5 ms·
I'm astonished they accepted Breitbart in the first place. When I first heard about it, I checked it out and literally the first discussion in their comment sec
by JohnStrangeII 8y ago
I'm astonished they accepted Breitbart in the first place. When I first heard about it, I checked it out and literally the first discussion in their comment section was about how to most efficiently gas the maximum number of jews in the US. I'm not kidding.
Breitbart is not the only problem of people who read it, many of them are mentally ill (schizophrenia) or they were raised in a way that makes it almost impossible to discern facts from fiction. Before you argue about that, I can guarantee you that I would - and in fact do - say the same about similar radical left-wing "news sites".
One problem at Wikipedia is that there is generally not enough vetting of the citation sources.
To be fair, that's not entirely their fault, because especially in the US there is a vast network of fake science and news sites powered by lobbyists, and it takes a substantial amount of effort to discern these from reputable sources. I've seen some interesting network analysis of the lobby sites of the US oil industry, and have to say that I wouldn't have been able to easily recognize their think-tanks and science information sites as fake. They're well-disguised and you have to look at interconnections, board members, and funding sources to find out who is really behind them. For example, some of them looked like legitimate sources about green energy technologies, but were in reality designed to poison the climate change debate and further the interests of oil concerns.
Conclusion: Don't focus too much on Breitbart, there are plenty of other seemingly legitimate associations, news sites, institutes and think tanks whose primary purpose is to bullshit people, and they are funded from the left and right.
- tomohawk 8y agoYou're making an extraordinary claim here. Care to provide a link backing it up? If not, this is just a slur. You're implying that people who go to breitbart are mentally ill. Maybe they need help? Should be committed to an institution for their views? That worked out so well in the Soviet Union...
- JohnStrangeII 8y agoYes, many of them are mentally ill, which is pretty obvious if you would actually care to check out their comments on Breitbart, which I have done. I stand by my word, everything I've said about Breitbart is true, whether you like it or not. You can downvote me as much as you want, fact is that Breitbart is a hate speech site that also happens to copy & pastes news from other sources in order to disguise their real purpose. Anyone who thinks there could be a "news site" with a more right wing bias than Fox News is seriously deluded, because the primary goal of news reporting is not to politically influence the public towards radical anti-democratic world views and create chaos. Just to make this clear, I'm not a US citizen and couldn't care less about Breitbart's fake news if Bannon hadn't recently announced that he wants to invest money to focus his propaganda efforts on the EU with the goal of disrupting the European Union and instigate chaos in Europe. There is no need to write indirect slurs about Breitbart, the truth suffices to discredit this site. But if you want a real slur, no problem. Yes, the people who run Breitbart are absolutely despicable scum. Would you read an ISIS "news site" to get your "news"? If the answer is no, then you also shouldn't read utter crap like Beitbart.
- WilliamEdward 8y agoOk, but where is your source that they have schizophrenia?
- 13415 8y agoUnfortunately many conspiracy theorists suffer from schizophrenia, a tendency to believe in conspiracies is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia, and the Breitbart site comments section is full of conspiracy theories - or at least used to be (see below). Note that I said "many" not "all" in the original post, and that was based on checking their comment section in 2016. Since then I haven't checked whether they have moderation now and whether this has changed, as you may imagine I have better things to do. Note: Same poster as OP, just from a different account.
- ohhellno 8y agoMultiple personalities?
- foolzcrow 8y agoCNN said it was illegal for Americans to read about Hillary's crimes in the Wikipedia. Your Russia scam failed now your rape scam failed too. Keep taking L's we love it.
- blahblahthrow 8y agoIt seems unhelpful to write off Breitbart readers as unaware of reality. They may be uncritical readers of the news, and they may have deplorable beliefs, but many sane, rational people believe terrible things. Or they're willing to associate with people who believe terrible things to further their own agenda, and be complicit in those terrible things.
- 13415 8y agoI agree in hindsight that my comment was unhelpful. The anectdote about the "gassing the jews" thread was true, that was in 2016, but instead of bashing on breitbart I should have emphasized more that there are plenty of more legitimate looking sources of disinformation, especially in the US where lobbying has such a long and powerful tradition. That was the main point I tried to make, but my disdain for Steve Bannon and his entourage got in my way. (Posted from another account, because I changed my machine, but I'm the same as OP.)
- ohhellno 8y agoMany HN posters are mentally ill, too.