NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

How about this one:

"The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"

I disagree that "articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices." The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently, and, on balance, probably pushes back at the notion that private messaging apps are a net harm in terms of the spread of misinformation. I'm not even sure how it's possible to specifically write an article intended to inadvertently accomplish something?

> "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman.

As someone who used to work for an academic-backed non-profit that sought to understand misinformation using algorithms, I strongly disagree with this statement. I agree that many people use terms like "misinformation" in a way that isn't grounded in this kind of understanding, but people do that with all kinds of buzzwords. Without getting into solutions (even if your preferred solution is "do nothing"!), I think we can agree that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. So what's worse about using misinformation as a boogeyman, than, say AI?

First-rate journalism highlights the subject's corruption or bad behavior with such persuasive and overwhelming evidence that the audience generally judges the person or organization under discussion to be a mendacious object of derision.

That is an accurate characterization of the journalism on the Snowden leaks that Greenwald won the Pulitzer for. E.g., the story on NSA spying on Petrobras.

Second-rate journalism simply cuts out the middle-man and casually derides the person directly for an audience that is drooling to see that person taken down a peg. E.g., "Liz Cheney is a compulsive liar who will say anything to manipulate the public, just like her father taught her to do."[1]

I have no idea why Greenwald insists on using techniques of second-rate journalism in his op-eds-- op-eds which quite obviously also include a lot of background research. But I find his consistent use of second-rate journalism steers his rhetoric in directions that directly mislead the reader.

E.g., when AOC tweeted about WSB, Greenwald alleged that she wanted to "claim these Redditors as their own," as he wrote in one of his articles. That's a mischaracterization of what she did, and apparently those Redditors agree with me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6fg8q/aoc_...

The responses there are a lot of fun to read-- lots of riffs, some surprising agreement, some reasonable disagreement. But as far as I can tell, nearly every default-visible comment there understood that she was uttering a relevant and common refrain from her political platform, not attempting to "claim" the users of WSB as current or even future social democrats. Politicians do this all the time-- e.g., Bernie Sanders did when as a presidential candidate in 2016 he spoke to Liberty University-- communicating to people with obvious opposing viewpoints where they are (albeit in her case with a bit of obvious snark) by focusing on common ground.

That is fundamentally different than a politician claiming a constituency for themselves who is likely opposed to their views in reality. When a politician does that it's at the very least condescending, and you can probably imagine how a group of trash-talking free marketheads on Reddit would respond if AOC actually tried to do that.

Greenwald's writing is littered with enough of these little boogers that it consistently gets in the way of his larger points. And in op-eds like his, there usually isn't that much original research in the first place-- there are plenty of other authors covering this territory who don't hurl completely unnecessary insults at people.

Just look at the comment sections of his articles to get a sense of what kind of person this type of writing attracts. It's not as rabid and pretentious as a David Foster Wallace fan club, but it's close.

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...

That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted:

"@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything"

Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied:

"Thanks for clarifying that it was Felicia saying that word, rather than Marc as many in the room heard it. I hope you can understand how some people in the room felt hearing it"

I mean, as I (someone who reads and values Lorenz's work) read it, she was offended (more, it seems, at the casual use of "retarded" going unchallenged than at the specific speaker), and tweeted about it, but made a mistake in attribution which she recognized (while pointing out that her original offense was that the word wasn't challenged).

And Greenwald wrote like 1000 words to go after her. And his essay, not her tweet, is at the top of HN right now.

So... who's cancelling who here?

It’s good, and better if you’re baked out of your gourd. But a tad melodramatic.

We have to allow people to dissent, or we will have destroyed our own civilisation.

I'll assume you mean doesn't but that's not at all what I'm saying. It's easy to take an absolute stance as long as your blind to or don't care about the consequences of it.

> What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry.

What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces.

> The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities

Look this shit sucks. It's terrible that the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch have been flocking to different corners of the internet trying to find a place that won't kick them out to self organize. As Facebook/Twitter/Reddit have shown you don't actually have to get rid of them at large just make a good-faith attempt.

I run into some issues with your use of Taibbi as a good anecdote though for unbiased reporting, and I won't touch your MSM comment.

I think Taibbi is a competent, honest, and candid reporter. That said, I was around during his coverage of GS in the Rolling Stone in '08-'09.

Is he good at speaking truth to power and creating compelling narratives? Yes. But he's biased in his coverage in the same way that Greenwald is. I don't necessarily agree with blurring* the line between OpEd and reporting is the direction that solves the disconnect.

Additionally, honest, citizen journalists with independent funding can misunderstand tech the same way a NYT reporter can. It's still a complex field only getting more complex.

The only citizens who will be able to expend the time and resources to do more than superficial reporting will either have a Paul Bunyan-sized axe to grind or be funded by someone else. In neither case will they be unbiased.

If groundbreaking free-speech is going on in there to drive the conversation forward, I haven't seen much of it yet.

