3 ms·

> and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial

by comex 10y ago

> and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. Not "evil and duplicitous", but false and sensationalistic. I expect that Vox's opinion of what counts as both is biased, and you might think that Vox's own articles tend to fall into those categories. Certainly it is not always possible to assess truth in politics in a completely objective manner; I frequently read PolitiFact, and while I think they're decent, their fact checks often boil down to judging how accurately a short and necessarily imprecise statement describes a complex reality, leading to subjective rulings I sometimes disagree with. But some stories are just complete nonsense, like the "oversampling" example from the Vox article, and any reasonable observer really ought to agree on that...

scarmig 10y ago
So my question is what kind of thread model we're trying to design against. Vox here seems to think that right-wingers generating click-baity bullshit is the big threat to democracy to design against. I agree that Breitbart et al. generate plenty more than their fair share of transparent bullshit. But I need strong evidence that that's actually a significant threat to the world. What I see as the real threat is a cabal of the powerful defining strict limits on discourse to help generate consent around decisions that are toxic to most of the public and beneficial only to a small segment of it. We've seen the latter happen recently: the Iraq War. You can get me to agree that the extreme nutty right believes lots of nutty, false things, but I don't see evidence that it has killed nearly as many people. Maybe if somehow Trump wins, and can attribute his win to false right wing bullshit, and he's actually as bad as the MSM says, it would work as evidence that that's a realistic threat model. Then again, half a million dead bodies is a hard mountain to climb.

by comex 10y ago

scarmig 10y ago

So my question is what kind of thread model we're trying to design against. Vox here seems to think that right-wingers generating click-baity bullshit is the big threat to democracy to design against. I agree that Breitbart et al. generate plenty more than their fair share of transparent bullshit. But I need strong evidence that that's actually a significant threat to the world. What I see as the real threat is a cabal of the powerful defining strict limits on discourse to help generate consent around decisions that are toxic to most of the public and beneficial only to a small segment of it. We've seen the latter happen recently: the Iraq War. You can get me to agree that the extreme nutty right believes lots of nutty, false things, but I don't see evidence that it has killed nearly as many people. Maybe if somehow Trump wins, and can attribute his win to false right wing bullshit, and he's actually as bad as the MSM says, it would work as evidence that that's a realistic threat model. Then again, half a million dead bodies is a hard mountain to climb.