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Comment by dwaltrip | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for linking this interesting article. While reading it, I followed a link to what turned out to be another great article, "Why everyone hates the mainstream media":

https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hate...

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I think Facebook is particularly vilified (rightfully in my opinion) because it developed the biggest "village" where it privatized the profits and socialized the costs by asking the village to police itself, and by relying on or expecting its government bodies to handle the enforcement of any regulation.

I get that policing billions of users you just gave a voice to is hard but so is counting all those profits they bring. When corporation profits were at stake everybody threw money at solutions that instantly and automatically solve the issue to everyone's advantage but the users' - copyright infringement. Now we get the "policing is hard, man" discourse from one of the biggest companies in the world, with the biggest userbase in the world. Indeed, the solution to this problem may not be technical but they're still miking everything for profit while claiming it's hard to come up with a solution and people are rightfully skeptical of their stance and vilifying them.

Reminds me very much of Walter Lippmann's work, Public opinion, part of a time of his debate with Dewey on democracy's functions. This was in 1922 and he already emphasised the role of the media in validating existing worldviews in a sense. There's much to benefit from Lippmann's insights, one of which is this concept of psuedostructures we all construct and caricatures in those pseudostructures.

Philosphize This episode: https://youtu.be/6QJYsSJGR8I

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)

> Judgements about status are embedded in almost everything aspect of the news. To read the news is to be insulted — which is why people are fleeing the mainstream media in droves.

Except that the people that are "fleeing the mainstream media" are going to media sources (on the right, and the left) that are even more judgmental, and even more insulting.

That pretty much annihilates his argument.

These other sources conform more strongly to the existing beliefs and values of prominent groups, right? So they are only more insulting for those outside of that group.

For better or worse, mainstream media is the closest thing we have to a consensus view that resembles reality as it exists (affirmatively, not normatively).

Retreating into safe spaces (either on the right, or on the left) isn't the answer.

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