes. It’s hard to attribute a death to just a single reason. Some Floridians might be avoiding needed medical attention out of fear, he said, and then they could die of an untreated illness or condition like heart disease."

> There's a large amount of evidence that COVID deaths tolls are hugely inflated. Just consider the problematic of/with confusion.

This is not evidence. This is a conjecture. It isn't borne out by evidence.

> https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new....

From the same article:

> That doesn’t the state’s coronavirus death toll is complete. Working with a University of South Florida researcher, the Times last week published a more complicated picture when it comes to excess deaths. That work found the pandemic might have already led to a toll between 17 percent and 58 percent higher than what had been reported.

Which is this article: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/20/coronavirus-...

> They found that during the 5-week period ending April 25, there had been hundreds of unexpected deaths from illness and disease across Florida, more than can be explained by the coronavirus death count.

Indeed these kinds of analysis have been done in multiple nations (http://archive.md/EBmj5), and show that, without looking at cause at all, death rates are above official figures.

Please explain how covid death tolls are hugely inflated if an analysis that entirely ignores cause of death, and only focuses on population level statistics, shows that there's been an unexplained increase in death rate beyond what has been attributed to COVID. Is there some other global pandemic that would be inflating death rates?

To phrase this another way, population level mortality in 2020 is greater than average population level mortality over the past few years + deaths attributed to COVID-19. This gap appeared only after the pandemic began. If COVID-19 were being overreported, we'd expect the opposite effect. The evidence points to it being underreported.

> Just consider the problematic of/with confusion.

Your weekly reminder that while the life expectancy at birth is 78 years, the life expectancy of an 80 year old person is usually still 5-10 years. Statistics can be weird like that.

Yes, I know that article makes multiple claims about excess deaths. I cited it to show you that the claim about Florida pneumonia deaths isn't real, it's just a conspiracy theory. I'm not claiming everything published by the Tampa Bay Times is correct. I think that point landed, as you didn't mention it again.

Now the other claim made in that article, the one you're now citing, it isn't logically valid. It makes the following inference:

1. If more people die on average during the past weeks, the cause of death must be CV.

2. Therefore if the death count of CV doesn't match excess deaths, there's been undercounting.

It's invalid because it assumes lockdowns have no effect on mortality. This is a very strange assumption to make, but it must be widespread because I've seen people here on HN argue that "the economy" is some optional thing that shouldn't be weighed up against people's lives, for example.

In practice the economy is what keeps us alive. It's not just restaurants and movies. Damaging it hurts or kills people. We'd absolutely expect there to be excess deaths from a lockdown both during and after it ends, and there's plenty of evidence of that happening.

During a lockdown access to healthcare services become restricted or people became afraid to go to the hospitals, or even afraid to go outside. In the UK cardiac admissions to the emergency rooms halved overnight when the government started telling people to avoid hospitals and cancelled all "optional" operations (not really optional of course, just delayable with some risk). Some people pulled their own teeth out because emergency dentistry was closed.

And in fairness to the article, it does say that - in the very next sentence after the part you quote:

> Health experts say that likely includes some people who died of coronavirus but were never diagnosed as well as others who might have lived had the pandemic not kept them from getting care.

So basically they don't know.

> Please explain how covid death tolls are hugely inflated if an analysis that entirely ignores cause of death, and only focuses on population level statistics, shows that there's been an unexplained increase in death rate beyond what has been attributed to COVID

These are two related but different arguments.

COVID is a real virus that has increased the excess death rate, absolutely, although not really more than a bad flu season. "COVID deaths" are a count of all attributed deaths, not just the excess over the average.

Imagine if every single death was reported as a COVID death. Obviously everyone would know that isn't true because deaths of other causes don't stop because there's a virus around.

Now imagine that 80% of all deaths suddenly become reported as "died of COVID" whilst excess deaths went up by 10%. People would still call shenanigans because it'd be obvious that this couldn't be the case.

But this can be the case if the report is actually "died WITH COVID". Then suddenly it's possible for 80% of people to die with it, and also for excess deaths to only go up by 10%. In practice all numbers reported as "died of" are in reality "died with" so this is a real issue.

Consider a theoretical virus called disease X. It's highly infectious and infects 50% of all people, but actually causes no symptoms and kills nobody at all. Its mortality rate is zero. Imagine that a few powerful people didn't know that and believed otherwise, and mandated that all deaths where the virus was detected via some clever test be reported to them centrally, and those reports went out as "died of disease X". In such a situation the virus would act as effectively a random labelling function. People would just get this label in their bloodstream but it wouldn't actually affect them. Then it would be true that the death toll of disease X was hugely over-inflated, as it'd be zero in reality but via a chain of reporting errors would be reported as 50% of all deaths simply because it was present at the time of death.

Finally, reconsider the above argument, but where 50% is adjusted to be lower than the excess death rate. The argument doesn't actually change at all: it's invariant to how many people get labelled. Any reports of death of disease X are an over-inflation, even if those numbers are smaller than the excess death count.

Now, COVID isn't disease X. It does cause symptoms occasionally, in very rare cases it can cause death, usually people with very weak immune systems. But there's a whole lot of very compelling data showing it's pretty close to disease X. It labels a lot of people as "infected with COVID" even though it's not really affecting them much or at all. In that case, given the way reporting standards have been implemented, a whole lot of people will be reported as COVID deaths when in reality they died of something else. And importantly that statement can still be true even if the total number of "died of/with COVID" reports is lower than the excess death rate, if there are other factors also killing people, like lack of access to health care and increased suicides.

To really figure out what happened with COVID will take a long time. It'll become clearer in retrospect, indeed it's already a lot clearer than when this all began.

> Your weekly reminder that while the life expectancy at birth is 78 years, the life expectancy of an 80 year old person is usually still 5-10 years. Statistics can be weird like that.

Interesting. Good point. I don't think it changes the argument above though.

The increase in death rate above baseline predates lockdowns. But let's ignore that for a second.

Please explain why the consipracy to overcount covid deaths is happening in every us state, even ones with a vested interest in reopening, the UK, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden (whose overcounting has now internationally embarrassed them), Brazil (whose leadership claimed the virus want real), and various other nations. What force is causing them all to collude, despite the negative economic impact of everything they're doing?

Question two, of course is: what do you think the mortality rate of the virus is? Experts at this point pin it at somewhere around 1%, +/- like .3-.5% at the population level. This is based on a combination of factors including population level serological studies that overcount the percent of the population infected. In other words, they're more likely to be underestimating, rather than overestimating, the fatality rate at this point.

How are those methodologies flawed such that they too are actually overestimating covid deaths?

Are you saying all the people who die if pneumonia like symptoms and who tested positive for covid died from... Other causes? That 80% of those people died of a different kind of contagious viral pneumonia? (In which case we should be worried about that!)

Yes, lockdown measures have negative impact on healthcare access, and yes that may increase death rates slightly. But to believe that it dominates the increases we've seen requires a truly incredible set of assumptions that aren't borne out by reality.

There's no conspiracy, just stupidity on a massive scale.

Governments have managed to pressure each other into needing detailed case counts which means mass testing. This is hardly done before. It's seen as obvious and required by any civilised country (although it's not).

If you do widespread testing for a virus that isn't really very deadly, you'll immediately get a hugely ambiguous dataset in which people are labelled as having been infected at the moment of death, but in which it's totally unclear if the virus really caused the death or not. In many cases you can't even really say why someone died without an autopsy which isn't gonna happen for so many basically routine deaths.

It's an inevitable consequence of demanding data, but having political, scientific and media leadership that are unable or unwilling to interpret it honestly, lest they be attacked for downplaying the risk and potentially not saving a life, somewhere, somehow.

what do you think the mortality rate of the virus is? Experts at this point pin it at somewhere ....

I don't know. Nobody does, except it's obviously very low, as the numbers even of "infected at time of death" are already quite low, and if you select only cases with no co-morbidities it's really incredibly low.

Health "experts" have the same problem all experts have: they can offer any answer at all and not be held to account, except if they give the most honest answer: we don't know. That answer is one they cannot offer without undermining the justification for their own job and social status. It's why non-experts are so often more correct than "experts" - they can correctly weigh up uncertainty without risking their livelihoods.

This doesn't respond to either of the points I made: that raw deaths have increased in non us nations, and did so even prior to lockdowns being implemented.

> Those numbers agree with expert opinions on the mortality rate. In many cases you can't even really say why someone died without an autopsy which isn't gonna happen for so many basically routine deaths.

Death due to sudden onset pneumonia isn't super common. And there aren't that many causes. If you die in a hospital due to pneumonia having tested positive for covid, yes it's actually very likely that covid is that killed you. You can disagree with that all you want but it's ultimately the way the world works. And it's kind of scary and not fun, but it's a truth we should death with, not avoid.

> any answer at all and not be held to account, except if they give the most honest answer: we don't know.

Scientists are actually exceedingly good at giving this answer. It's why there number I gave had a confidence interval. Experts are so good at saying "we don't know" that they can quantify it. And they do. And even to the extent that the expert opinion is 2 sigma off, you're still completely wrong.

Let me ask you this: given all the information you have, how many people do you believe have died of covid in the us? How many have been infected?

> All kinds of deaths that have nothing to do with the virus have been reported as "died of COVID" for dubious reasons

This is overstated. SARS-COV2 causes clotting which can lead to cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolism, stroke, and a host of other issues. The medical community tracks most of these as deaths caused by potential complications from the infection because we know it happens, so it's a reasonable precaution.

No doubt the reporting around these numbers is overblown, because, surprise, science reporting in the midst of a panic is even more abysmal than usual.

I'd be very skeptical about all of that. Pathologists aren't digging in to discover why people died and the amount of medical misinformation about what this virus does or does not do is crazy.

However we can safely say the virus doesn't cause death by gunshot wound, leukaemia, suicide or many of the other deaths that were initially reported as "caused by COVID" and later turned out ... not to be.

> What flaws of the left are being exploited here?

It's impossible to elucidate in a way that wouldn't cause a left or right partisan to howl with objections, but the big one is making perfect the enemy of good. This often comes in the form of extreme purity tests and an inability to accept compromise.

The left has had some past success using shaming as a weapon and now it's being used as a one-size-fits-all bludgeon to solve all of society's failings (e.g. gay rights, climate change). Trumpism is the right's immune system response to this: hence why they chose a leader whose superpower is an inability to feel shame. (Meanwhile the left spent the past three years trying to beat up Trump using shame and remain bewildered as to why it didn't work.)

