Hacker News Reader

Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

There's been a lot of coverage around false-flag sorts of behavior in Portland, but the fact that this thing is being pumped through the lie pipelines that originate with places like RT (Russian state-controlled media) is kinda a dead giveaway.

We can get into a nuanced discussion of "is it really lying" since there's a video, but I have not been a party to any conversations in my lifetime that start with a nuanced discussion of "is something technically a lie" that end with a good feeling in my gut. So that's kinda a clue that despite the technicalities of language something uncool is happening.

View on HN

>There's been a lot of coverage around false-flag sorts of behavior in Portland

And has any of it found to be true?

I see a worrying amount of blame on invisible spies for actions that happen all the time in the real world without the need to sound like we are living in Red Scare 2.0.

To literally quote 1984:

>The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over.

> the fact that this thing is being pumped through the lie pipelines that originate with places like RT (Russian state-controlled media) is kinda a dead giveaway.

What makes corporate-owned media more trustworthy than state-owned media?

> but the fact that this thing is being pumped through the lie pipelines that originate with places like RT

They have originated with events on the ground widely reported by independent journalists, citizens and local news.

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo

What people here are doing is dismissing the overall picture of what's happening on the ground in Portland based on a few misreported facts. No matter that that are hundreds of videos from different sources showing all kinds of crazy shit. "Breitbart lied about bible burning, so the protests must be peaceful!"

The old Snopes effect

Claim: Protestors burned then stomped on the US Flag

Snopes: Mostly False, Protestors actually stomped then burned the flag

I'd be careful trusting anything being piped from Andy Ngo, he has a history of being affiliated with, and giving preferential coverage to some pretty nasty far-right groups [1].

[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-n...

>I'd be careful trusting anything being piped from Andy Ngo

This is supposed to prove that hundreds of videos posted there (many of which are sourced and attributed) are all fake? This sort of ad-hominem nonsense is getting beyond ridiculous.

1) There are protestors 2) They are doing things 3) "Protestors are doing things" is a lie because they might not "actually" be part of the protestors but instead be false-flag undercover agents?

That's wild. You can't have a functioning press under those assumptions, because you don't know for absolute certain that everything is the way it looks. Donald Trump might be a long-term agent of the Democratic Party aiming to damage the Republican Party. Of course, it doesn't look that way on the surface, but you never know. Saying he's a Republican is "a lie" by those standards.

There is a long, long history of false-flag operations undertaken during protests. Some caution is advised when deciding whether any one action is taken by genuine protesters, especially when it's as comically "unpatriotic" as burning the bible and flag.

Obviously, just as it's important to be cautious in general when reporting on hot issues. But to claim that it's a lie because they might be false flag seems ridiculous. Your reporting might always turn out to not be accurate in hindsight, but I wouldn't consider it a lie unless you knew it to be inaccurate at the time of publishing.

Agreed. I don't know the article author's opinion on this, but my personal problem with the article is not its veracity, but that it is obviously engineered to cause outrage in a certain group. It is nearly impossible to put forward facts that do not tend towards a bias, but efforts can be made to present it in a less emotionally charged way. Many comments on HN that are factually true get downvoted because of accusatory phrasing, this is the same in my opinion.

If it makes our side look bad then it's fake news

For example (maybe - nobody will ever know):

> The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre, Haymarket riot, or Haymarket Square riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day, the day after police killed one and injured several workers. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.

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

Ok, but then you could call almost everything in the news a lie because there is always a chance that it's a set up by some nefarious, false-flag operation.

Not exactly helpful.

Then a Factual facts based reporting would be something like

"Today there were protests, and during those protests these things occurred, we do not yet know if the people committing these terrible acts where part of the protest or not"

Instead we get

"During mostly peaceful protests everyone sat in a circle chanting defund the police" while in the background we see buildings on fire

There's a lot of precedent for right wing false flag provocation during these protests, and lots of evidence, while there's no credible evidence of Trump being a double agent for the Democrats. There are people vandalizing their own property to blame it on antifa, "boogaloo" proponents smashing windows and lighting things on fire and posing as BLM supporters while calling for violence. It is wild, yes.

It's more than just whether or not the events are true; I'll assume they are, but the commentary of "protests and riots are [..] an attempt to dismantle all of Western Civilization and upend centuries of tradition and freedom of religion" and "flag burning at the antifa/BLM gathering" most certainly is not. The problem with that last one, to be clear, is that it's trying to associate some alleged terror organisation with a civil right protest.

This entire thing fits in a pattern of poisoning the well and conflation of unrelated things on this topic. Is it strictly speaking a "lie"? Probably not, but it's also most certainly not an article intended to promote a deeper understanding of events – quite the opposite.

This, to me, is the biggest reason it's presented as a lie. You can present factual events in such a way to convince people to draw incorrect conclusions, and that seems to be what the Breitbart article is doing. I actually like this example of a lie, because it's not an unintentional lapse of editorial oversight but an intentional distortion of fact. The unstated conclusion of the article, that Portland is an anarchist playground in need of correcting, is just as important to the context of the article as the "factual" events it describes. I swear, the HN commentariat can be so literal.

This is exactly what a coordinated Russian disinformation campaign looks like. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/668209008/inside-the-russian-...

I agree, but I don't consider that remarkable in news media: pretty much all events are spun and presented in some way while intentionally removing context that suggests a different interpretation. It's "technically correct" but it's not in the spirit of truth and neutral reporting.

I wish journalists had higher standards, but they don't. I wish the same for consultants, but they typically recommend whatever they're selling, not what the customer needs, so I don't know why journalists would be more ethically, they're human like all of us.

I couldn't disagree more. "A little bit wrong" is not the same as "profoundly wrong".

A technically true statement in a falsified context is actually still an utter lie.

For an example close to my heart, I can't count how many videos I've seen purporting to show little innocent children dying in Gaza (killed by the IDF) or in Syria (killed by Insert Party Here) that were actually from Syria (ie: not the IDF) or Iraq (ie: not your least-favorite party to the Syrian Civil War).

Is it a lie if I post a video of my dog playing fetch and say it's someone else's dog doing a trick? Hell yes it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com