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Comment by kikokikokiko | Hacker News Reader

We live in a distopia where one of the last search engines that returns real results related to anything the western mainstream "hidden forces" do not want you to be able to see is Yandex, a company located under a dictatorship. In 2022, the only way for a regular citizen to approximate what is reality, what is the "truth", is to look for information provided from the opposite side of any argument you're trying to understand more of. Everything is fake or hidden from you. It's the stable diffusion distopia.

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What I don't know is, I see mainstream media become increasingly curated and clearly agenda driven.

Is this a function of reality or me getting better at spotting it?

I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source. Early 21centuey VICE was legitimately good.

Today there is next to nothing given anything other than a heavily biased view.

I think the internet has made things worse, there's a new kind of bias. What do you set the headline to for the breaking alert? Because that's what people will see. Follow that up with a more subtle article and boom you've got a basically iron glad propaganda machine.

I think it is a function of game theory akin to Prisoner's Dilemma.

If all the news sources are rather centrist (i.e., they all "cooperate"), then no one gains or loses audiences because of bias. This is a good strategy when publishing is expensive. However, as the costs of publishing drop, it becomes profitable to shave off niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication. This begins the defection phase of the PD game series. As defections accelerate, anyone who doesn't defect eventually suffers by continuing to not defect, leading to a new optimal state of all defections--i.e., publishers have to defect to maintain audience.

I dunno, I just came up with that as I was writing it.

There are also things to be said about the ability now to track engagement, which allowed humans to quantify (i.e., put a cost/value/ROI on) the extent to which bias/outrage drive engagement. But, this function would still play into the greater theoretical framework I proposed.

This makes a lot of sense. Here is a classic paper that tests a model like this on US data:

https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/biasmeas.pdf

  We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms’ actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Since it is a like minded result, I obviously have a significant preference for it. (Unlike the sibling to your comment, which was obviously produced by someone from the other team)

I think that would make sense if these were new smaller news media but I see it mostly the bigger players.

Even the BBC which is state funded. Okay, that might be a bad example as they are a state broadcaster and so propaganda is really their remit.

> niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication.

We could just call them specialized audiences with particular interests, instead of equating the neoliberal centrism of a bunch of collaborating oligarchic publications to lack of bias.

edit: e.g. if all of the publications collaborate to not discuss issues concerning Mexican-Americans, a defector who peels off a large audience by being the only publication that attends to Mexican-American issues would not be an example of "bias" except under extremely normative definitions of "bias."

> I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source.

Nope. They were the original cheerleaders of modern militarism, from the first Persian Gulf War, which they turned into an infotainment spectacle devoid of any serious critical analysis, to their promotion of NAFTA and neo-liberalism. This idea that things were better in the past is a form of rosy retrospection and nostalgia. Things weren’t better, they just hid the bullshit under thicker layers of opaqueness. And I say this as a progressive liberal who has always hated CNN and despises Fox.

It goes back into at least the 80s as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

What's wrong with supporting the first Gulf War, NAFTA or neoliberalism? These are all popular and reasonable positions.

I’m not sure. Herman and Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent - a book describing the manipulation of public sentiment in the service of corporate and political goals - in 1988, and they were talking about wars from the 60s. The term itself comes from the 1920s. And 1984 was published in 1949.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

This has always been the case, it's just that the dial has been turned from industrial dystopia to nightmare.

I agree with this post. Over the span of the last 20 years, and most certainly the last 7-5 years, the information wars have ramped up to an entirely new level. After 2018, large portions of dissident content mostly stemming from the right was completely banned on youtube, facebook, twitter. And it's being kept up in tiktok, instagram, and more recently even entities like cloudflare have begun participating.

I understand, the truth is not comfortable. It is sometimes incredibly hurtful to know the other sides version of the truth. But even then truth is worth it.

"All I'm offering is the truth, nothing more."

I disagree. I find fringe information readily available, after a few more easy steps that is.

Could it instead be that the environment (or, to speak in your words: “the western mainstream hidden forces”) has altered your perception?

You can always exit the Matrix.

We live in an imperfect society where extremists leverage the very real flaws to insist that everything is absolutely corrupt and that we should embrace the exact opposite of anything that’s imperfect. Vaccines don’t prevent 100% of all infections for everyone? They’re obviously complete frauds that do no good at all.

The sad thing is that we have real problems, and this nihilistic insistence that everything is fake means that those problems will only get worse.

Right?

Whenever I get into a discussion about vaccines I say something along the line of:

Of all the shitty things our governments do in our names, you’re choosing vaccines to fight against?!

This argument is 100% of the time used to silence people by telling them that they should be talking about anything other than the subject they are currently talking about. It's also a generic argument that can be used to dismiss any issue without changing the wording.

As things stand Wikipedia is pretty good. Non-contentious topics are free to edit by everyone, contentious/political/hotbutton/etc topics have restricted editorship.

I do not sense any specific bias. As usual, "freedom of speech" does not imply a right to be listened to.

Also, I do not buy this dystopia claim. In 99.99% of all topics we know exactly what is true and what is not. The sky is blue, clouds are condensed water, the earth is a sphere, there is racism, there is poverty, wealth is unevenly distributed over the planet, hygiene helps prevent sickness, vaccinations have prevented a lot of suffering, social security is expensive, etc, etc.

The facts are easy. We used to argue about consequences stemming from these facts and what do to about it. These days we tend to confuse our disagreements with "alternate facts".

It's really not that hard to stay informed.

Bias definitely exists but it's on a page by page, or perhaps topic by topic basis. It can be fun looking at the talk page - and better yet, the archives of the talk pages.

I hate to break it to you, but the facts are not easy. To take something which is far enough away that it hopefully doesn't come across as inflammatory to you, consider the 9/11 attacks. And how the opinions about what happened are incredibly split all around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_consp...

Now, you can ofcourse dismiss all these opinions as "alternate facts". Probably similarly to how devoted christians dismissed theories about a heliocentric solar system as "alternative facts" only aspoused by lunatics.

This is the style of thinking that is drilled into children from a young age. No one has ever discovered anything, mankind has not continually rediscovered the world and then forged dogmas and killed dissenters and then burned the dogmas and killed the priests of the former dogma. There is Capital T Truth and Capital F Factx. No one is responsible for those factx, they just exist and are delivered by God into the minds of men. Looking out my window right now, the sky is grey.

Oh come on. This was about Wikipedia allegedly sensoring stuff, and us entering some kind of dystopia of uninformed people.

We'll follow the scientific method; and that is how we learn and continue to explore and learn more.

Do really not a see a difference between that and convenient political alternate facts?

And the grey sky? Seriously? You're looking at clouds, not the sky. Whatever, why am I even responding...

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