Another one is a massive blind spot around the idea of having the same ethics but different ethical priorities. That would take a whole book chapter to explain so I'm not even going to get into it here. But at the extreme it culminates in the left unable to comprehend the mindset of a sincere Trump supporter as anything other than a burn-the-house-down anarchist.

> but now also Coronavirus.

I'm sorry, but you completely lost me there. I'm in Australia where we have similar cultural norms around human contact, similar levels of population density and a distracted and not overly competent right-wing national government. Yet we got the Coronavirus under control very quickly. We're just a few steps behind New Zealand, the oft-cited COVID-19 success story.

Most of the USA's astonishing failure was self-inflicted, predominantly due to a lack of prompt national leadership over containment strategy. There's no two ways about it, the USA fu_________________ed this one up so hard. The incompetence is staggering.

This is the chapter of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" where the wolf actually came. This is the chapter where Trump wasn't merely pissing off the left, he actually screwed up because he was too busy pissing off the left.

Thanks for the answer. I don't fully follow the first part though. Perfect being the enemy of the good, extreme purity tests, inability to compromise etc, I agree these are all common characteristics of the left. But how are these being exploited by the right? It's not like in the USA the Democrats make a proposal and then Trump comes back with, "but you didn't go far enough! that's a compromise, you shouldn't propose anything until it's perfect". It's not like the purity tests are being instigated by Trump. They're all self inflicted.

I agree that Trump's super-power is inability to feel 'shame', at least not shame about the things his opponents want him to be ashamed of.

Australia and New Zealand are not necessarily CV success stories. NZ seems to have locked down so hard and early that now it can't re-open: witness the panic over the two arrivals who were infected but not stopped. Unless they intend to stay in quarantine forever they will eventually go through the same thing as the rest of the world - really they should have been doing it now, when it's summer (a far more likely explanation for why down under isn't really badly hit given the well known effects of sunlight and vitamin D on the virus).

In my view the only astonishing failure around coronavirus was the fact that society reacted at all. Deaths-wise it appears very similar to a regular flu season compressed in time somewhat, and with some more deaths added on top caused by the lockdown. Trump's response was essentially to go for federalisation and let the states do their own thing, this has worked out quite well in the sense that it makes clear the wide disparities in local leadership (and it's not like the USA could isolate itself forever either).

> Australia and New Zealand are not necessarily CV success stories.

That's an utterly wacky assertion. In what possible metric are they not a success? New Zealand has beaten the virus and is now completely reopened domestically. Australia has mostly beaten the virus and is mostly back to normal for most people. If NZ and Australia aren't success stories, I'm curious, what would a success story look like?

> NZ seems to have locked down so hard and early that now it can't re-open

That's just factually false. NZ is completely open in absolutely every respect other than international travel. Australia is mostly open as well, other than for long distance travel. Are you saying that NZ and Australia aren't success stories because they're still closed to international travel?

Perhaps your argument is that we've been TOO successful relative to the rest of the world? Perhaps we should have let the disease run rampant bit longer.

Yes, by "open" I obviously mean "people can enter and exit it". A country with indefinitely closed borders is not "open", it's North Korea.

Perhaps your argument is that we've been TOO successful relative to the rest of the world? Perhaps we should have let the disease run rampant bit longer.

There's no success in merely delaying the inevitable. It's an infectious disease, it can't be kept out forever. The NZ strategy is effectively to seal itself off from the world and hope some cure or vaccine is developed before it re-opens, which is a terrible decision given that these sorts of viruses often never have vaccines.

Until the NZ population gets over its fear, there will continue to be events like this one:

https://globalnews.ca/news/7079388/new-zealand-third-new-cas...

NZ will eventually re-open and let the disease go, because it's not actually any worse than many other viruses. Not because it's some sort of genius success story.

> by "open" I obviously mean "people can enter and exit it".

Most countries have their borders partially or fully closed to international travel. The only difference between New Zealand and most other countries is that New Zealand isn't also dealing with a rampant pandemic.

> A country with indefinitely closed borders is not "open", it's North Korea.

Comparing New Zealand to North Korea is absurd and demonstrates that you're not being serious. Something like 90—95% of all people on this planet will never travel across a passport control border during their entire lifetime. A short term, medically rational restriction on international travel only restricts the "freedom" of the most affluent few percent.

> Until the NZ population gets over its fear

What fear? I'm starting to wonder if you think that the only thing worth doing in New Zealand involves international travel. I suppose we're all in a big North Korea called Earth because we can't hop onto a rocket into outer space.

Borders are opening up again. I crossed two borders in Europe yesterday. No disasters yet.

A short term, medically rational restriction on international travel only restricts the "freedom" of the most affluent few percent.

A few percent? Tell that to the budget airlines.

It's not even medically rational. Before COVID the WHO said border closures were "not recommended under any circumstances":

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...

(see table 1)

The medical establishment just makes this stuff up as they go along. Best to avoid arguments based on what they think is rational.

> utter failure of the American Left to understand their own country

Hillary got the majority of the vote, with a considerable margin no less. BLM protests have shifted public opinion tremendously in a progressive direction and has brought systemic police abuse to the attention of people who would never encounter it personally. Public opinion on LGBTQ+ rights has also moved in the progressive direction. Young people are politically engaged and want to see real, fundamental change. This didn't just happen, this was the result of tireless activism.

It's not as hopeless as you make it out to be. Unless the "utter failure of the American Left" is code for the left not being sufficiently eager to pander to people who fundamentally don't agree with them. But that's a deliberate strategy, not a failure to understand the country.

I don't agree with your characterization that both sides used to act like white-hat hackers. American politics has been nasty for a long time. I recommend watching The Lee Atwater Story to see what I mean.

I'll reiterate that I'm left on all these issues.

You're just wrong. The left has completely failed to shift public opinion on these matters. It's more of the same ineffective strategy of shaming. And before you cite some poll, realise that shaming IS effective at changing what people tell pollsters. Some social conservatives will publicly claim to support the current progressive issue du jour because they fear the shame of being seen as "hating black people" or "hating gay people".

It's not about "pandering to people who fundamentally don't agree" it's about recognising that people can't suddenly become comfortable with gay people overnight, or as a result of shaming them for their views. What works is iterative consciousness-raising. A good example of this in mainstream left-leaning media was Amber Ruffin's police encounter anecdotes at the top of Late Night with Seth Meyers. That was powerful because it told a human story.

People aren't asked to become comfortable with gay people overnight. The lgbtq movement has been fighting for this for over 50 years.

If evidence (polls and such) can't convince you that popular support for lgbtq people and solidarity against racism is going in the right direction there is no point in having a further discussion about this.

Polls are only evidence of the poll's results. It cannot read anyone's minds, nor are they guaranteed to reveal true intentions—especially when the individual being polled is being asked questions by a human.

The gay and lesbian movement has been fighting for over 50 years and made slow but steady progress as the virtuous circle of increasing community acceptance which means more gay/lesbian people revealed to their own family, which increases community acceptance, which means more gay/lesbian people revealed to their own family, which increases community acceptance.

Other groups in the rainbow have not been quite so patient. Look at what happened to J. K. Rowling recently as an example. Regardless what you think of what she said, the transgender community as a whole isn't improved by making enemies of as many people as possible. We need to show people in the rainbow our love and compassion, not find as many people as possible for them to fear or hate.

Nothing happened to J.K. Rowling. She's still an immensely popular billionaire, despite her continued bigotry towards trans people.

The trans acceptance movement started decades ago. Your suggestion that trans people need to be more patient is gross and insulting.

It's like you're not even bothering to read what I wrote. You picked some prefabricated framing through which you've interpreted my comments and then proceeded to criticise things I didn't say.

I sincerely weep for the transgender community that they have people like you purporting to defend them.

You're not weeping, and nobody is asking for your tears.

Your contention is that activism for lgbtq rights and BLM is counterproductive, because it's too hostile. The facts say it is working: https://twitter.com/sangerkatz/status/1270703905144537092

So now you claim to know my mind. You must be very impressed with yourself.

As to your second paragraph, I didn't say that. I would never say that activism is counter-productive. And I never said that activism wasn't working. Sigh, you're doing it again: you're not bothering to read what I wrote. You picked some prefabricated framing through which you've interpreted my comments and then proceeded to criticise things I didn't say.

Conversing with people that reinterpret everything you say is unproductive and gets boring quickly. I encourage you to learn from your remarkable failures in conversation here, but you'll have to do so on your own as I'm not going to reply further. (Though I might check in one more time to see how much effort you put into baiting for a response now I've said I'm not going to. The more baited it is, the more I'm going to silently laugh at you.)

"BLM protests have shifted public opinion tremendously in a progressive direction"

Are you sure about that? Sure the left are screaming louder than ever, but I think a lot of us saw the coronavirus lock-down been broken irresponsibly after keeping ourselves confined for two or three months for the good of everyone. Personally I am in Europe and can't see what the hell they are complaining about as the UK doesn't have anything remotely similar happening in their policing. I think it may have had the opposite effect of what you think it has.

Zero Hedge was easily a MONTH ahead of the mainstream on the covid-19 crisis.

...and they even today are ahead of the game on the looming USD crisis.

...but you need a good BS filter because there's a lot of nonsense, lies, and speculation on it.

So maybe it needs an opt-in warning window on the front.

...and the comments are worthless - no one reads them.

>A lot of us have seen friends and family lose their minds to the conspiratorial "news" like Zero hedge, Fox, etc.

Let's not let the left off the hook either. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing and I see it drive people insane. It is STRANGE. Huge swaths of people and journalists simply cannot be objective about anything Trump does.

>Zero Hedge has every right to spread their nonsense and Google/Twitter have every right to refuse to support it.

What about hosting companies, CAs, domain registrars? Should Zero Hedge (which is terrible and no different from 'sputnik' and 'info wars') have the ability to even have a web presence with a .com address and TLS? How about bank accounts and utilities?

Any cultural, regulatory, technical and legal infrastructure you put in place to purge the ZeroHedges from the web, will be used against something you care about, or you personally.

How does a news source that gets things wrong help you as a trader?

Because he's not trying to learn what reality is, he's trying to see what people THINK reality is. Misconceptions can move markets just as easily as plain facts.

If it's right the majority of the time, the gains might average out the losses.

