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Comment by throwaw12 | Hacker News Reader

> Civic institutions - the rule of law, universities, and a free press - are the backbone of democratic life

It probably was in 1850-1950s, but not in the world I live today.

Press is not free - full of propaganda. I don't know any journalist today I can trust, I need to check their affiliations before reading the content, because they might be pushing the narrative of press owners or lobbies

Rule of law? don't make me laugh, this sounds so funny, look what happened in Venezuela, US couldn't take its oil, so it was heavily sanctioned for so many years, then it still couldn't resist the urge to steal it, and just took the head of the state.

Universities - do not want to say anything bad about universities, but recently they are also not good guys we can trust, remember Varsity Blues scandal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal - is this the backbone of democratic life?

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The alternative to all of these institutions is currently social media, which is worse by any metric: accuracy, fairness, curiosity, etc.

I am more optimistic about AI than this post simply because I think it is a better substitute than social media. In some ways, I think AI and institutions are symbiotic

>I am more optimistic about AI than this post simply because I think it is a better substitute than social media. In some ways, I think AI and institutions are symbiotic

If I made a pitch for a cyberpunk dystopia where knowledge is centralized by a for-profote corporate trillionaire, I'd get a resounding yawn for originality. Yet here we are vouching for that in real time.

Social media has a lot of noise, but people understand not to take poisonshadow_42 as a central hub of general knowledge. That is sadly not the case with Grok, despite its obvious, blatant abuse of such a title.

It's better in all those metrics.

Go on X. Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious.

Compare to, I dunno, the BBC. The video you see might not even be real. If you're watching a conservative politician maybe 50 minutes were spliced out of the middle of a sentence and the splice was hidden. You hear only what they want you to hear and they gatekeep aggressively. Facts are not checked in real time by a distributed vote, LLMs are not on hand to double check their claims.

AI and social media are working well together. The biggest problem is synthetic video. But TV news has that problem too, it turns out. Just because you hear someone say some words doesn't mean that was what they actually said. So they're doing equally badly in that regard.

BBC for all its faults is definitely better then Musks X when it comes to truth.

> Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious.

Every single sentence in this paragraph is a lie.

Last time I went on X my feed which I curated from ML contributors and a few politicians had multiple white nationalist memes, and engagement slop. Fact checks frequently are added after millions of impressions.

I am sure there are very smart well meaning people working on it but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me. At least I know that’s state media of the UK and when something is published I see the same article as other people.

>"but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me"

BBC was cutting-edge for creating and fostering methodologies that went on to become most of the "impartial reporting" practices from journalists. So, even if it's not feeling any "better" than BBC, that's still a pretty good step in the right direction!

The parent poster was saying X was better than the BBC, I certainly wouldn't have picked that one, but it's likely because they get their news from conservative outlets outraged by the recutting of Trump's speech on January 6th.

That phrasing sounds like you're not yourself outraged by it. It wouldn't be surprising given the institutional attitudes seen at the BBC (and Channel 4 which got caught doing something even worse) - clearly, leftists have decided that framing politicians and publishing entirely fake news is acceptable if it's to attack right wing people.

Anyone who knows about that event and is still watching the BBC afterwards is saying they don't care about the truth of their own beliefs. Dangerous stuff.

>So, even if it's not feeling any "better" than BBC, that's still a pretty good step in the right direction!

The step in the direction of decentralized filter bubbles isoating society? With no channels to hold info accountable and checked/upfated for accuracy?

GP made a pretty good case for X being a good-faithed attempt at a new distributed structure for mass media that at least TRIES to have conflicting viewpoints or objectivist "fact checks", even if it occasionally misses the mark. I was VERY early on the "hate-Elon" bandwagon and even earlier on not being an active Twitter/X user (search my username).

In a post-Fairness Doctrine world, what else would satisfy you?

>In a post-Fairness Doctrine world

I don't think we're in a post fairness doctrine world, for one. So no, I haven't given up on the idea of he 4th estate. Your solution to bias is, as always, to not take any one source for granted. Take time to actually read articles from multiple angles that fall in line with the Fariness Doctrine. Then from there, use your own lived experiences to form your own viewpoint.

Outsourcing that to soundbites from randos on twitter with middle school lieracy is insanity. But let me use a charitable lens here.

