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Comment by jbdigriz | Hacker News Reader

The entire basis of this paper is politically motivated and aimed at deplatforming any sites which don't abide by radical leftist progressive propaganda. Any discussion which considers Snopes a valid "fact checking" enterprise immediately loses all credibility.

Very unfortunate as the premise that Google promotes or blocks content to suit their agenda is undoubtedly accurate

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Your statement is false and unsourced. The basis of the paper, as stated in the abstract is to "examine the role of search engines and their optimization processes in directing traffic towards junk news & disinformation about COVID-19" - it has nothing to do with "radical leftist propaganda".

Also, besides Snopes, the authors list the following sources: AFP Factuel, BBC Reality Check, Correctiv, Les Décodeurs, dpa Faktencheck, FactCheck, Media Bias/Fact Check, Newsguard, Pagella Politica, PolitiFact, Tagesschau Faktenfinder.

It is easy, especially for the HN community, to see that overly-sensationalist fake news stories could trip an algo whose purpose is to surface the "most popular" stories.

This is fantastic work by The Computational Propaganda Project.

The very first line of the introduction has most blatant heavy handed QUALITATIVE assessment of ZeroHedge as an example of a conspiratorial site which is as antithetical to true science as you can get. In fact, the term conspiracy theory was itself developed by the CIA to discredit any leaks about various clandestine activities they intended to keep this way. This is a bad faith argument and sets the stage for everything to come, culminating in the true intention which is to continue the marxist left on free thought and speech.

Every single one of those "fact checker" sites is a known left leaning and supported entity with plenty of examples of mistruth.

It's ironic how both the left and right are at least pretending to want to reign in big tech, but for the exact opposite reasons...

> Any discussion which considers Snopes a valid "fact checking" enterprise immediately loses all credibility.

Citation needed, and alternatives.

Also,

> radical leftist progressive propaganda

Who are all these American Bolsheviks that everyone seems to think have all this power? There isn't really a left, much less a radical left, in the USA at all that I can tell.

No radical left in the USA? Have you been following the news for the past 2 months?

I have. There's protestors demanding that we finishing dismantling the American apartheid. Not particularly left. Are there calls for collective ownership of the means of production that I've been missing?

"Protestors" - right here you expose just how little credibility you have be neglecting literal violent riots, billions in property damage and theft, hundreds of assaults and dozens of murders and deaths that have come from this.

Seriously man, try as you may, you cannot Correct The Record of things people have seen and heard with their own eyes and ears for months

> Are there calls for collective ownership of the means of production that I've been missing?

Apparently yes

Citations?

Are you sure you have it in the right direction? There's forces trying to privatize the post office and the schools, which is the opposite.

Source: look at news on the internet from sites other than the ones calling what we have in this country "American apartheid"

I haven't seen any news source call it that. That's my description, and it seems accurate. After all, South Africa based a lot of their system on how the USA operated.

But what news sources are we talking about? NYT? BBC? WaPo? Seattle Times? Christian Science Monitor?

Apartheid elected a man with no connections, wealth or experience to become the first black president twice in a row and retire a multimillionaire...

Seriously you should drop this extreme radical leftist fever dream perspective because it prevents you from having adult debates.

First, the USA definitely had an apartheid. Though that may be backwards, since apartheid in South Africa was based in part on the social order of the US south. But segregation and Jim Crow laws were a very clear example of "apart-ness" (apartheid). There has been a steady march to dismantle that apartheid including such major events as the civil war and the civil rights movement. When Barack Obama was elected, explicit apartheid had been largely dismantled, though there persists a large amount of implicit apartheid that remains.

Obama was hardly a man with no experience. He was a constitutional law scholar, a community organizer, a civil rights attorney, state senator for Illinois, and a US senator before he became president.

This isn't radical or leftist. The US had segregation (such systems are typically known as "apartheids" in today's vernacular), which continues to have large systematic repercussions.

There's an old joke that the hard left in the US have the same policies as the hard right in the EU

Yep I'm aware of that as I've heard it for going on decades now. You're right in that it is an old joke, because if we're going to act as if the left in the USA now is the same as it was 10 years ago, then we aren't operating in the same version of reality

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-trump-impatiently-dump...

This is labelled as "miscaptioned" which is embarrassingly obvious politispeak for a LIE. Not only did Trump NOT dump ALL the food in the koi pond as fake news media breathlessly reported (with intentionally deceptive editing), but he was actually following the exact same action taken by Abe as a dignified courteous guest would do as a sign of respect for a highly regarded leader from a foreign culture.

You want more examples?

really? my impression is that snopes is pretty good. why do you say it isn't?

Snopes routinely picks up on unsavory truths regarding the left and then proceed on a campaign of disinformation warfare by distorting the truths into their own fabricated strawman that can be "debunked" while simultaneously spending a princely sum on SEO to insure searches for said unsavory truths are redirected to their fever dream. It's a DNC digital mercenary site and routinely muddies the waters at best.

Do a little reading up on the guy who started that site. While I generally prefer to criticize arguments instead of their presenters, the fact that this guy is an actual lying fraud says everything about his credibility - and also the leftist/progressive tribal cult that relish in his church

I've noticed on a number of occasions what appears to be what I would consider a very staunch difference in Snopes' declaration of a claim vs what they say below in their explanation

> I've noticed

> on a number of occasions

> what appears to be

> what I would consider

(just setting the stage here... making sure we all understand the underpinning of the argument)

> a very staunch difference in Snopes' declaration of a claim vs what they say below in their explanation

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is an appreciable difference between the categorization and the basis/justification on which that particular categorization was chosen, that is a well-known problem with discrete binning.

As others have noted, however, in their demand for citations, it is unlikely that any such appreciable differences actually exist.

No. You provide examples of why you think Snopes is worthy of believing.

There is no reason to believe them simply due to the fact that they are posited as an unbiased site.

They present information in bad faith then contradict themselves on the exact same page in the explanation of their claim to validity.

Burden of proof is on he who makes an outrageous claim, so by all means feel free to state your case as to why you think a particular, clearly untrustworthy website, is worthy of trust

Snopes sort of just is what it seems to be... I don't expect snopes to be right 100% about everything, but you're the one making an "outrageous claim" while demanding other people prove your vague unsourced allegations wrong.

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