As he mentioned and in my experience they are good at breaking news stories. It will help you decide on your next move or figure out why market moves when other news network have not covered it yet. Being wrong or right is not relevant, there are lots of other news sources.

There is a really obvious telegraphing of what is to come: outsourcing censorship to protected classes. It doesn't really matter if it is for political reasons or commercial (advertiser friendly padded cells), groups like the SPLC and ADL are eagerly assuming that role - allowing companies to displace blame onto effectively unimpeachable groups (Don't agree with us that milk is a hate symbol? Are you a nazi?!).

Whoever controls Google search, Facebook and Twitter feeds controls the election. Politicians already realized that, and Facebook got the taste of what is coming. Once there is more unity in the office, congress and senate, they will return to dismembering FB, Google, Twitter and friends.

I worked at Google at the time of election. Google essentially manipulated search results by showing instant answer cards about Hilary’s campaign and not showing them about Trump’s. VP of my division expressed support for Hilary in division-wide email. They say Zuckerberg has political ambitions. Things like this, apart from being unethical, will not be tolerated in Washington for obvious reasons.

If your thesis is that Google might control the election, and your proof is that they put their thumb on the scale for Hillary in 2016... well, let's just say I don't find that a particularly compelling argument.

It’s one thing to have power and another one is to exercise it. Back then Google actually claimed to “provide equal access”, but instant answers is just visible and minor example where they slipped. But they will be dismembered by politicians not because they ever manipulated results, but because they can.

BTW, notice downvotes coming in. Why parent comment is being downvoted? Does it present incorrect facts? Does it advance implausible theory not worthy of discussion?

After reading this post I've noticed that I've skipped parent comment because of its color. Time to add some custom CSS to HN.

Since you say you worked at Google, are you willing to put your money where your mouth is and prove that they manipulated search results to benefit one campaign over another? That could run afoul of election laws, so I hope you realize you have a legal duty to report that thing. Publicly.

I'm expecting proof.

Well, you need to acquire video of TGIF meeting from 2016 dedicated to search support for election. In question and answer section one of employees asks why for many questions instant answer card is shown for Hilary and for same question not shown for Trump.

As for division-wide email from Senior VP declaring preference for specific election outcome (you don’t need to go to Standford to guess which one), I actually tried to look it up some time ago, but it was wiped-out since Google smartly deletes all internal emails older than 6 months specifically to avoid this kind of embarrassment.

I'm asking you, directly, for evidence. Since you claimed to have worked at Google during this time, you directly made the claim that implies you saw this occur with your own eyes.

I worked there when this happened and this is what they said: Google went to both Hillary and Trump campaigns and asked both of them for cards to display when searching for them. Hillary's campaign gave them cards, Trumps campaign didn't respond. Therefore there was no discrimination.

So you are saying that search results were manipulated (cards were added) inequitably (added for one campaign and not other). Notice that is doesn’t matter why it happened. End result is the same: campaigns were inequitably represented in search results.

Yes, and I described to you what and when.

>ZeroHedge isn't the best news source if you're looking for high quality

They definitely aren't the best new source. They are part of the sputnik and info wars crowd.

>A decade ago I used to have so much hope that internet would be liberating for humanity. That seems laughably naive today.

And it was when it was pushed by idealistic libertarian-types (not just on the capitalist side, but also on the socialist side - like RMS). Then it was gamed when it hit mainstream. Oh well.

I love Zerohedge, but let me explain why before you condemn me.

What I like about Zerohedge is that I actually hear about things before the major media covers it. If I go to CNN, Foxnews or other networks, they all cover the exact same thing. And they are also slow. It's not unusual for Zerohedge to cover something half a day before the big boys.

Now, when I read Zerohedge, I put on my filters. They love to interpret news in the worst possible and highly-conspiratorial light. Gold price drops? Must be an international cabal led by Elon Musk or some other nonsense.

Yup. The first story they had on Covid-19 was January 2, and it was followed by a series of alarmist headlines with great photos and videos every week. That said, it was real. It took a while before it was headline news elsewhere.

It’s easy to be right about a pandemic when you’re alarmist about everything

A broken clock is right twice a day.

See: TMZ and Michael Jackson

My favorite saying about zerohedge: “They’ve predicted 8 of the last 3 downturns.”

Agreed. I'm astounded by all the comments in this thread that are like "ZH is usually wrong and often crazy, but the few times they're right, they're really right."

Reminds me of the joke, "60% of the time, it works every time."

Or the saying, "a stopped watch is still right twice a day."

You certainly got a point there. Nonetheless when there were several, quite daily articles about the wuhan situation (with pro-CPC sources like Global Times and anti-CPC like Epoch Times) it got my attention. Weighing the different facts + rumours and taking time to reflect i decided to buy PPE/etc. for me/family/relatives/friends end of january. Helped a lot to keep us safe. so thank you ZH! you may be the dirty kid on the playground, but you are way more fun and helpful than <insert company you don't like>

That's exactly the point. If you have a good BS filter, you can filter out the Alarmist nonsense from things that might actually have merit.

...and that's exactly why I go to ZH daily.

CBC, Jan 1:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/china-pneumonia-outbreak-1.54...

CBS, Jan 2:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-sarshttps://www.bbc.com/n...

Forbes, Jan 3:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/01/03/a-mystery-p...

BBC, Jan 3:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025

There are a couple of major difference in the coverage that still puts ZH way ahead.

1. The NUMBER of articles they ran on covid - was 100x any other MSM provider in Jan.

2. The depth of the articles, including first-hand reports from China.

3. They weren't buried in some BBC->Asia->China subsection of the website like in your examples. They were FRONT PAGE.

Also, at that time there was a big tension between US and Iran. This is around the same timeframe that Iran shot down it's own civilian aircraft. So I really won't blame any MSM here - the Iran story was obviously the bigger story then.

There was lots of coverage of COVID pre January by what I would think of as the larger 'main stream' media outlets.

I see lots of these types of "they covered this before anyone / the other people did". And every time I wonder if people just mean they saw an article and actually didn't read "anyone else" and just assumed it wasn't covered elsewhere.

It's such a common and strange pattern.

I don't read ZeroHedge, but what you've just said is why I read Hacker News -;)

>They love to interpret news in the worst possible and highly-conspiratorial light.

And in a pro-Putin light.

And for the love of all that’s dear, don’t read the utter garbage that is the comments section. They do not censor, which I like, but man oh man, do trolls thrive there...

Yup. It's nice to get your news from a few sources that have wildly different biases. You can then use your own judgement on who has the right take on it. Or maybe it's none?

No one reads the comments - I don't even know why they have them.

I visit Drudge knowing it is kind of wacky right. There is no other dependable one glance headline news aggregator where I know if something is happening it will be there. It may be a link to a right wing rag but if I want to check I can always go search for other sources of information.

Drudge is hardly “wacky right” [anymore]. Even the Daily Beast said as much in a funny piece they did called “I Spent a Week Down the Right-Wing Media Rabbit Hole—and Was Mesmerized by It”

> The Drudge Report, once the online town crier of the right-wing bubble, now pales in comparison to the likes of Gateway Pundit. Drudge links to so many mainstream media outlets, such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and to enough Trump-skeptical content that on day two I deemed it contrary to the spirit of the simulation and blacklisted it lest I fall down the rabbit hole of facts, truth, and sanity.

Now I might not believe 1% of what I read on The Daily Beast, or Vox, or whatever, but I would never call for them to be defunded or de-platformed.

Another thing about Drudge is that he was never a Trump guy, he was a Romney guy. Now that Romney is a senator none of that matters, and Drudge has retrenched as mainstream Right news aggregator.

I like Zero Hedge because of the "Reverse Gell Mann Amnesia".

Without going into details, things I know, subjects I'm in an expert in, areas I've lived in and systems I've experienced is reported accurately by Zero Hedge, while government media and government subsidized press reports inaccuracies, blatant lies, outdated information and common ol' misconception.

Because of this I support and read Zero Hedge and I advice people to take this into account - all of them lie, the secret is finding what they lie about and what they don't care about.

This is actually a good point I hadn't realized until now.

Zerohedge does tend to cover the contrarians and often the talk to experts. Yes, some are nuts, but many are not.

For Covid-19 - they were covering it a MONTH before everyone else.

They are routinely FAR ahead of the curve.

No one reads the comments - they are collapsed by default.

I guess my question—knowing very little about ZeroHedge, and never having visited it—is, did they also "cover" a whole bunch of things that turned out to be false?

If what they do is talk about all the things that might be coming, then it's likely they will have some pretty good hits. The coronavirus trajectory was certainly much more predictable than you would have guessed from the way the US, in particular, handled and reported on it, so the fact that they were able to get out ahead of that just means they weren't believing everyone else's groupthink.

That can have value, but it doesn't mean they're immune from bad predictions...

As someone who has worked in finance and specifically a trading floor - i can confirm that it is widely read by traders/market-makers/risk-takers in those spaces.

It's not that those people are inherently bearish or expect the world and financial markets to "go to zero"; but they understand that informed decisions and fair market pricing arises from a matrix of ideas. Zero hedge takes an extreme starting point for most of its commentary/coverage but as long as you know that slant exists it can become a useful input into thinking about the "bear scenario" or the "tail scenario". Knowing that it has reached a critical mass and that other traders read it - it becomes a harder to ignore point of information.

I worked in derivatives trading. ZH was mostly laughed at. At least lately, when it became a more racist RT.

I'm not sure if you're really in derivatives trading, because ZH has become a f*ing hero on our trading floor as if drove many positions to the short side in Feb because of their early coverage of the covid crisis.

They published a number of warning indicators that we just didn't see anywhere else.

The problem with all trading is overcoming the HFT and market movers. If they see enough shorts, they shake you out. Even if I 100% know a company is going to go down, shorts always seemed to get squeezed, and it's completely rigged IMO. You need to have super deep pockets to avoid margin calls and a complete lack of fear to avoid total ruin.

Mostly structured products, like credit correlation in Europe.

There is content on ZeroHedge that you just cannot find anywhere else.

In early January, ZH was publishing multiple articles a day on Covid-19 with details that neither the WHO, nor Chinese media, nor mainstream media were reporting. Novel economic indicators showing the virus impact / reports from crematoriums in Wuhan / reports from Chinese dissidents ...and all while HackerNews and Reddit was filtering the stories, telling everyone it was just the flu, and that masks don't work.