Any notion of X being a good faith attempt at being a community-lead fact checker got broken with the introduction of Grok. Then those hopes were shattered to pieces when Grok was shown to be massively compromised by yet another central figure. One who, yes, has the literacy of a middle schooler. We somehow ended up with the worst of both worlds having centralization of a bad knowledge hub and stupidity.

>what else would satisfy you?

if using our brains is out of the equation and lack of censorship is truly the most important metric of "free discussion": let's just bring back 4chan. no names or personalities, 99% free-for-all, it technically has threading support to engage in conversations. There is centralization, but compared to the rest of the internet the moderators and admins stay very quiet.

There's a lot I hate about modern social media, but surprisingly 4chan only has like 2 things I strongly dislike. Big step up from the 20+ reasons I can throw at nearly every other site.

As I said, AI is better than social media. AI is trained on and references original sources, which makes it better than reading and believing random posts.

AI is also trained on "random posts". Google made an 11 figure deal with Reddit for this sake.

The biggest factor of social media is being able to curate personalities you go to for whatever reason. If you care about reason you will find the reasonable writers. This also enables disinformation, but people looking for anything to fit what they want to hear wouldn' fo towards the reasonable writers anyway.

Original sources include random posts.

> Facts are not checked in real time by a distributed vote

Nor could they be. We don't even have the tech for trustworthy electronic elections.

X is not a good representative to free speech.

1. It censors some topics. Just for fun, try to write something about Israel-Gaza, or try to praise Russia and compare the likes/views with your other posts and over the next week observe how these topics is impacting your overall reach even in other topics.

2. X amplifies your interests, which is not objectively true, so if you are interested in conspiracy or Middle East, it pushes you those topics, but others see different things. Although its showing you something you are interested in, in reality its isolating you in your bubble.

1. Are those topics being censored? You don't seem to know that is true, you're just making assumptions about what reach should be. They open sourced the ranking algorithm and just refreshed it - can you find any code that'd suppress these topics?

2. The media also amplifies people's interests which is why it focuses on bad news and celebrity gossip. How is this unique to social media? Why is it even bad? I wouldn't want to consume any form of media that deliberately showed me boring and irrelevant things.

Paradoxically, these institutions are probably the best they've ever been. We trusted them more 100 years ago because we didn't know better, but we're now letting perfect be the the enemy of good. Wise men once said:

"In prison, I learned that everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality..."

"But the perception of reality..."

Our distrust of institutions is a prison of our own making.

I can't speak for the other institutions but I'd be shocked if the press, as an institution, is the best it's ever been. I know a lot of people who left that industry because of the way that the Internet and social media eroded the profitability of reporting while pushing on virality, articles were tuned to declining attention spans, outlets leaned more on centralized newswire services, and local reporting collapsed nearly to zero.

I think the press, as an institution, was at its peak post-Watergate, and pre- ... something. I don't know when exactly the press began to decay; possibly with the rise of 24-hour cable news in the 1990s; maybe the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, maybe the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The media landscape was certainly severely decayed by 2003, and has not gotten any better.

pre-24 hour news cycle. When you need to generate news around the clock at any and all times, you quickly run out of interesting topics. So the best solution is to report on every tiny morsel of information you can grab on whatever story gets the most eyeballs.

> Press is not free - full of propaganda

Did you think that was different from 1850-1950?

My (non-authoritative) understanding was that after Vietnam there was a more recognised need to control what the media published, resulting in Operation Mockingbird and such. However, given how centralised the media has always been, I could see it being influenced before this.

Did you have any examples or reading to share?

I really shouldn't be so gobsmacked by people's ignorance of history, but it is astounding to me the number of replies here that seem to believe that the press really was well-behaved in this time period. When learning about the Spanish-American War, pretty much the most important bullet point covered in history class is the role of the press in essentially inventing the cause of the war, as exemplified by the infamous quote from a newspaper baron: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

The general term to look up is "yellow journalism."