I listened to about 40 minutes of a chat on SolarWinds from a lot heavy hitter defense<>tech people start with:

-> how do we feel about this level of compromise v. encryption access laws (not totally related but yeah good topic, let's go there!). This was asked by a pub policy devsecops rep at GitHub, so she knew her stuff.

answered first with (and I swear this is a close quote from a thought leader, startup founder and ex-Marine named "Marvin")

-> freedom of expression, leads to freedom of thought, which leads to freedom of innovation, which leads to freedom of minds, which leads to...

leading to:

-> clubhouse uses NLP, so of course if it's free you are the producing

and end somewhere far, far away from anything meaningful on SolarWinds while producing the worst type of verbal fluff from people who generally are there to self-promote their startups. I raised my hand in there to see if I could get in a question re: "hey that engineer asked a solid question 20 mins ago, I'm not sure it was ever answered." Moderators then disabled hand-raising.

Half of Clubhouse is SV founders practicing their pitches on each other, and the other half is entertaining discussions of the somewhat raunchy type, i.e. "Gain your empowerment, no more casual sex!" Additionally, although this is my take away from a casual scroll of profile pictures, clubhouse has a massive diversity footprint. Finally, we have minority techies congregating in numbers, talking about their stuff!

If tech reporters are really spending their time digging for the next GRU disinfo campaign there, then NYT needs its $70k a year back from those reporter salaries and should sub to FEYE's campaign reports instead.

And she later noted the clarification that it wasn’t him.

I don’t hold tweets at the same bar as a reputable news publication. Tweets are often point in time, not verified, often on whim.

Grenwald’s blog seemed more appropriate for yellow cake taking us to war than this tweet.

Again, it’s a 3,000 word polemic rant in response to… a mistaken allegation in a tweet. It’s not speaking truth to power. It’s not shedding light on corruption. It’s just Glenn up on his high horse, spewing the same boring right-wing outragebait that he’s peddled for years.

On a more fundamental/deeper level, from my understanding, he is alluding to those systems and how regular people would all tattletale on each other voluntarily and out of some misguided conviction and belief in the system (except instead of getting canceled on twitter, they would get gulag'd instead). Without realizing that the system was not their friend and that they themselves were extremely likely to end up next on the chopping block the day after.

Taylor Lorenz's issue is that she is blocked by Marc Andreessen and several others on Clubhouse. So she is blocked from entering many key rooms (i.e. the one where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were on)

It's both the US legal definition and the correct definition, because anything else becomes self-contradicting. Forcing someone to say or support another person's speech is never Free Speech. And that's what denying them the right to not speak, not help, and not associate with someone else means.

>Namely, malevolent self-serving actors, sometimes represented by major journalistic institutions, are whipping up the social media mob, during the time of mass hysteria, to destroy the lives of political and cultural opponents, as well as anyone that gets caught up in that drag net.

What a load of hooey. This is just you having a pathetic meltdown over other people's exercise of their freedom to not like people being gigantic assholes.

>Is that a problem? Are we OK with that? Do we have permission from you to talk about this as a problem?

Of course you don't need my permission to be a snowflake and spout garbage, that's your Freedom of Speech after all. And in nobody needs yours to call you out on it, dislike it, refuse to support you, refuse to have anything to do with you, and encourage others to do the same. And you can do the same, and try to rally others to your point. And they can counter. And around and around it goes, that's the point.

>We know why she did that and what her aims were.

Do we now? Do we know about Greenwalds anti-speech agenda too?

>Is that OK for a NY Times reporter to do? Is that something to highlight as an issue?

It's her freedom of speech to do so, so long as it's actually true as opposed to defamation. It's ours to criticize should we wish it, to shame the reporter, to refuse to further support the NYT, or of course merely to dismiss it as silly. Or for that matter some people may honesty think the reporter has a point. But to believe in Free Speech is believe this is all a process that should play out without anyone being shot.

>Or are you still stuck arguing semantics and definitions of words while missing the entire point.

I think that's your projection. This is a matter of fundamental principle and the application or not of hard power, not semantics. It is you who are running away from that.

FWIW I said "fully private" specifically with organization "quasi-government power" in mind since there is none of that involved here and I didn't think it worth getting into there. That said, I disagree with you that mere size at all makes a company quasi-governmental, and in particular disagree with your chosen example of social media. That's actually a really weird one to choose compared to classic natural monopolies like physical utilities, particularly when they are in fact directly leaning on government power (like wireless telecoms that have a government force backed monopoly on sections of the limited useful electromagnetic spectrum).

>such a tiny handful of companies are responsible for such an enormous portion of our collective speech

"Responsible"? Every single method of speech we had in 1791, 1891, or 1991 is still with us, far easier and cheaper than ever, along with a host more. I don't agree that expanding the venues of speech in a positive-sum way somehow turns a place into a public square at all. The TOS limits are very, very loose, but even if they weren't why should that be a matter for government to step in? Why should people not have to put a few bucks where their mouths are if they want to break other people's rules on other people's property?