Even today, there are topics being discussed that aren't getting much attention anywhere else. Topics that critically inform some of the investment decisions we make managing our portfolio.

There's a lot of garbage on ZH, sure, so you need a mature filter, but maybe adults should be able to filter, right?

Maybe if you can't read stuff you don't agree with without being offended... maybe we should have a special protected internet for kids?

ZH boosters in these comments keep saying variants of this: "You have to have a good BS filter to find the good stuff on ZH, but it's there!" Sure, if you look backwards and cherry-pick only the accurate stuff while ignoring everything they got horribly wrong, then yeah, the site's going to look good. But that's true of any bullshit-peddler. In fact, that's the very essence of what a bullshit-peddler does: throw bullshit at the wall, knowing that some of it will stick, and gullible people will forget about all the stuff that didn't stick.

If you really want to prove the site's credibility, then perform some of this vaunted BS filtering in real time. Give us some examples of accurate predictions ZH is making today that can't be found on any mainstream media site, and let us evaluate their conformance with reality 3 or 4 months from now.

No one is trying to demonstrate the sites "credibility". The point is to get the unfiltered feed of news. ZH gets news from various sources - many are totally unsubstantiated and have varying degrees of evidence.

This isn't a "reputable news" source. It is a RAW feed.

You need to be an adult to understand and read it and disregard the BS.

So take my challenge. Give me an example of your BS filter in action.

I agree. This is by far the weirdest discussion I've seen on HN. For a site that usually has pretty logical discussions, everything has gone out the window here.

Over the last few years, I've noticed an increasing prevalence of HN comments that skew alt-right-adjacent, especially on certain topics. I'm not sure what explains it, but it's been a clear trend.

I look at ZeroHedge at least a couple of times a day. I typically look at the FT and then ZH when I get up in the morning, along with various other financial sites. I never look at the ZH comments but I do think it an outrage Google having the power to crack down on free speech and that anti trust action and Section 230 review is long overdue. We are at a dangerous tipping point where free speech is being cancelled, other super wealthy thanks to section 230 firms (ie Twitter) have the temerity to editorialize and 'fact check' (ie provide a 'correct' opinion on) posts of users they don't like. BigTech has greatly overstepped the mark and I look forward to them being reigned in.

The incredibly irony here is that Google is crucifying ZeroHedge for content its users post, whilst Google disclaims any responsibility for bad behavior on their platforms by using Section 230 as a shield: "We aren't responsible for what our users post."

The fact that Google will both exploit Section 230 while attacking other sites which expect the same immunity is absolutely golden, and a clear demonstration of why it needs to be stripped of the privilege.

The irony certainly isn't lost on me - I find it enraging. I'm also annoyed by @NBC_VC being framed as a self titled Orwellian 'news' 'verification' outfit when they are clearly highly partisan and intent on closing down anyone they don't agree with. I pay little attention to NBC or MSFTNBC but this is making me actively dislike them

Google will remove or demonetise videos that violate their terms of service. Also Section 230 protects you from legal action, it doesn't protect you from things that are not court based.

This is not a "free speech" issue. At all.

The FBI didn't show up and shut down the ZH domain.

ZH has not been removed from Google's search index.

Tyler Durden's fingers were not amputated.

Nobody's speech is being prevented.

No business is entitled to any other business' monetization. No store has to sell every product. The store doesn't even have to give a reason.

Anyway, ZH has MANY other monetization strategies. It is read enough by traders that subscription would be a good option.

Have a nice day.

You are conflating the 1st amendment with "free speech".

The First Amendment is what protects the People from the Government.

Free Speech is a principle that people should be allowed to express themselves as freely as possible, because contrarian speech provides a critical public service.

Good lord, no.

Express yourself, yes, be free from the consequences of expressing yourself- no, unless you are a child. Be entitled to compensation, no, or to compel others to enter into business arrangements with you- no.

There is no restriction on expression, in principle or in law.

Certain private entities no longer wish to work with Mr Durden in a particular business context. He is free to find others, in fact, he may contract with his advertisers directly, which many prefer to do rather than go through an intermediary platform, like Google, that can take 70% or more when all is said and done. Or contract with his audience, which by the tone of HN comments would be delighted to pay Mr Durden directly for the value his publication provides them.

Advertising has always led to the sorts of conflations of which you mistakenly speak, where the loss of an advertiser, or an advertising platform, is a restriction on freedom. No- precisely the opposite. Freedom means you are free to fuck things up for yourself, free to bear the consequences, free to make your way.

Cheers.

This logic breaks down when a company becomes so large as to become an international utility.

ZeroHedge has no alternative to Ad-based revenues. Google is effectively a monopoly in that market. ...and think about that. That means that Google can effectively put any online news publication out of business, at will. "but hey, they can just go to news.google.com, right?"

Think about the degree of power you are happily handing Google.

Sorry, as someone who has been in the business, this is completely false. There are plenty of alternative networks. I used to work for one. Plenty of content sites that do direct advertising. Even plenty of ways to run one's own adserver. They're open source!

Yes, losing monetization through one platform is rough, but that's the algorithm. He has an audience, a valuable audience. If he can't monetize it, it's not from loss of freedom, it's from lack of brains.

Furthermore, every high traffic, high value property Google drops is an opportunity for someone else. It's not handing power to Google. It's Google ceding power.

Cheers.

What's the other online advertising provider?

There are many. Advertising is a hundreds of $B, tens of thousands of companies ecosystem. Thousands of subniches. I worked at AppNexus, now Xandr, which was a platform for thousands of B2B companies, both buy- and sell-side. OpenX is another big platform. Verizon. Note that there are pipes between all of the big players, so that everyone sees a lot of everyone else's inventory.

ZH is such an ideal ad property: lots of content, high rate of production, very targeted and wealthy audience- if ZH hadn't previously been doing direct deals (which are so much more lucrative for the publisher) then they are just failing at capitalism. Being dropped by Google may turn out to be a blessing.

Google is an enormous player, to be sure, but Ads are not Search. Completely different business and dynamics. And ZH is still available for search.

Cheers.

@jonahbenton I think you're missing the bigger picture here. NBC is a giant media monopoly that approached a giant S230 platform monopoly to demonetize a website's ad traffic via that S230 platform's advertising business. The plumbing of the surveillance capitalism advertising world is a detail in a much larger issue. The current siege mentality of starving out dissenting online voices, or merely voices that don't fit establishment narratives, is both undemocratic and harmful to the free speech conventions that define the free world. Tyler Durden as you probably know is a pseudonym for various writers at ZH and they also republish all sorts of other blog posts. Like most people I have mixed feelings about much of what they publish, have picked up invaluable information from their site and have questions about the Bulgarian owners, but I absolutely defend their right to publish and to not be bullied by much larger players.

Thanks for engaging, HN isn't a great platform for this kind of dialogue but here goes:

1. Re: NBC conglomerate angle-

With respect, the "giant media monopoly" take is completely without merit. I don't work for NBC, I'm not presently working in media, I'm definitely not in the room, but the inference that there is executive level intervention on this sort of thing is, as physicists are known to say, "not even wrong."

NBC at the executive level cares about its own business, growing its audience, improving its technology, growing its partnerships, its own monetization. It supports the "right" of ZeroHedge / Federalist / Daily Caller / Breitbart / Washington Examiner to monetize because if it didn't it would be counter to its own self-interest, its own need to monetize for itself.

Beyond that...NBC very simply has zero leverage over the Google Ads business.

Beyond the absence of motive, and the absence of leverage, whatever the hypothesized causal mechanism for such a conversation and transaction...having engaged in executive conversations between media and advertising...I don't know what to tell you. The thought that anything like it happened is fantasy.

The conglomerate angle is wrong. The mental model that grants it credence is both wrong and useless, a waste of glucose. Forget it and move on.

2. Re: NBC reporter angle

There was no executive level engagement, but it is not only plausible but likely that individual reporters work with various organizations/non-profits that have a mission to demonetize and discredit the right wing ecosphere garbage and its publishers. That happens all the time.

There absolutely are individuals who care deeply about the peddling of that sort of bullshit and work like lawyers to find needle-in-haystack conditions under which a Terms of Service violation can be alleged. That's exactly what happened here.

Most of the time it fails, but on occasion when the political waves are tilting the boat slightly in one direction or another, that may be enough for it to succeed.

Doing that work is well within the bounds of a media business. Organized executive conspiracy? No, an activist individual. There are lots of them, they're called journalists. The shit that they care about is why they get into the poorly paid, thankless business of journalism.

3. "...starving out dissenting voices/don't fit establishment narrative"

There is simply no "starving out" of "dissenting voices". It is precisely the opposite. It has never been easier to monetize "dissenting" garbage, to automate the production of it, and there has never been more of it.

Not only from a business perspective, but politically, the Trump administration's series of attempts to use the machinery of the law to attack the business and boring process of fact finding, conventional reporting- its active measures to manufacture chaos- is exactly the opposite of a starving out.

4. "Siege mentality"

While there is no defensible argument that there is a "starving out" I completely agree with the presence of the "siege mentality" in the emotional dynamics of people who make "dissenting" arguments.

My own personal view is that this is just emotional immaturity. There is a science and a mechanism to human conversation, and a "dissenting" view by definition attacks that long established machinery, machinery that predates human society.

Lots of other creatures have "conversations." Just about every species has power dynamics. The "dissenting view" stuff lives in those playbooks and anyone who feels "besieged" kind of just needs to grow up, put on the big boy pants, recognize what they're doing isn't new, recognize what game they're playing, etc.

There is a long, long history of study of these dynamics. I go to things like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chomsky's Manufacture of Consent, and then newer work on argumentation- Lucy Suchman comes to mind. But there are a lot, lot, lot of lenses on this.

5. Plumbing of surveillance capitalism

Yeah, having worked in the space...I'm a lot less worried about this than I used to be, but it's a complex issue and too deep to go into here. From a publishing perspective, I do think the world would be better off for my definitions of "better off" if there were more subscriptions and less advertising, but everything has tradeoffs.

6. ZeroHedge itself

I personally don't have a problem with ZeroHedge, most of the bullshit they publish is transparently and easily dismissed bullshit. I do find the small irony that ZH is failing to monetize effectively to be amusing.

Federalist is much more skilled at pushing the antagonism button, and I think the people who work for it are engaging in systemic criminal incitement. But they are extremely skilled at staying within the ToS bounds.

7. Bigger picture

There is no bigger picture in this specific story. There is no harm to "free speech."

