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Comment by temp8964 | Hacker News Reader

> But the far right and far left media ecosystems are "fundamentally different," Edelson said, with 40% of the media sources cited on the far right actively spreading false information. In other corners of the media ecosystem and other partisan groups, this number doesn't go above 10%.

This is simply a lie. The whole BLM / antifa / defund police / acab movement is based on misinformation. If you count those in, there is no way it is below 10%.

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This is the first time I heard of acab. If anything thanks for the laughs. It's a hilarious acronym, I was expecting something highbrow like apartheid government claims.

My impression is that neither side is more “truthful”, but there is a strong qualitative difference between them.

The left tends to use true facts but to exclude inconvenient contradictions, and build misleading narratives.

The right on the other hand does seem to just spread straight up falsehoods.

So if you fact check them both, the right will look a lot worse.

All the fact checking sites absolutely do treat what they consider to be misleading narratives as outright lies when the right does it though. So at least to some extent, that strong qualitative difference is just due to claims being treated differently depending on which political cause they support.

Until you ask about police statistics...

Do you have an example? Generally it’s what is left out that makes the bias.

if you swap the "left" and "right" labels you comment will be just as true (or false, depending on whom you ask).

NYU has very strong reputation in hard sciences but their social studies are hopelessly left-leaning and probably as far from neutral as Taliban studies on women's rights.

> if you swap the "left" and "right" labels you comment will be just as true (or false, depending on whom you ask).

I don’t think this is true. It also misses the point I was making.

The NYT is hopelessly left leaning, but they don’t generally report straight up falsehoods. Rather they construct biased narratives out of true facts.

Contrast that with fox.

The NY Times isn't "far left." Let's compare "Mother Jones" to "Fox"

The whole idea of investigating "spread of misinformation" in the current politicized climate is unscientific at best and agenda-driven at worse. You've got to take a political stand to declare something "misinformation".

I don't think so. If you openly and intentially select creditable data-driven academic researchers from both sides of political spectrum (or having an established record of being politically neutral), you can run a research study close to politically neutral.

Let's say I grant you this generalization (it seems like it could be true to me). Then it's not really the NYT vs Fox, is it? Doesn't sheer quantity matter? What fraction of the media (say, the stuff you're likely to see on Google News) is "left" vs "right"?

In other words, the suggestion is that the right lies outright, whereas the left lies via omission and cherry-picking to concoct stories. OK -- doesn't it matter that the left has, I don't know, 85% of the market share (that's what the tech giants endlessly blast out)?

I think the debate here was merely on misinformation, so to be honest I'd say market share doesn't necessarily apply here.

You might rightfully say that weaving a biased narrative out of truths could also be labeled misinformation, but in my own personal opinion I'd rather try and unravel that narrative than try to unravel a narrative based on straight up lies.

Also, some of the narrative weaving can be done in good faith or unknowingly (e.g. baively being somones interpretation for which they knoe of no alternative) but lying is never in good faith or accidental.

> OK -- doesn't it matter that the left has, I don't know, 85% of the market share (that's what the tech giants endlessly blast out)?

This isn't true. Fox News has been rated the most watched network many times including in July. According to a previous post here on HN, a lot of highest trending stuff spread on FB is right-wing.

Also almost all US media is to the right of almost all European media (notable exceptions including Poland and Hungary.)

Well, I grant it's hard to quantify. It was recently reported that Fox had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, but that's TV.

On the internet, it's a very different story. If you block left-leaning news outlets on Apple News, your front page may contain nothing at all. Google News has a permanent section devoted to leftist "fact checkers". Their "beyond the headlines" section currently displays the NYT, BBC, Vox, Guardian, Atlantic, WSJ, Slate, Verge, and AP.

WSJ is owned by Murdoch and is pretty far right-wing even for the US, but like I said, all of that is considered right-wing or "centrist" to be very charitable (although obviously not conservative except the WSJ) in Europe and to anyone who actually calls themselves a leftists (or a political sciensit.)

How is wsj far-right? You are totally making things up.

https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart

Your own graph shoes that they are right wing. I said pretty far to the right which obviously they are, not "far-right."

Interesting! Where are you getting your information?

This is a frequent problem with such comments like the one you just replied to.

I am prepared to give them a chance for them to substantiate their claims, however if we ask them for any evidence and we still have no response, then the claim can be immediately be dismissed as baseless.

Correct. Here is an ongoing example of left leaning (Rolling Stone) misinformation: https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1434591443855753220

This one puzzles me. There seems to be a concerted effort with shared messaging preventing neutral discussions of ivermectin, regardless of whether or not it has any benefits with regard to covid. What interests me is the motivations and confluence of groups that are effectively censoring public discourse through suppression, guilt by association, and other mud slinging tactics, despite what looks to be an interesting possible course of treatment and prevention. I don't know that there's any human or group pulling the strings or if it's a coincidental harnessing of an advantageous narrative by multiple parties, but it's completely illegitimate regardless.

But no! Horse dewormer eating Maga cultists will shock and disturb you!

Makes me wonder what else is similarly suppressed and censored in the west.

Very unfortunate. Mud slinging and blame game tactics to prevent neutral discussion are the bane of society.

HISTORY is humans and groups pulling the strings. I've certainly had the impression that there are humans/groups pulling the strings to try and derail the US pandemic response into useless and/or actively damaging directions, from hydroxychloroquine to bleach. Horse paste is particularly well chosen here as it can be procured in farm-animal dosages, allowing for panicked people to poison themselves on a grand scale. And since it's a veterinary medicine, it's less likely to have people bounce off the suggestion than say, bleach.

