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Comment by nomay | Hacker News Reader

Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil.

The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that fact-checking has been rendered futile.

It now has democratized censorship，indoctrination and misinformation, as the self-media care only about their ads income.

My advice? Vehemently reject any info/news platforms, as they care only about clicks.

>The “Post-Truth” Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...

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We have similar situations elsewhere.

Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit.

We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645. I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems simply because they found what they thought of as similar things to recent events.

> but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems

Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real" journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything. Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times filled with clear indications of them not really understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash journalists, they have limited time for research, need to write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.

The question is how do we fix this?

Follow journalists who have domain expertise in technology?

You can use a shitty news article about a particular relevant topic that contains some questionable issues, and then search around for people that actually know what they are talking about.

Exert some of your own effort to find good sources. Don't trust the first thing you read. This is ultimately the problem imo.

Yep, thats one solution. But then do you really need journalists? Ultimately this ends in you having a some people you trust in certain areas. Quite how it works in real life. E.g. real life friends asked me what i think of covid tracking apps because they trust me on topics like this.

It's also not without failure modes. Lets say you just follow certain journalists/sleuths on certain topics that's basically filter bubbling by design.

Doing your own research to finding sources is imo the best thing, but it just doesn't scale. If i personally checked every single thing i've read today, that would be a full time job (aaand we've just invented journalists again to solve THAT problem)

I feel like you asked the question and demonstrated how the answer is yes.

Well i also said i don't think journalism works in the post before. So my position on this is still that i don't think we have a solution.

That seems fair, at least in the context you describe (not sure i'm there but that's not important).

I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.

The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...

> I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.

I don't like this, again because of filter bubbles. It's very easy to fall into a 'i don't agree with this person, they must be wrong' trap.

> The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...

I would argue that this is what we're doing on HN though. HN has a policy of preferring the primary source.

It was a sudden and dramatic shift. I spent years being critical of news establishments, due to things such as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect," poor science reporting, conflicts of interest or a distaste with the progressively shorter articles and lower quality writing. However, as of the last few years, I don't feel comfortable talking about that with most people anymore. Terms like "mainstream media" or vocal distrust of news establishments have become conservative political dogwhistles, and imply that the speaker has a tenuous grasp on the concept of "reality."

Essentially, the Overton Window has shifted from questioning journalistic ethics and quality to a binary "do you support actual news of events that really happened...or delusional fancies of YouTube personalities and stuff like QAnon?"

Honestly, it's disturbing.

The delusional fantasies aren't just YouTube though. It's in Fox News, it's in the op-ed section of the WSJ, it's propagated by political leaders. The entire conservative movement in the US right now is steeped in delusional fantasies. I don't see how this gets better.

The difference is incentive, you probably have heard that ByteDance already makes big money, it pays these self-media to concoct what-ever eye-grabbing "content", and lend credibility to these "writers" by putting them in the same arena with traditional news and reporters: their news aggregation app and say this is today's "news" for you.

The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as possible.

"Internet sleuthing" can mean "reporting the glitch" without meaning "giving a causal account of the glitch".

The "official narrative" on major political events has definitely been glitching out. Weird stuff like Qanon is really symptomatic of how institutions who should be calling this out (this huge intellectual buffer society has: Cory Doctorow, sociology deparments, church leaders...) are pretending not to see the glitches.

But they're there. I could start five flame wars in a short comment citing a few, but the point is not to side with the "deplorable" side in each of these, but to note that there's some deep truth at the root of each of these five deplorable things that goes haywire because the intellectual element of society hasn't been paying mind to it.

Maybe intellectuals just want to watch the world burn?

Is Fox News or MSNBC significantly better?

I think people should be skeptical of any news platform which can easily be centrally controlled and manipulated. However, there is likely journalistic value to be found in some portion of those user-created news stories.

"Vehemently reject"ing user-created news seems to overly discount the flaws of mass media journalism: filter bubbles and misinformation are not new problems, and large organizations tend to have greater bias towards state interests. For example, I don't believe the national outrage over George Floyd would have occurred if everyone still got their news from mass media.

I have yet to witness MSNBC pour their efforts into deliberate misinformation. They clearly have a bias, but they are at least peddling correct information.

I think "deliberate" is a hard thing to determine with available information, and Politifact has certainly has selection bias is what they check and some ratings are questionable, but I think this demonstrates that they don't always 'peddle correct information':

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?speaker=rachel-m...

I do think MSNBC's MO tends towards bending truth to make emotional appeals against ideological opponents rather than reporting outright fabrications, such as:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/mar/05/zerlina-ma...

Also, a lot of their Russiagate reporting was questionably and thinly sourced. I suspect it will be a couple more years before the public gets enough substantive facts to outright call their reporting and analysis on this topic "false" or "intentionally misleading" but they certainly had a number of questionable segments.

The latest "False" fact check on that page is from 2015. Meaning that she went through the 2016 primary, 2016 election, the entire Trump presidency, and the 2020 election since the last time Polifact rated one of her claims false. And the claim was sourced from Pew Research but mistakenly interpreted.

Meanwhile on Fox News, Tucker Carlson had a "pants on fire" just last week. https://www.politifact.com/personalities/tucker-carlson/

My doomer instinct tells me that it will be the future of digital media in Australia, in which Facebook will be the pioneer of this practice.

I have a novel idea on that front: What if to combat ad-driven fake news we will deprive people spreading them from money, so that it would not be profitable to show them ads. That money can instead be directed to subsidizing education for those same people in formal logic and critical thinking.

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