There is an ongoing battle around what constitutes "public" discourse, and it is only going to become more intense as we figure out more direct ways to pump stuff into people's brains (cf FB going big into VR and neuro). In the architecture of the western society we live in, most of the attacks on the components of informed free speech- things like facts, reality-based reports, even the recognition that there is an unforgiving reality that supercedes political BS- those attacks are (mostly) coming from the team that (mostly) claims to be suffering from them. But the loss of a sense of "objectivity" cuts multiple ways.

Again, not a great platform on which to have this conversation. Happy to take it elsewhere if helpful.

Cheers.

@jonahbenton Thanks for sharing your opinions. I stand by my previous points and don't consider what ZeroHedge publishes to be 'transparently and easily dismissed bullshit' and even if it was I strongly defend their right to publish anything they want without interference. I consider the standard of dialog on HN to be excellent (which is why I spend time here. You appear to be completely unaware of the wave of demonetization and shadow banning of dissenting voices, most notably on YouTube, who also have the power through algos to push the opinions they do approve of to broad audiences. I suggest you adjust your overton window and get over the left right political paradigms.

The biggest issue is that Google is also a publisher, with comment sections. It competes in the same space, and is pretty much the only game in town for advertising. This is an election year, political biases are a factor in the discussion and other sites on the other end of the political spectrum don't get their advertising removed for speech by commenters. Other sites have comment sections and has its share of trolls (from both sides) and controversial speech that targets identity groups. Does Google hold itself and other sites with that speech to the same standards? This creates an anti-trust issue. And yes, if a company has enough power to control the speech and public discourse with little other alternative is part of anti-trust, just as if there was one phone company to communicate with. There is a double standard here and a conflict of interest (not to mention they teamed up with NBC News to make this happen, another competitor). This will be used as evidence that Google should be broken up. I bet their lawyers are freaking out right now.

Section 230 holds the standard that sites are not held accountable for the speech of their commenters.

Corporations can censor too. The issue becomes when a corporation uses its market dominance to force another company to censor its own speech. It starts slow, but eventually it'll be any speech against Google getting censored, comments, or news articles will earn a "policy violation" with lop sided enforcement.

With all respect, I'm afraid that most of what you are saying is incorrect.

Google is a "publisher" but not in any way that uniquely competes with ZH. No Google property takes traffic from ZH, for ZH's audience. ZH is a well known brand, long established, with huge proportion of return visitors and inbound link traffic.

Google is also very much not the only game in town for advertising. They are the default choice for many publishers but there are many, many, many monetization partners, a high degree of liquidity and flexibility, and a brand as well known and with as loyal and wealthy an audience as ZH is ideal for many monetization strategies that are much more valuable than plain old Google ads.

I understand the anti-trust framing and the "teamed up" with NBC business and conflict of interest and so forth, but with all respect, that amounts to conspiracy theory/faulty inference thinking. It is not reality. Google's lawyers are not concerned about any of this.

Ads is just a monetization tool. Advertising is ALWAYS sensitive to messaging and reputation and issues around implied endorsements and so forth. People confuse that with speech, but it is not. It is about b2b contractual relationships with both sides being free to end them at any time. Ads are not "pipes" like ISP service (or arguably CDN). They are not search, not publishing. Just money.

Cheers.

They present NBC News on their platform "YouTube" which directly competes in the media space with other news outlets.

They also have an issue if they start using this tactic to pull the rug out from outlets critical of the companies other divisions. If an outlet reports on an issue with say, a Pixel phone, and suddenly the advertising for that outlet dries up...or they come up with an excuse about comments, knowing full well they also have comments on their platforms that violate their own policy. Well you can see where there is a lopsided enforcement or double standard and this can be wielded to coerce speech or extort a company into giving favorable reviews. Which is already a problem given access media practices. I wouldn't care so much if there was another few advertising players in the market.

One isolated incident isn't cause for concern, but there's been enough of this to establish a pattern.

Practically all traders read Zerohedge. It's larded with fringe shit for sure, but it's an invaluable source of information if you're involved in any kind of active trading. First place I heard about COVID was ZH.

Same. ZH was screaming about it while HN and Reddit were telling everyone that it's just the flu and that masks don't work.

I haven't read Zerohedge since 2011/2012, but at the same time this is kind of worrisome. I really don't like the idea of a corporation deciding that news is "bad", and therefore should be punished.

Zerohedge was clearly getting money from Russian propaganda sources, especially during the invasion of Ukraine and the nerve agent attacks in the UK, it had a hard-on for Putin.

It attracts all sorts of nutters, the comments are 100% cancer... just don't even bother. I'm not surprised Google kicked them off.

It does occassionally have quite good articles related to actual financial issues though. You just have to wade through a lot of crap first. Jack Dorsey himself follows it on twatter.

Edit: it used regularly regurgitate articles from this crowd: https://www.strategic-culture.org

It doesn't matter whether it is crap or not, whether it is true or BS, whether we like their opinion or not; Google should not be in the business of censoring sites, given its monopoly on advertising.

I'm sorry but this censoring argument is getting more and more detached from reality. So now not letting ads run on a website (mind you the advertisers themselves have strong opinions on where they want their ads to run) is censoring?

I'm with you 100%. I thought censorship meant "not allowing you to speak". I guess now it means "not actively helping you profit from your speech".

According to much of HN, any moderation is censorship.

When you have monopolistic power it is.

Advertisers have always chosen where they want their ads to be seen, and what types of content they don't want to be associated with. That's censorship, now?

I just interpret censorship in this context to be equivalent of forbid or ban. It saves a lot of fighting over definitions.

In that light, it is not the advertisers making the decision in this case. It is google refusing to place add for advertisers who presumably want to advertise on zerohedge.

I see this argument repeated many times, X is bad so we must never do X. Any company that does X is bad no matter what. This completely ignores the other side of the story. What is the consequence of not doing X? Censorship is incredibly dangerous tool, but that does not mean it must never be used. At some point the cost of inaction is too high. In this case not taking action could be construed as Google enabling systemic racism.

Of course the above is simplistic. For one I don't know if alternative action existed that would not set a precedent of censorship.

How has it censored anything? Zerohedge still exists. Google isn't the only ad exchange out there.

Google is free to be in the business of whatever it wants. It's absolutely ridiculous to suggest Google should be obligated to participate in any business contract. Google can sell adspace or refuse to sell it to whomever they want or don't want.

It's really astonishing how much of a facade the commitment to free enterprise on the political right was now that some conspiracy websites get the treatment they deserve

We have 3,500 schools literally incorporating Marxist propaganda into their curriculums,[1] and we’re worried about some news sites receiving money from Russia?

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project-conspiracy-theory

I'm no propaganda expert but I think you're comparing apples (teaching about an ideology that a German living in Russia came up with a century ago) to oranges (receiving money from the current Russian state to push the stories they provide you)

They’re not teaching “about Marxism.” They’re repeating lies that Marx came up with to explain away the undeniable prosperity of western capitalist countries. That should concern everyone a lot more than some fake news articles funded by Russia.

What lies? I'm definitely biased but I've come to respect your comments and would honestly like to hear (or be directed to) more about this whole 1619-project and its veracity.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians...

> The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.

Here's an article from one of the project's own fact checkers: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...

And here is a letter signed by numerous historians, the NYT response and a counter-response: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174140

I think the 1619 project makes some really important points, so please don’t misconstrue this as a broadside attack on the publication. But the article on capitalism was a hit piece motivated mainly by the author’s (a guy named Ed Baptist) own political views: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-....

The article tries to stain American capitalism by claiming that it originated in plantation slavery and provided the capital that made America rich. The article rests on a superficial and fallacious parallelism that tries to equate slave owners lashing slaves to work harder with capitalists pursing ever increasing efficiency. And the author, being a sociologist and not an economist, commits massive math errors, overstating the economic significance of slavery by a magnitude: https://www.thecollegefix.com/cornell-scholar-cited-in-nyts-...; https://www.aier.org/article/the-statistical-errors-of-the-r...

> Coates’s numbers come from Cornell University historian Ed Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told. In a key passage in the book, Baptist purports to add up the total value of economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at $77 million made up about 5 percent of the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States in 1836. Baptist then committed a fundamental accounting error. He proceeded to double and even triple count intermediate transactions involved in cotton production — things like land purchases for plantations, tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance, and credit instruments used in each. Eventually that $77 million became $600 million in Baptist’s accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the United States.

In fact, slavery kept the south poor (as economic theory would predict—you can’t make a society richer by enslaving labor; that makes the society poorer even if it enriches a minority of slave owners). Productivity and ultimately industrialization took off dramatically in the south after slavery was ended: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html

This seems to dovetail with a growing ideology that American exceptionalism is a lie, that American history is a stain, and that America itself is racist. I’m not sure if it begins or end with the burning of books and tearing down of historical statues (Confederates and Abolitionists alike).

I guess it’s true that history is written by the victors. I guess it’s not so clear who the victors were and if they will remain so.

It’s strange for me, having been brought up on American idealism, and the power of freedom (of speech), democracy, that whole Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness thing.

This civil-warish thing has seemed to have escalated quite dramatically however quite recently and it’s hard not to see TFA within that context based on anti-BLM articles that ZH has been publishing.

> I guess it’s true that history is written by the victors. I guess it’s not so clear who the victors were and if they will remain so.

History is written by whoever actually writes it. Thus for a century after the US Civil War a view extremely kind to the South, and Sima Qian, who lost at politics so comprehensively he was castrated is where we get most of our knowledge of the Emperor who ordered the deed done.

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-writte...

> Thucydides’ obsession with Brasidas is easy to understand once his personal relation to Thucydides is made clear. His portrayal of Brasidas as daring, brilliant, charismatic, and clever beyond measure also begins to make sense—the greater Brasidas' past feats appear, the less damning Thucydides defeat at his hands becomes.

> Thucydides treatment of Brasidas is hardly unique. You can play this game with many other aspects of Thucydides’ History, from his attitude towards Athenian democracy (which voted for his exile) to his unflattering portrayal of Cleon (who replaced him). Thucydides lost battles with them all. The History of the Peloponnesian War was written by a loser.

You know who wrote a book about Marxism? Thomas Sowell, that's who. I always wondered what ate his brain later on.

"a German living in Russia"

I'm afraid you've lost a "P" there. Prussia, not Russia. Different places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Prussia

FYI, Karl Marx never livid in Russia (he preferred London) and was dead a century ago.

