How Ukraine's 'Ghost of Kyiv' legendary pilot was born | Hacker News Reader

How Ukraine's 'Ghost of Kyiv' legendary pilot was born

bbc.com

8 pointsverisimi6 comments

That Ghost of Kyiv story was saturating Reddit for several weeks. After being shown to be demonstrably false, that was it for Reddit as a plausible alternative news source. They have some nice niche subreddits in a few specific tech areas but I deleted the app after that. The record of their leading Covid subs on banning all discussion of the quite plausible lab leak origin theory was also not good. I'm not sure why 'Google + Reddit' is such a theme, but it's not really much better than 'Google + Twitter'.

It would be good to have independent reporters on the ground, but these days, given the manic obsession with controlling the narrative on all sides, it's likely the warring parties would stop fighting each other just long enough to wipe out the independent press, then get back to it.

This goes to show that the media (and especially social media) has once again easily manipulated its readers with fake news stories of this 'Ghost of Kyiv' like this from the BBC and other news sources [0] and it has been repeatedly debunked [1] and now they finally admit it was fake news.

And No. There is no 'good' disinformation. It is very safe to say that especially in a war, ALL disinformation is bad. Zero exceptions.

[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ghost-of-kyiv-who-shot-do...

[1] https://theaviationist.com/2022/04/30/ghost-of-kyiv-eventual...

Ah - but government can discern the good from the bad. They say. And their courts support this! So it must be true. And they also teach us this in school.

Have you not heard about the declarations, white house statements, etc? Here are some recent submissions of mine where I try to draw attention to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31210507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31171249

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30972158

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836247

its endless frankly.

But we should be assured that government by legal definition (which it writes) is incapable of misinforming its citizens. Except when it admits to it, but then it gives itself a pass.

Please remember though that government only misinforms with the best of intentions for its citizens. These are white lies!

We all agree that government has our best interests at heart, and isn't a parasitic entity leeching off its citizens. Thanks to government for taking a strong paternalistic hand, guiding us only to what is acceptable for our eyes and ears!

That there is little truth in war reporting seems to remain true. To me this is basically war propaganda and reddit was pretty enthusiastic about it. Not the first time it shows a lack of judgement. But this seems to be mostly applicable to the large subs, there were users that called it fake from day one because there were obvious signs that it was a lie. They probably aren't allowed to post in many places anymore because they allegedly spread "disinformation".

Posting to show that not all disinformation is bad - when governments do it, its fine!

Were do they claim it's good? They are just debunking it and explain the origin and why it was difficult/impossible. I even think I read post claiming that it was fake before.

Anyway, I agree that a similar story from the Russian army would have been atribute to evil troll farms instead of a grassroots confusion. But I expect the oposite type of coverage from the Russian and allied press.

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