I do think that quasi-government power is a thing, and agree with some of the older SCOTUS cases vs their more recent pruning back. But my concern would be more at the level of physical fiber connections or access to payment systems. With skill, effort and money people should be able to get put up their message without threat of violence, but I'm not at all convinced that needs to be in any specific private venue (disclaimer, I don't actually have a twitter, facebook, or any other such service account at all, never did, which may bias my view on how necessary they are).

>Greenwald's argument is that the repercussions being discussed are not the result of genuine freedom of association.

Which is complete bullshit unless someone is getting forced. There is nothing "ungenuine" about it, he just doesn't like their choice. Which is his right, but denying their agency is him being an asshole anyway.

>He thinks that there exists a powerful ideological movement in the media that is using its power to get people fired (or banned but at least punished) for reasons that are 1. unreasonable 2. have nothing to do with anything the general public cares about.

Hah, "the general public doesn't care" and yet somehow all the social repercussions depend entirely on the general public caring. How very convenient! And we're supposed to what, just accept Greenwald's definition of what's "unreasonable"? Who made him king?

>You seem to not understand (or not care) about that latter point and, as a result, I find your worldview shockingly amoral.

And you seem to not understand (or not care) about people's rights to speak and associate as they please so long as it's not defamatory, as well as denial of agency. Which I find amoral, though sadly I cannot honestly say it's at all "shocking". Your view is well represented throughout human history I'm afraid.

>To you, apparently the whole point of discourse is to destroy your ideological opponent in whatever ways are available. The only restrictions are legal.

See, this is literally the opposite of everything I've said! The restrictions aren't legal, I've direct argued against legal restrictions! The restrictions are social, and speech.

>You might decline a dinner invitation over something like that but not e-mail the offender's boss.

Why shouldn't you email the offender's boss? I wouldn't over something like this, but there is perfectly legal speech (like glorifying slavery) that I would consider serious enough to potentially complain about. And what of the BOSS'S agency? Working at a higher level college tech position, for a medium business, a political campaign, and even front desk way way back in the day, I can remember plenty of crackpot messages that came in to me or others. We'd have a good laugh at the sillier ones and chuck 'em. If we just went along with them all that'd be on us, not the nuts who wrote in.

Fortunately, because we have Freedom of Speech, you and I can in turn be upset over a company going overboard, or someone going after someone in ways we don't approve of. We too can email, expressing support for the person who said "retard", and trying to convince others, and threatening whatever social (including economic) consequences we can muster! And at no point will any of us be shot for it, or have to ask government permission.

>"Social repercussions" is doing a lot of work here. Is it just a coincidence that the "social repercussions" under discussion so often involve the targeted parties being less able to express their views?

"Less able to express their views" is doing a lot of work here. Are you asserting that you have a right to take someone else's money or property for your own speech against their will? That they must like you and chat with you or work with you or invite you along to social gatherings or the like no matter what you say? And how would that not be restricting their freedom of speech? I'd call that pretty creepy.

>Also, your creepy use of "social repercussions" is certainly not any part of any defense of Free Speech I've ever heard.

You need to get out of your bubble and read some history if you've never so much as heard phrases like "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" before. Both parts of that are important.

It seems like the appropriate posture is being positively in favor of the best thing we've got (free speech) while acknowledging the limitations. Which is a long way of saying the appropriate posture is that of a free speech proponent. After all, free speech proponents aren't arguing that free speech completely solves the speech quality problem--only that the best we can do is allow debate to select for the best speech.

Note also that the soft restrictions and political tests we've put in place in our epistemological institutions have predictably degraded public trust in those institutions and the void is being exploited by different and often worse authoritarians.

Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).

Instead, we're building a system that regards all right-wing positions (and a fair number of moderate liberal positions) as uniformly "far-right" such that there are fewer incentives to hold a respectable position and instead we get dishonest extremists on either side. It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.

Yes there is. According to others on the call, the word "retard" was uttered by a woman, and in a completely appropriate manner given the context. Taylor claimed Mr. Andreesen said it, and that he said it in a manner that warranted calling out. When her "mistake" was revealed, she responded not with an apology, but another lie to divert blame. Her claims had no apparent relation with reality, and her recent antagonism of Mr. Andreesen gives us no reason to assume this was all a big misunderstanding.

The content I've added is, "This article is hard for me to read because of its tone." Agree or disagree, I found it difficult to get through, and hard to see what Glenn was trying to point out as a result of the tone he chose.

Am I not allowed to comment on an article's tone?

Good question. Perhaps the answer is that we're beyond convincing at this point. A product of dispersion. We Americans all drifting apart economically, politically, and in how we perceive reality. As to where that leads us - likely chaos.

Photos of drug fueled sex romps with prostitutes by the president's son are newsworthy. Same goes for his investments and work in foreign countries. The lack of investigative journalism into Hunter Biden is the product of something far worse than what Greenwald is covering. This has zero to do with the false Democrat/Republican dichotomy - this is powerful people that are doing things that the proles cannot, while being shielded by the same people tasked with holding them accountable.

I don't understand? The difference between author and NYT reporter is one reported a lie, and the other reported based off of facts (though will a lot of emotion/ tone).