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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general, from the beginning was not to censor. They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians

There's the headline quotation right there and I gotta say it does not make a lick of sense to me. Journalists didn't drive this at all.

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Yes they did. For 4 years they blamed and attacked FB and Twitter for letting trump win. The pressure was enough. Enough for these platforms to disable private messaging of bad Biden news story links. Whether you think it was true or not, it’s insane that these platforms did this 2 weeks before an election.

That's a blanket statement and Greenwald is still connecting a lot of unconnected dots and then adding a completely subjective assertion on top of it. Obviously there was a ton of reporting on the spread of disinformation, hate speech and even foreign sock puppeting on social media because it was all 100% true.

If you want to blame "journalists" or "the media" then blame Greenwald too because he's one of them. Otherwise you have to acknowledge there was wide range of public and professional opinion. And that social media orgs have all done what they felt they had to do to protect their businesses bottom lines.

Greenwald left The Intercept because his editors had the audacity to ask for edits. That's like living in a Gestapo prison as far as he's concerned. So his absolutely paranoid belief that journalistic authoritarianism is directly to blame for private companies taking action to hide incitement to armed revolution is just far-fetched to me.

It's notable that the US local news landscape is dominated by the Sinclair media group.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

"There is bias in the media"

Obviously true and uncontroversial.

"Some media outlets pursue political agendas from the top down"

Seemingly true in a few places

"Journalists are authoritarians"

Meaningless blanket generalization and definitely false.

> Meaningless blanket generalization and definitely false.

You're just parsing it uncharitably. Saying journalists are authoritarians is like saying turtles are slow. The fact that you can find the occasional turtle with a rocket sled and is thereby not slow doesn't really disprove the general principle.

The context also indicates that he's referring to journalists at specific enumerated publications, in which case it might reasonably refer to the entirety of them if the structure of those institutions is pushing out anyone who isn't.

He pressed that point pretty hard without qualifying it at all. He's both a professional journalist and a lawyer who should be an expert and speaking precisely. He either really means it, or he's deliberately being hyperbolic to obscure the reality. Neither of which reflect well on him.

I wouldn't use the word Journalist but... There are 1001 pieces of outrage-porn every day about how someone said a bad thing on some socials media and what will BiGTeCH do about it.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1353728390268940288

One form of how this works is something along the lines of: activist journalist find something on the platform they don't like, they write about it, go after the advertisers and try to lump them into it like "Look at what disgusting views you're funding with your money, are this the views your company represents?". Advertisers don't like any controversies so they threaten the platforms to pull their money, platforms establish measures to please the advertisers.

Another one is: journalists don't like their outlets getting outperformed by some "whackos/conservatives" on facebook, they go directly after facebook and demand that they downgrade those channels and promote theirs. They demand fact checking routines which are then in part outsourced to outlets that share their values.

>Advertisers don't like any controversies so they threaten the platforms to pull their money, platforms establish measures to please the advertisers.

Advertisers love controversy if they think it will help them sell stuff and don't like it if they think it will alienate their customers, it depends on who the companies cater too.

I think you (and Greenwald) are giving journalists too much credit. They generally write what they think their readers want, advertisers react based on what they think is best for their bottom line.

I'm pretty sure that Facebook, Twitter etc. have absolutely no will to engage themselves in politics, at least openly. They'd be perfectly happy to focus on technological issues and ways to make more money through advertising. Very reluctantly they had to acknowledge their role in the political debate and start taking decisions, because people were asking them to. And people mostly repeat the opinions and views they've read in the press.

Are you sure he’s not referring to how journalists are continuously calling for censorship? For example, a headline from the outlet he just left:

> Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles.

It also sounds like he thinks that illiberal millennials graduated, got jobs as journalists and editors, and now are happy to parrot propaganda from government authorities rather than investigate and report on accounts from whistleblowers.

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/trump-capitol-facebook-t...

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