Traders love it, and traders are rich. They don't need Russian money.

It’s not Google’s money, it’s advertisers money. Advertisers do not want to pay for their ads on the websites with unacceptable content and trust Google to do the moderation. Because the advertisement may even have a negative effect for them when published on certain websites.

There are advertising networks (like those used on porn sites for an extreme example) which have weaker rules, but the websites get smaller profits.

This is one of those situations where regulation of some sorts could help the business being regulated. If the government decreed that they're not allowed to pick and choose based on the content then the ad buyers couldn't do anything. It's unlikely this would ever happen though.

These regulations would greatly harm the ads industry: Google will be forced to place their ads on trash websites.

AFAIU Google is not yet the monopoly among the ad networks (it holds less than a half), so it’s too early to regulate.

>Advertisers do not want to pay for their ads on the websites with unacceptable content and trust Google to do the moderation.

Are advertisers really choosing to "trust google to do the moderation" or is the reality that Google is a virtual monopoly and advertisers don't have much of a choice?

Google is not a monopoly in ads networks, it has less than a half of ads networks market share.

Google is banning even advertisers which want to be on ZeroHedge from using their [dominant] platform to place those ads.

I’m not sure if you’re suggesting that Google’s platform doesn’t provide advertisers the ability to mark specific domains which they do not want their ads to be shown on?

I believe this feature is readily available under the Placements > Exclusions page.

I guess advertisers do not want to manually maintain thousands of exclusion domains.

If an advertiser did not explicitly excluded a certain domain, it doesn’t mean an advertiser wants to place ads on that domain.

Sorry for using this analogy again, if Google banned some porn site, but an advertiser did not add that porn site to the exclusion list, likely it still means that advertiser agrees with Google moderation and don’t want to be advertised on that porn site.

Google ads has a policy for ads and for hosters (which prohibits hatred, for example), both advertisers and hosters agreed with it when they joined the Google’s service.

One might disagree with the fact that such policy exists in Google, but that’s topic for another discussion.

Seems like Google could just maintain a list for advertisers then.

I think it's naive to think that they are purely doing this to protect Advertisers' convenience.

> Seems like Google could just maintain a list for advertisers then.

Maybe it could. I believe the market of advertising on marginal websites is small, and it's not worth the trouble for Google to try to work on that market: the number of users of these websites is small, and the number of advertisers wanting to advertise on questionable websites is also small.

> I think it's naive to think that they are purely doing this to protect Advertisers' convenience.

It's not just convenience. When advertisers are unhappy, Google loses a lot of money, because ads make the most of Google revenue.

If you have reasons to believe otherwise, please explain.

According to SimilarWeb (reliable numbers? I'm not sure) ZH is ranked #300 in News & Media as has "Total Visits" of 36 million, compared to for example Bloomberg.com which is ranked 85th and has "Total Visits" of 82 million.

If Google created a separate list for questionable websites and allowed advertisers to opt-in that list, my back of the envelope calculations are:

* all these websites account for at most 1% of Google Ads network reach by the number of page views

* since these websites are to be opt-in, the advertisers' competition will be much lower, probably 1/10 of the usual click price

* since the number of advertisers will be low, and only marginal advertisers would opt-in the marginal website list, the relevance of ads (and thus the probability of a click) will be also much much lower, probably 1/10 of the usual click rate

So by banning all marginal websites Google loses only 0.01% of revenue from ads network. If my back of the envelope calculations is at least order of magnitude correct, this does look like a very little price to pay for relief from a headache associated with working with questionable websites.

> the advertisement may even have a negative effect for them when published on certain websites.

I've heard this a lot... but does this really cause them problems?

Them, Google or advertisers?

Advertisers are afraid of being mentioned in some viral tweet like: "Coca-cola is advertising on the website next to a comment suggesting to kill all black people. They are racist! Let's boycott Coca-cola!"

And Google has a reputation to maintain: they protect advertisers from situations like described above.

Maybe it is not a real problem for advertisers, to be advertised on the wrong website, I don't know. But I understand they don't want to have that risk for virtually no profit.

Yea. Choosing to not do business with another business is fair game, IMO

Unless you're so big that you are nearly a public utility.

Lots of top comments talking about ZeroHedge, but what about the Federalist? Other than being slandered as "white nationalist" by the usual suspects in the corporate media, why is their comment section considered more representative of the site/owners than any others on the internet? Youtube included?

This is a very dangerous step, but a consistent one in how the big monopoly players of the modern web have been behaving. We should all prepare and push for more decentralised alternatives wherever possible.

It strikes me as awfully hypocritical for the owners of YouTube to condemn someone for their comments section.

A few years ago I went on a non-anglophone[1] YouTube kick; my anecdote is that the comments sections were generally less toxic.

[1] YouTube's filter bubble seems to lag a few days to a week on searches, so moving it around takes patience, but is possible.

I think things like this very obviously points to a problem with these monopolistic internet utilities. The push out competition, then get protections under article 230, and are policing speech on their platform. I think they obviously have to pick 2.

You can't be the only game in town, be unsueable, and police speech, thats far to much power for a un-electected corporation with clear bias

> [Google is] policing speech on their platform

Howso? Zerohedge and Federalist publish their content on their own websites. Should Google be forced to serve ads to their readers and cut them checks every month? (I would say no). Is anyone stopping these publishers from cutting their own deals with advertisers? (I think the answer is no).

A policy like that may be fine in and of itself but I think a number of factors make the action suspect:

* does Google have a monopoly in the online advertising space? Is their content policy only feasible because of that monopoly power?

* does Google apply that policy fairly across all of it's customers, or is there selective enforcement with a political bias?

* does Google hold it's own content platforms (like YouTube) to the same standard?

They could but just like we don't just have this same sentiment towards electrical companies. Where we don't say hey use a smaller utility company because its so difficult to bifurcate a natural monopoly like that.

Also you'd also need to remove article 230 because they need to explain why they are doing this if they are actively doing it to make sure its not prejudice. I feel like the democrats politicians and the super left people are ok with it now but this opens the door for them to be effected in the same way if this isn't monitored, but they are thinking short sighted.

Here is the actual Zerohedge response:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/google-demonetizes-zero-he...

> The reason presented to us for this decision is far more mundane than what has been disclosed by NBC: we are currently appealing it, and expect to remedy it.

That said, we were surprised by the framing of the suspension by the NBC article, which disturbingly appears to be another attempt at activist targeting of inconvenient media outlets, especially since the core argument presented by the NBC employee is different than what Google actually has said. In fact, half the NBC article just happens to be dead wrong.

Sounds like bullying to me.

Giant entrenched mainstream entity teams up with nonprofit to financially take out a competitor. For the purpose of removing diversity from public discourse.

Doesn't sound so high minded when you put it that way.

Zero Hedge is not exactly user-submitted, but it's not heavily editorialized either. It doesn't have a clear line, it's a thousand voices -- many republished from personal blogs, etc.

I never expected it to become the litmus test on where we stand on freedom of expression.

For context, ZeroHedge [1] has an estimated 36 million monthly visits. The Federalist has 7 million.

They could probably run off donations with that sort of traffic. They have a blogpost on this event and they end it with a donation link so it'd be interesting to see if this pushes them to be self-sufficient.

[1]https://www.similarweb.com/website/zerohedge.com

>They could probably run off donations with that sort of traffic

If they pivot to donations, I'll give it a fortnight before major payment processors such as Paypal deplatform them also.

They are currently using a service calling PayoLee:

https://www.payolee.com/checkout/5ed7f0febebae

Sounds large enough that they could manage and sell their own ads, cutting Google out of the loop, while ending up with advertisers more in line with their content. Handling one's own ads is a significant burden for smaller sites so paying the Google tax is worthwhile but larger sites like ZeroHedge likely can do better than with Google if they put in the effort. In many ways Google is coasting on inertia and relying on most sites not bothering with building and managing their own ad content.

They don't need donation, they get enough money from the Russian government.

This CNBC article was debunked with much evidence: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/google-demonetizes-zero-he...

The original lie came from NBC. They made up a false quote from Google's comms team to fit their narrative -- presumably to go after a news competitor.

I would characterize that link simply as ZeroHedge’s “response”. Their response contains embedded tweets but not much evidence.

It only took a few clicks to get from a zerohedge article to learning about how to join the fight in the coming "race war", so I don't think I feel too bad for them.

I'm not at all being hyperbolic, but it seems not at all dissimilar from 4chan's comment sections.

No one is arguing that there isn't garbage content on ZH.

The point is that there is also very valuable content on ZH, if you are willing to sift through the garbage.

They were easily a fill MONTH ahead of the curve on Covid-19.

I don't think they were, do you have any evidence for that assertion?

Reuters wire service reported an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia causing disease in Wuhan in December of 2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/31/reuters-america-chinese-offi...

So did AFP, which resulted in sites like Yahoo covering it.

The only two articles on Zero Hedge to reference pneumonia between Nov 1 2019 and Jan 1 2020 are a link about two people caught the plague (which was never eradicated) in Beijing (not Wuhan): https://www.zerohedge.com/health/fears-pneumonic-plague-outb...

And an unrelated article about superbugs, antibiotic resistant bacteria.

I never read ZeroHedge, and I have the Federalist bookmarked but never go there.

Now, I'm going to start reading both, out of intense curiosity, because of both Google's questionable actions and the interesting discussion here on HN.

The Streisand effect is still a thing.

I can't wait until all this Silicon Valley censorship virtue signaling comes back to bite them in the ass.

My prediction is it will come in the form of expedited monopolistic practice inquiries and significantly harsher penalties.

Even if they were split apart that still won’t block their ad unit from dropping Zerohedge.

How would you know? It would likely be under different leadership with different decision makers. And they would have to worry about a viable competitor that could steal away customers that get upset by blatant censorship in America.

Somewhat ironically, the CNBC article is not accurate and ZeroHedge has different take[1]. Also, there seems to be no shortage of adds on the page.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/google-demonetizes-zero-he...

The American electoral system leads to a two-party system, it's not a written down rule, but it's an emergent feature.

So it seems that the internet economy leads to One Opinion. The side who manages to get sufficiently many companies on board can use deplatforming to strong the rest of em, and through the companies, every person.

See, saying that BLM is fake isn’t really an opinion. It’s a lie.

"American electoral system" was properly qualified. "Ad-supported internet economy" was missing a qualifier.

