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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

It's not true that we have raw footage stream of the war, What we have is a curated stream that is optimised for engagement(until the content is found to be unhelpful with the official agenda, then it is censored).

Actually, most of the raw footage comes from instant messaging(WhatsApp or Telegram, mostly), shared in groups with an agenda. Then it is shared on TikTok, Twitter etc. to a wider audience where it is curated and censored by algorithm that optimise for something(engagement, impression, revenue, agenda and so on).

Which means, instead of getting our news from journalists on the ground who know the context(at least the good ones) we get a snapshot of the event curated by an algorithm or people the way the analytics told them to.

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I agree. It's like suddenly everyone's forgetting the power these media giants have to control their platforms. This isn't the YouTube of the early 2000s, everyone. Always treat unsourced and unverified information with skepticism, especially if the truthfulness of the content doesn't immediately affect you. Always ask yourself "why would they not censor this video but censor these others?"

as if journalists do not have bias?

I've never understood the point of this claim that "journalists are biased!".

All human beings are biased, and the systems we build inherit our biases. What is the alternative?

I don’t claim that they don’t, everyone has a bias.

The difference is, with journalists actual humans observe a situation, builds an understanding, creates a presentation where picks or produces material to convey that to people who cannot observe it first hand.

The accuracy and the fairness of the presentation they create defines their careers as journalists. Sometimes they build a reputation to be co complete hacks but the history is full of high quality reporting. The bias isn’t that big of an issue because there are multiple journalists who operate. Their censorship happens on editorial level but there are(or used to be) also high quality editors that don’t dilute the reality too much.

With algorithms, everything is systematically optimized for some irrelevant to the truth metrics without any understanding of the context. It’s also censored on massive scale, you can’t really use another source to see a different perspective.

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