I don't think, but I feel like situation was slightly better for some reasons:

* there were no internet, so local communities strived to inform things happening around more objectively. Later on, there were no need for local newspapers

* capitalism was on the rise and on its infancy, but families with a single person working could afford some of the things (e.g. house, car) hence there were no urgent need to selling out all your principles

* people relied on books to consume information, since books were difficult to publish and not easy to revert (like removing a blog post), people gave an attention to what they're producing in the form of books, hence consumers of those books were also slightly demanding in what to expect from other sources

* less power of lobby groups

* not too many super-rich / billionaires, who can just buy anything they want anytime, or ruin the careers of people going against them, hence people probably acted more freely.

But again, can't tell exactly what happened at that time, but in my time press is not free. That's why I said "probably"

> * not too many super-rich / billionaires, who can just buy anything they want anytime, or ruin the careers of people going against them, hence people probably acted more freely.

The provided timespan encompasses the 'gilded age' era, which saw some ridiculous wealth accumulation. Like J.P. Morgan personally bailed out as the US Treasury at one point.

Much of antitrust law was implemented to prevent those sorts of robber baron business practices (explicitly targeting Rockefeller's Standard Oil), fairly successfully too. Until we more or less stopped enforcing them and now we're largely back where we started.

I think the 1876 election in the USA is an interesting case that counters this view.

I would disagree about capitalism being on the rise. Marx and his views grew after the 1850s and communist / socialist revolutions spread throughout Europe. There may have been more discussion of "capitalism" and an increase in industrialization, but "capital" had existed and operated for centuries before that. What changed was who owned the capital and how it was managed, specifically there has been a vast increase in central / government control.

I think this centralization of authority over capital is what has allowed for the power of lobbying, etc. A billionaire could previously only control his farms, tenant farmers, etc. Now their reach is international, and they can influence the taxing / spending the occurs across the entire economy.

Similarly, local communities were probably equally (likely far more) mislead by propaganda / lies. However, that influence tended to be more local and aligned with their own interests. The town paper may be full of lies, but the company that owned the town and the workers that lived there both wanted the town to succeed.

He predicted capitalisms fall, (which happened in the 1930s) but didn't predict that instead of the workers uniting and rising against the bourgeoisie that the bourgeoisie would just rebuild it and continue oppressing the masses

Capital continued to function just fine through the 1930s. Crops still grew on land. Dams produced electricity. Factories produced cars. What exactly failed?

Capitalism is subject to periodic crises; the Great Depression of the 30s beginning with the stock market crash of 1929 was the largest of those at the time it happened.

Yes, at the very least there wasn't strong polarization, so the return on propaganda content is lower. Now a newspaper risk losing their consumer more if they publish anything contrarian.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-...

    if they publish anything contrarian

Publishing something to the contrary of popular belief is not being contrarian. It is not a virtue to be contrarian and forcing a dichotomy for the sake of arguing with people.

>do not want to say anything bad about universities

I'll make a slightly warm take: Co-opting our higher education institutions to be used as an extended job pipelne was a huge mistake. Your primary goal for attending college should not be to prepare for a job unless you are aiming for a highly specialized position.

Hotter take: jobs above a certain size should require a 3 month onboarding pipeline that is demonstrably used if they want to make the argument of hiring H1-B's. If you can learn the job in that period, it's clear that there is domestic talent.

The press has always been full of propaganda, it's just that in the time period 1850-1950 there weren't any dissenting media outlets so it was impossible for anyone to recognize that there was anything different from the propaganda

Every society is going to have problems. Democracy's benefit is that it allows those problems to be freely discussed and resolved

If this is all true (I don't disagree) than what is or should be the backbone of democratic life?

They are (part of) the backbone of democratic life. But democratic life hasn't been doing well in the US in the last decades. The broken backbone is both cause and symptom of this in a vicious cycle

> Venezuela, US couldn't take its oil, so it was heavily sanctioned for so many years, then it still couldn't resist the urge to steal it, and just took the head of the state.

Could you provide supporting evidence for your statement?

The press has never been believable. How many innocent people were beat, framed and shot and the press just took the word of the police? Rappers in the 80s were talking about police brutality. But no one believed them until the Rodney King video in 1992. Now many don’t instinctively trust the police because everyone has a camera in their pocket and publish video on social media.

On the other side of the coin, the press and both parties ignored what was going on in rural America until the rise of Trump

These are all supposed to be the backbone of democratic life, yes, but won't someone PLEASE think of the shareholders?!?

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