This does imply that (a) an outside influence is involved, such as for instance the idea that Russia manipulated the election for the benefit of Donald Trump against other perhaps more capable Democrats and Republicans, and (b) that in so doing, Russia did not REALLY want to make a US political faction powerful and healthy, and encouraging bizarre and ineffective 'takes' on pandemic response is in line with what Russia really wants through use of their social media manipulation techniques, which are pretty well documented at this stage and depend on cooperation from US tech giants such as Facebook, sometimes through intermediaries, sometimes not even.

If this seems contentious, I'm interested in which clause is the issue: I've seen a lot of self-interested denial in the very concept of Russia paying Facebook etc. through Cambridge Analytica and so on, to run marketing campaigns with very detailed feedback on effectiveness (this is a social media innovation on par with the invention of radio: the value of microtargeting demographics CANNOT be underestimated). Denying clause A is common, though it seems insane.

What would be more interesting is acknowledging A but denying B: in other words, the position that yes, there are massive covert PR campaigns going on to push these things, to your 'Maga cultists' and anyone else who will listen (there are a LOT of weird left-wingers who eat this stuff right up, just as susceptible to the paranoid tropes), but instead of being suspicious, the reaction is to automatically trust the mysterious sources all the more, because strange people want you to eat veterinary medicine for your own good, protection, and eventual great power…

Invermectin has no medical value for the treatment of viral infections. The users should be mocked. It is time to return to the era of experts.

Ah... you're very wrong.

Ivermectin is worth exploring. Even if only to properly establish its limits. To assert otherwise is anti-science. I think you've inadvertently shown some kind of bias but I'm not exactly sure why or what. Perhaps politics is clouding your judgement?

Here's what some actual experts think:

"Several studies reported antiviral effects of ivermectin on RNA viruses such as Zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, Hendra, Newcastle, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chikungunya, Semliki Forest, Sindbis, Avian influenza A, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, Human immunodeficiency virus type 1, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32533071/

The listed studies in that paper are all in vitro besides one study in mice where there was no significant improvement and one in pigs that did appear to show an effect on porcine circovirus 2. I'm not saying it isn't worth trying, but there are an incredible amount of treatments that will kill viral cells in a petri dish and a very small portion of those retain their efficacy once you move to animal models.

Ivermectin is kind of a hopeful one, since it is cheap and pretty harmless to humans. However, it's incredibly important as an agricultural med and it would be a shame if the supply chain was interrupted for a treatment that turned out to have no real effect.

My point still stands: knowing that something doesn't work is useful. The post I was replying to was attempting to justify mocking. As if that is something worth doing.

I've spoken to multiple scientists that are actively avoiding studying or running experiments of possible treatments due to the political impacts. This is a worrying trend.

We should be very concerned when scientists are threatened or mocked for confirming whether or not a drug could work. Especially against a virus we didn't know much about.

BTW that was simply the first article I found in a very lazy web search. I didn't imply it showed anything other than ivermectin could work. Yet according to the narrative, even running an experiment is justification for mockery and ridicule.

That is anti-science. Its also part of a general dysfunction of present science around replication of results because something "obvious" isn't being verified. The old "emperor has no clothes" problem.

Do you know more than the medical experts in India and Japan? Should they be mocked?

Um, no.

Bad journalism isn't intentional misinformation.

One distinguishing trait, between FUD and laziness, is printing retractions. Rolling Stone has already posted updates.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gunshot-...

How many of the howling monkeys criticizing Rolling Stone have their own followup retractions?

IIRC, Rolling Stone had a campus rape story fall apart a while back, doing a lot of damage. You'd think that'd make them be more careful. (I don't read Rolling Stone, so have no idea what's what.)

In this case, Peter Wade should have second sourced KFOR's original quote from Dr McElyea, the origin of this meme.

https://kfor.com/news/local/patients-overdosing-on-ivermecti...

You'd know all this too, if you had bothered to look.

But that'd conflict with the THey'rE aLL tHe saMe schtick.

Please. Continue.

This comment shows what a huge effect misinformation has on people. The commenter is saying video of police officer kneeling on man's neck until he dies is "misinformation".

They did not say that. Just claiming that various movements have their broad social narratives and prescribed solutions based on misinformation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/09/police-violence-again...

Recent studies have found that while both liberals and conservatives overestimate the chance of dying from police killings and covid, conservatives were significantly closer to the statistical truth. So while there is obvious right-leaning misinformation (obvious because it is always critiqued and mocked openly), we should be aware that misinformation from the left is not critiqued as noticeably, so it can gradually shape general perceptions in misleading ways.

Keep in mind that the label “misinformation” does not usually mean complete fabrication. It includes cases of careful editing of context, labeling, and story association to spread a misleading narrative.

That link is not really that compelling, some of the points made, like this:

> Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do.

Come across as misleading to me. To compare to the entire race demographic rather than just race demographic in contact with police (which would better give rates than flat population percentage but not be such a tiny number), to not mention the vast difference in those population sizes, to use a national measure when physical force used by police various greatly by location, etc.

> Recent studies have found that while both liberals and conservatives overestimate the chance of dying from police killings and covid, conservatives were significantly closer to the statistical truth.

If the population of the states resembled liberal demographics, does that point still stand? Could the conservative estimation sit closer to the recorded amount because they're less likely as a demographic to see that violence?

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