No it's not just the ad-supported parts. App stores, patreon and paypal are cutting people off even though it's based on taking a percentage rather than ads.

Sorry, being from the pre-Canter & Siegel days, and not being exposed to any of those funding sources in my surfing now, I missed them. How does "directly-financed internet economy" sound?

If Google banned ZeroHedge for it's own content and not its comments ... would that be different?

While I'm willing to 'forgive' or not associate a site with it's comments to some extent, I do think that if the comments are largely of a particular type... at some point if the site isn't moderating them I feel like they are ok with them to some extent. And it sounds like ZH has a great deal of control over those comments / who comments / isn't just leaving them to their own devices.

I'm asking less about ZH itself and more along the lines of "Can you hold a site to some level of responsibility (even if not legally, maybe just morally) for the content they choose to host?"

This is not the first time Google has done this, for what its worth - simply the first time there's been widespread attention on it.

ZH has a very wealthy audience. They can do just fine without AdX revenue with contributions and membership, and can probably juice this Google slap pretty hard.

ZH is just loaded with depressing news. The comments section is mostly reserved for tinfoil hats.

I think Google should tread lightly here because they are a monopoly in search. This would not help their case at all if the government decides to come after them.

Sounds like nbc was wrong.

https://twitter.com/google_comms/status/1272997425821540352?...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200616/14390744730/no-go...

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542864

You search for Pampers on a website. You go on ZeroHedge and you get Diaper advertising.

Google does not provide anymore Google Ads product which targets the actual page content (Except on search result pages).

ZH, surely, has something to fix.

But Google AdSense also (I am not specifically speaking about this case, but on the fact that the user is tracked and Google AdSense carries his past search wherever he goes).

In yet another sign of the big tech platforms having too much power, Google has chosen to demonetize ZeroHedge and The Federalist. Twitter recently reinstated ZeroHedge and admitted that its action to suspend ZeroHedge in January 2020 was a mistake.

Per this article, the reason The Federalist was demonetized was because "The Federalist published an article claiming the media had been lying about looting and violence during the protests". Personally I think this is a completely valid topic to write an article about. I've seen local politicians gaslight constituents by claiming "white supremacists" were engaging in rioting and looting when videos undeniably showed numerous non-whites participating, and often comprising the majority of the looters in some cities.

Regardless of where you stand on this topic, shouldn't this kind of discussion be totally valid to hold? Are people not allowed to criticize the BLM movement or the media or politicians unless it aligns with a progressive worldview? Should Google be in the business of responding to activist pressure at all, instead of just remaining a neutral carrier of information?

According to Google, The Federalist was going to be demonetized (hadn't been yet) over comments not even an article.

Zerohedge hasn’t been popular since the last financial crisis. Barbara Streisand effect incoming...

Back a year and a half ago when Tesla short sellers were thriving on twitter, it often happened that links to ZeroHedge started a negative newscycle regarding various rumors. I wonder if the operators of ZeroHedge are part of this short-sellers community.

Only the operators know for sure, but the site is so extremely contrarian one cannot always read a negative ZH headline and infer an intent that traders sell, or a positive headline and infer an intent that traders buy. Often the intent seems to be just the opposite, i.e., sentiment is awful, trade accordingly.

Never heard of ZeroHedge, but skimming it, it looks... less bad than most right wing sites?

Any idea what articles they were banned over? Th first current one that has something to do with the protests: “No we’re not all together” is on page 2:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/no-were-not-all-together

The premise is that there’s one set of COVID rules for the rich and the protesters, and another set for religious groups and “normal” people.

The article’s tone is a bit offensive (and outside HN decorum), but it’s reasonably well-researched, and not obviously incorrect.

"there’s one set of COVID rules for the rich and the protesters, and another set for religious groups and “normal” people"

I feel like comparing the anti-lockdown protests with BLM is a talking point that was distributed from some central source, because all of a sudden a whole bunch of people popped up and started hammering away at it, including on HN. It raises all sorts of questions, none of which are answered by yet another article pretending it's a compelling original thought people need to be informed of.

I personally am not 100% sure it's Russian propaganda, but it's blatantly someone's manipulative party line, and it makes a paranoid person wonder what influence the source has with any of the protesters, right or left.

I see your point (and don’t disagree that BLM isn’t the same as anti-lockdown protesting), but the article cites egregious examples on both sides. One example is rich folk flying around the world to second houses because they’re annoyed with their spouses. Another example involved people being banned from small religious ceremonies (like funerals, probably, though I only skimmed it), and then not being able to protest about losing their right to religious assembly.

Contrast this to Fox News, which hasn’t been deplatformed, but falsified photographic evidence against the CHAZ BLM people, and then ran headline stories about events that didn’t happen.

Again, I’m not seeing why ZeroHedge got the ban hammer when most right wing sites are much, much worse.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cbs-news-italian-hospital/

Are we going to now deplatform every news outlet that publishes false images? Let's start there.

But seriously, this is ridiculous. News media makes mistakes

You’re implying that people can’t come up with that conclusion on their own? Why does it have to be a central source, and not just people realizing it themselves?

I think it’s more likely that the claim of “Russian propaganda” is itself a form of propaganda. It’s like the new boogeyman of 2019/2020.

I worry that people tend to use such a device to shut down discussions on a “reasonably well researched” article which espouses a widely held viewpoint that they might not agree with.

Most people were told they weren’t allowed to hold funerals for their loved ones, but thousands of people can protest together. The rules are undeniably slanted in their application based on politics. I think the tipping point was the open letter from healthcare professionals claiming that BLM should be exempt from social distancing rules that shut down the economy and put 40 million people out of work.

Another recent article on ZH showed a video taken in a predominantly Hasidic Jewish area of Brooklyn of city workers literally welding the gates shut at a park, in the same weekend that massive protests for BLM were being held. They mentioned in the same piece I believe that NYC has ordered contact tracers not to ask residents if they had attended a protest.

The first amendment protects freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. The State here is picking favorites. It doesn’t take a “Russian troll” to tell you that.

It’s an obvious point to make, and most people who hear and agree with a certain point will reuse it themselves later on.

Besides, knowing Russia’s m.o., they’re probably promoting both sides at once to sow division.

I haven't participated in either, but I support both.

I don't think that the lockdowns and systemic police violence are especially comparable in terms of severity, but it's been infuriating watching the very people in my network that were mocking the 'dumb rednecks trying to kill themselves and everyone in their community over a haircut', and making a scene of complaining that three people at the supermarket weren't wearing ppe turn around and fanatically support some of the least controlled mass gatherings in recent memory.

It's not a centrally distributed talking point, it's a readily perceived point of contrast which any casual observer could make, even if it's somewhat tacky and ill-advised so far as rhetorical gotcha's go.

A counterargument would say that concerns of government overreach and economic damage weren't worth the risk that accompanied their expression. I'd argue that getting any significant number of libertarians and conservatives out on the streets to demonstrate is exceptional enough an occurrence that clearly they'd beg to differ.

I saw, on Twitter, a “before-after” compendium showing how some of the same users posted tweets in support of the anti-lockdown protests, sometimes saying the virus is a hoax or whatever, then later tweeted that the BLM protests were going to spread the virus. My point is that there’s a lot of very obvious opportunities to find hypocrisy here, given two protest movements from opposing sides capturing the nation’s attention and occurring in short order during a time of social distancing and lockdown. It would be shocking if the internet wasn’t full of people talking about this. It’s thick grist for commentators of all stripes.

Note: this report was either a mistake or a "stylized fact". Google never did this. See their comms for details: https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1272997425821540352

Looks like that says they didn’t demonetize the federalist after the latter “agreed to work with goog to address their comments section “. It says nothing about ZH...

they didn't "work with"-the federalist removed the ability to comment it looks like.

Can ZH stop google from displaying or indexing any of their content?

These sites must be getting really good now if they're attacking them this directly. Thanks for the heads up on sites to keep checking out.

have they seen youtube comments?

Pornhub is calling...

At this point I'd rather read ZH with scrutiny than watch anything on cable news, or anything "reputable" online.

At least ZH doesn't lie to you. The facts are presented, the narrative is painted, but in a manner that is open to questioning. It's pure speculation, and that's ok, because that's how and where investigations start. By the time reputable spots pick it up it's usually months old.

ZH has become a propaganda outlet. I’m not sure how you can come to the conclusion of “it doesn’t lie to you”.

If you don’t know who the owner of the news outlet is and you are not actively paying for your news, you probably shouldn’t trust it.

The fact that there is propaganda on ZH doesn't mean there isn't also factual information on there. That's the scrutiny I'm talking about. You and Google both are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

You can be completely factual, but still do propaganda by selectively presenting facts, choosing the order and context of how you present those facts and supplementing those with a healthy dose of speculative non-falsifiable questions ("Would the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation benefit from putting nanochips into everyone? Possibly!1").

This is called "framing" in psychology and it's an intrinsic part of passive measures.

Thinking that one is immune to it, while discarding other sources of information is a bit naive, IMO.

I would not be surprised if it turns out the ratio of factual information to false information is higher in propaganda outlets than in ad-sponsored outlets.

(ad-sponsored media measure what ratio of advertising to editorial maximizes their profit. Propagandists do the same; if you want eyeballs on the propaganda, you need plenty of straight content in between)

Linebarger, "Psychological Warfare" (1948)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm

"The intelligence that goes into the making of propaganda must compete for attention with the home newspaper of the enemy. It must therefore be up-to-date, well put, authentic. ... Even if exaggerations or nonsense appear in the commercial press of his own country, the propagandist must realize that he is Honorary G-2 to the enemy—a G-2 whose function consists of transmitting news the ultimate effect of which should be bad but which should go forth with each separate item newsworthy and palatable. ... The Japanese who obediently hated the Americans when it was their duty to do so nevertheless could not help looking at maps that showed where the Americans actually were. Nazis who despised us and everything we stood for nevertheless studied the photographs of our new light bombers. The appeal of credible fact is universal; propaganda does not consist of doctoring the fact with moralistic blather, but of selecting that fact which is correct, interesting, and bad for the enemy to know."

Note that in 2020, double-checking credible fact has become easier than it was in 1950.

I'm with you on the first sentence. You lost me on the 2nd.

ZH lies all the time. ...but you can also get nuggets of info that you won't find anywhere else.

Thanks for destroying comments on the internet, Google.

I have to say ZH comment section is the most toxic content I have seen on the internet.

