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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's dangerous to publish things like this at the moment due to the amount of dreadful journalism and carefully misquoted titles out there. We are literally in the middle of a misinformation war.

Harsh reactions with consequences result every time the press print things. Adding dead children weaponsises this as the final taboo push.

It takes one mistake, one misquoted image or one manipulation and there's just going to be more dead children.

Edit: to clarify I am NOT against publishing these things. Just now is a really bad time due to rife misinformation and poor journalism. All it does is inflame already terrible situations for people all over the world. Its divisive and dangerous.

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Are you implying there aren't any dead Palestinian children? Or are you saying that no one should talk about it?

No I'm saying that sources should be verified carefully rather than rushing photos of dead children to the front page and then correcting articles later quietly. The gap between these two events tends to result in more people getting hurt. This has actually happened from major press outfits in the last couple of years (not just Israel/Hamas conflict)

100% agree. Right now, when something "happens" I leave it alone for a couple days until the real information comes out. Remember the "terrorist attack" at the Rainbow Bridge on the Canadian border a couple days ago?

Fox News never was and still isn't a reputable news source.

The problem is that the BBC was and now isn't.

The challenge there is that to some, there is "never a right time". After Columbine, "we need time to grieve", then "we need time to heal", then next thing you know it's 'ancient history' and "we shouldn't revisit it". Next thing you know, it happens again. Rinse, repeat.

All of which is very convenient to ignoring the issue.

and there dead and kidnapped jewish children? maybe blame the terrorist that are more concerned with killing jews than helping the people they claim to represent. Maybe Israel wouldn't keep Palestine in such a stranglehold if the Hamas would quit turning every bit of scrap metal and fuel they can get their hands on into missiles to shoot at Israel.

If journalists can't talk about this, the only people who will talk about this are the propagandists.

The two are difficult to distinguish at the moment which is the problem.

This same argument could be made about publishing anything, at pretty much any time in history.

I think you have no idea how bad, utterly bad, this world can be. How much force is behind the hate that leads people to kill babies.

I don't either. But I think it gets worse by not showing the reality.

I think you're correct.

This topic is breaking my soul. So much suffering and death. Why?

Ungh. I need to watch Firefly and drink.

I don't think we shouldn't show it. Now is just a bad time. The social media misinformation networks are quite frankly more organised than the organised media and the organised media's press standards are low because they want to get the first story out of the door if it's accurate or not.

It's a disaster zone.

By "now" you mean sometime between 2010 and indefinite year in the future?

Because social media manipulation will never stop, I'm afraid.

I'm sure propagandists(of which there are many) would love nothing more than to be able to show pictures(real or not) of dead babies. And so would truth tellers. What do do?

I agree with you in theory. In practice I wonder if the refusal of traditional media to publish these things surrenders too much ground to social media, which has zero restrictions on "weaponizing" these things to an a degree that would have been difficult to conceive of a few years ago. And on top of that, everything can be layered with the seductive narrative "here's what they refuse to show you", which is often just used as a primer to suck people down some rabbit hole of even worse conspiracy and propaganda.

Actually making social media networks and the posters accountable for misinformation rather than threatening it would be a first step.

How about just not having engagement self enforcing algorithm feeding people stuff from people they don't "follow" or don't want BS from? Censurship of "misinformation" will kill any actual discourse worth anything. Not that Twitter, Facebook et al. have it anymore.

But before the algorithm changes discussions were actually sane.

What misquoted titles? What misinformation?

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