How the Truth Was Murdered
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
The idea of people complaining about "black psychological warfare" (to use the 1948 vocabulary) or "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" (to use the 2020 vocabulary) being dismissed until the evidence became incontrovertible reminds me of the Lakota: Custer's side of the story got most of the play for many years, but recent forensic examination of the Greasy Grass battlefield corroborates the accounts the Lakota gave, directly after the engagement.
And, before that, the Maine was sunk, unprovoked, by the Spanish.
"Media" is a tactic.
Any educated person who takes the media at face value is being wilfully obtuse at this point. We simply know too much.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477
"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897577
The problem is that the internet broke the newspapers and cable tv. The internet has been able to allow people to get to the truth. Look at that maga hat kid story; if this were 75 years ago. The newspapers would never have retracted. The change is that we can watch the whole thing and see how the media spun the story in a completely false way. As they have done for decades. The internet has ruined their long history of being able to spin stories. They know their enemy, it's the internet.
Facebook, twitter, insert social media here. That's their enemy and they'll do everything they can to vilify their new enemy. That means every group will be attacked as effectively as possible. If all they can do is label you a discriminator of some sort. they will do so. Just look at presidential debate. The proud boys, whose leader is a black man, were labelled white supremacists. Last I checked, white supremacists dont follow a black man as their lead.
That story doesn't show what you think it does. The media didn't create the initial misleading cuts of that event, social media users did (i.e. "the internet"). The media reported on those cuts (and the reaction to them), then it reported on the longer cuts that surfaced later. If the internet hadn't existed, the whole thing would have been a literal non-event.
While social media "has been able to allow people to get to the truth" it also has been at least as effective in helping people get to lies and disinformation. See QAnon, Pizzagate, and this Covington High School student video, for instance.
> Just look at presidential debate. The proud boys, whose leader is a black man, were labelled white supremacists. Last I checked, white supremacists dont follow a black man as their lead.
Watch the video again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZk6VzSLe4Y
Trump was asked to condemn "white supremacists and [right wing] militia groups" and was pretty equivocal and strangely reluctant to do so. That's the story. The Proud Boys were just an example that was thrown out by Biden. While they probably fit more into the militia group side of that formulation, the they don't seem like the kind of top-down bureaucratic organization that would allow easy inference about the group from it's "leader."
That's not how I see the situation. The 'viral' videos even today only have 200,000 views. They weren't viral. The whole story went viral when Nathan Philips was brought in to be portrayed as a victim. Subtly implying racism and saying this isn't boys will be boys.
Meanwhile, you know what actually went viral. The full video which has 2 million views. Sorry but the numbers dont lie. This one is entirely on the antiquated media. The internet is what forced the retractions.
>While social media "has been able to allow people to get to the truth" it also has been at least as effective in helping people get to lies and disinformation. See QAnon, Pizzagate, and this Covington High School student video, for instance.
Certainly interesting other takes. Qanon and pizzagate are pretty much the same thing. The democrats and clinton(as proven by wikileaks) were hacked. There will be sensitive information leaked in those hacks. Qanon leaked it as if they knew anything new or not-public via wikileaks. Qanon is just a bunch of morons who are pretending like they had a clue. You just had to go read wikileaks and get that information. Qanon and pizzagate had real information at the beginning but then morphed into bullshit when the wikileaks data dried up.
If you ignore qanon/pizzagate and just look at the wikileaks data. Yes, most of it turned out to be true. Pizzagate = Jeffrey Epstein. He was in prison to stand trial for those allegations and somehow cameras malfunctioned just that night and he happened to kill himself? Come on. It's ridiculous to consider pizzagate a conspiracy theory. Unless you also believe epstein was innocent or something.
Which really goes down to exactly the same problem we are discussing. Truth is truth; the newspapers and media calling it a conspiracy theory doesnt make it so.
>Trump was asked to condemn "white supremacists and [right wing] militia groups" and was pretty equivocal and strangely reluctant to do so. That's the story.
That's really not the story. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-... which that source is left-leaning to be fair.
The violence in the USA right now is coming from left-wing groups. Which hey, I understand their concern when it comes down to police brutality that has been regularly caught for decades.
> The Proud Boys were just an example that was thrown out by Biden.
Admittedly I dont see who says it exactly but from my ears, it's CNN saying it. Again this is just entire fallaciousness anyway. The left-wing seems to be consistently just calling the right-wing racists. Sam Harris discussed this with John McWhorter.
>While they probably fit more into the militia group side of that formulation, the they don't seem like the kind of top-down bureaucratic organization that would allow easy inference about the group from it's "leader."
The focus on the proud boys is just part of the media's ploy. I do believe it's the media perpetrating this and not the left-wing in general. I have been enjoying listening to Sam Harris' take on this lately. Sam is pretty left wing; probably up there in terms of understanding and can explain cogently how bad Trump really is. Yet he also points out how the left-wing has started labelling everyone a racist.
> That's really not the story. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-... which that source is left-leaning to be fair.
That article is from February and about some falsely-precise statement Biden made. The story here was Trump's debate performance, which was not in February.
>> The Proud Boys were just an example that was thrown out by Biden.
> Admittedly I dont see who says it exactly but from my ears, it's CNN saying it. Again this is just entire fallaciousness anyway. The left-wing seems to be consistently just calling the right-wing racists. Sam Harris discussed this with John McWhorter.
What are you talking about?
The video I posted was from CNBC, not CNN. Neither of those organizations did anything except cover the debate, so there's no way they could have said anything. The moderator was a Fox News reporter. Biden made the statement, which can be easily confirmed by looking at other easily-found videos that chose to display the candidates in a side-by-side view. That can also be easily inferred from the video I posted: you had three speakers: the voice wasn't Trump's, it wasn't Wallace's, so by process of elimination, it was Biden's.
Your confused take on this very well-documented event pretty thoroughly undermines your position that somehow access to raw clips on the internet is going to let you and other people do a better job at learning the truth of what happened than the mainstream media. Figuring out who said what in a US presidential debate is an extremely easy thing to do.
The right wing does seem to have more racists on display right now. I say that as someone who affiliated with the right until recently. For instance, the president himself has publicly said some obviously racist things and many more dog whistles, though his lying and bad communication skills often give a motivated partisan enough smoke to come up with some unbelievable alternative explanation.
> That's not how I see the situation. The 'viral' videos even today only have 200,000 views. They weren't viral. The whole story went viral when Nathan Philips was brought in to be portrayed as a victim. Subtly implying racism and saying this isn't boys will be boys....
> The focus on the proud boys is just part of the media's ploy.
The media's ploy? You're talking about them like they're some conspiracy. They're not, by the way.
The problem with this mistrustful, conspiracy-theory attitude towards the media is that it's usually a step to falsehoods and confusion masquerading as truth. That's very useful to unscrupulous partisans and other salesmen, who are happy to create and exploit the situation. That's not to say the mainstream media is perfect, far from it, just that when people reject it they almost always seem to substitute it with an inferior product (from the perspective of truth, at least).
The internet has also been able to allow people to get lies out, and made it easier to disguise lies as truth.
That's the beauty of the internet. In antiquated media pretty much ran unopposed publishing mostly left-leaning bias. Afterall, social sciences tend to lean left.
What the internet did is allow said antiquated media to continue posting their lies. However, it also allowed the entire spectrum of discussion to happen. Some will be lies, but the truth will be among. The beauty of the internet is that the truth can be discovered.
Even better, on subjective topics where one cannot find the truth. You can have long form discussions where consensus can be discovered. You don't have that in the antiquated media.