You must be new here. Head over to 4chan (and 8chan?).

Or...YouTube. Another reason why this deplatforming reeks of hypocrisy.

The Federalist?? That's a legitimate news site with good articles. What the heck are you doing Google.

Sure ban ZeroHedge, they're crazy, but The Federalist is a mainstream right-leaning site.

Afaiu the user comments (not the articles) on the federalist were unacceptable for advertisers.

Right, so they're trying to censor users on third party sites now. This is when you know that Google needs to get broken up as they have too much power and are too willing to use it.

Google does not want to lose advertisement money which is almost all of Google revenue. It’s just business, I would not call that censorship.

It looks like the move was pushed by the "Center for Countering Digital Hate". I don't see how that's just business, it seems more like a political move. Which is pretty disturbing, if you ask me.

Well, it’s entirely possible that some SJW raised the issue with the website. But whoever raised the issue, Google had no other option than follow it’s own rules https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6008942?hl=en-GB quoting:

“”” We value diversity and respect for others, and we strive to avoid offending users, so we don’t allow ads or destinations that display shocking content or promote hatred, intolerance, discrimination or violence.

Examples of inappropriate or offensive content: bullying or intimidation of an individual or group, racial discrimination, hate group paraphernalia, graphic crime scene or accident images, cruelty to animals, murder, self-harm, extortion or blackmail, sale or trade of endangered species, ads using profane language. “””

Note these rules apply to both ads and destinations.

Isn't that one of the major problems with censorship[1]: that it's hard to apply these vague policies in a way that's consistent, useful, and ethical?

It all seems fine when the people making the decisions seem to be aligned with your values. But people in power are often not driven by lasting values so much as favorable media coverage[2]. When the media consensus on what's good and what's bad changes, they are going to turn, as well.

[1] I know it's not really "censorship" in the government sense, but that's not relevant to the point and I don't know a better word to use.

[2] Honestly, who wants bad media coverage? It just makes you feel bad and takes you down a few pegs in social status. If you're rich and powerful already, that's probably in your top five fears.

So google is "censoring" these two pubs by saying we won't pay you anymore by allowing our ad networks to be on your site because we don't like what people say there. Up thread someone says google is less than half internet advertising. So is it still censorship? If 3M doesn't like something in the WSJ, is it censorship if they stop advertising there? I get the point, that someone exerted force on them but is stopping giving money censorship?

Refusing to advertise on a site is not censorship.

refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding is not discrimination?

If you can present an argument that your analogy is meaningful, I’ll consider a response.

Advertising is an endorsement of the content. Baking a cake is not.

Tell that to the baker.

Unless the ad was manually placed there by the advertiser, in what way can an automatically ad-network placed ad be remotely considered an endorsement?

Nope. It isn't.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-federalist/

Wait, why do you get to decide what is crazy?

If they're so legitimate, why won't they say who funds them?

Say what you will about the NYT, Wapo, NBC, etc. But they're either public companies or in Wapo's case everyone is well aware who owns it. If nothing else having this transparency is important for news orgs so we know when there's a conflict of interest.

According to The Federalist, it was actually NBC that got them defunded to remove competition.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/16/federalist-co-founder-s...

If The Federalist folds, those readers are expected to go to NBC?

Most probably already get some news from NBC, but I think the implication is that some journalists are also activists and don’t consider attempts to demonetize other journalists to be unethical if their views don’t align.

Of course, now they’ve drawn more attention to them instead.

> Sure ban ZeroHedge, they're crazy

Please, please no. A bedrock ideal of our society is that we should not seek to humiliate or ruin people simply because they look different or think ideas that are different from our own.

That is not to say we grant license to speak or wrote just anything, but I think over the last ~240 years we’ve stuck a fairly decent balance. It doesn’t include mob rule calling for firings, de-platforming, and de-monetization based on politics ideology.

ZH is not crazy. They are neither always right nor always wrong. They have no greater or less or claim to Truth than anyone below God.

The idea that what you say has consequences is a long held aspect of society.

Of course everyone will be judged by those around them based on how they act.

The question is how far should we go in attacking, stigmatizing, humiliating, or financially damaging those around us for voicing an idea that perhaps we don’t agree with?

I totally agree that it’s OK to hold people accountable. Answering speech you disagree with by voicing your disagreement and making the best counter-argument you can make. If someone says something that’s beyond the pale / beyond debate and just shameful, you can express your distaste and ask for an apology. Maybe someone says something you think is wrong and you take the time to see if you can teach them something new.

Every disagreement has two people who both think the other person is wrong. But it’s a mob mentality that the most organized or radicalized side should be able to inflict the most pain on the “others”.

There will obviously be the very exceptional case where an irredeemable idea meets an unrelenting bigot and perhaps such people must be ostracized for it. I’ve been fortunate enough to perhaps never have met such a person in my life.

I have encountered people who I have needed to shun and remove from my life. Google is free to shun people, indeed due to their size and reach they are much more likely to encounter people who must be shunned then you or me.

I agree that Google is free to do it. I don't think what Google has done is illegal. But I don't like that they're doing it, and I don't think society should encourage them to do it.

For example, I'm more likely to vote for a politician who would consider increased regulatory scrutiny for large companies that use their dominant market position to suppress political speech. Someone else might feel differently, but I would likewise be against large companies using their dominant market position to silence that person or outlets which sympathize with that person's viewpoint as well.

What one is free to do, and what is right to do, are two entirely different matters.

I think that free speech "side" needs to develop theories that take reality of these debates into account. Because, in general, where you aim is where is better to be. But, the argument that frames these conflict as abstract rational debates without consequences where making best case for your argument is the way to go is out of sync with reality.

These discussions are not about arguments nor counter-argument. They are a lot about manipulating, appealing emotions, emasculating opposing arguments, about making up lies and spreading them as much as possible. They are about mixing truth with lies in as sleazy way as possible and so on.

I am not saying this should be disallowed, but this arena is not about arguments and free speech argument that assumes so is hollow.

They are not detached disagreements either, because a lot of it is intentional attempt to make people act and think certain way. The goal is to make people feel afraid and under threat for example. And then I am personally getting more hostile treatment, because they read something on the internet. (And this effect did actually happen with some of my collegues. It was not big like harrasement hostile bad, definitely not, but it was noticeable and changed things).

The ZH take - https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/google-demonetizes-zero-he...

So I had a look and ZH esp the comment section is a racist cesspool for the boogaloo club ... moderate or just turn it off.

No one even looks at the comments - they are collapsed by default.

Looks like it is a fake news https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1272997425821540352

Oh, so they just pressured a news site into removing comments with the threat of demonitization - that's so much better.

I’m not sure. That’s understandable: the advertisers do not want to see their ads next to death treats or something comparable.

Anyway, even if Google is still bad, it’s not an excuse for false news.

> We worked with them to address issues on their site related to the comments section.

> As the comment section has now been removed, we consider this matter resolved and no action will be taken.

wow

> Oh, so they just pressured a news site into removing comments with the threat of demonization - that's so much better.

Just wanted to save your freudian slip.

Oh, wow - that's a fun one!

Comments sections don't belong on news sites. They belong on discussion sites.

I’d rather the user loyalty go to the people writing the news instead of some free-riding() intermediary.

() Present company excluded

"Google kicked ZeroHedge off its ad platform and warned the Federalist" might be a better title, per [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/16/tech/google-federalist-zerohe...

That should have been the link in this HN post, thanks!

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/16/federalist-co-founder-s...

This is an interesting addition, but it does not contradict my statement that the original article lied right in the title.

Some people have pointed out that The Federalist was not demonetized after all, since they caved into Google’s demands to delete their comment section. But if The Federalist can be held responsible for its comment section then why should Google themselves enjoy Section 230 protection from their user’s contributions? I know there’s probably a legal distinction since Google is private but on principle this is clearly unacceptable.

Because it would be a violation of the principles of freedom to force people to provide goods and services to people that they don't wish to (apart from protected classes which the Federalist is).

I'm surprised by all the negative top-level comments. I wasn't familiar with ZeroHedge before, but I just looked it up on Snopes.com and there are numerous results where ZH articles were marked false or mostly false. I followed a few links and didn't find any retractions. Clearly, this is a site that is OK publishing demonstrably false news for the eyeballs and ad dollars. An advertising platform is well within its rights to stop showing their ads on this website, especially since most major corporates would not want their brand associated with funding such false news. Admittedly, as a moderate/progressive, I'm biased against extreme-right hate-peddling.

>I just looked it up on Snopes.com and there are numerous results where ZH articles were marked false or mostly false

Have you actually read any of those Snopes articles? Snopes is notorious for putting a big, red X and "FALSE" on the very top of its articles but the article body itself concedes that the claim being debunked is actually true. It does that because it knows from its metrics most visitors spend a couple seconds on the articles, scan the page for the rating and move on.

Take this Snopes article debunking ZeroHedge's claim that water conservation measures in California will make it so residents won't be able to shower and do laundry on the same day [1].

The article admits that there are water conservation measures the two bills put into place, though they aren't slated to come into effect until 2022, meaning the only part of ZH's claim that is false is the word "now". The final paragraph is just glorious and actually tries to downplay the restrictions, the same one the headline portrayed as "mostly false".

>Given that the average shower uses about 17.2 gallons of water, while most high-efficiency clothes washers use only 15 to 30 gallons of water per load, most California residents (depending upon their personal habits and the efficiency of their home appliances and water fixtures) shouldn’t find it too difficult to accommodate a daily shower and a daily laundry load while staying within the 55 gallons per person per day guideline. But either way, nothing in either legislative bill specifically levies fines against customers who do laundry and shower on the same day.

Its article research is most often solid and Snopes articles are worth a read but the ratings and headlines are, ironically, mostly false.

1 - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-laundry-and-sho...

You're missing the point entirely.

ZH published unverified content ALL THE TIME. Every readers knows that there's lots of crap there.

BUT - they also release stories waaay before the mainstream. Covid-19 was actively posted throughout January, a full month before the mainstream took it seriously.

I read articles there that were posting preliminary Chinese economic data to show the early impacts, while Reddit and HN were telling everyone that "it's just the flu", "masks don't work", and that emphasizing covid was racist (literally - people were banned from a Reddit subs for trying to warn people - with accusations that they being racist against Chinese).

You have to be an adult and sift through the garbage - but there is quality ahead-of-the-curve content there.

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