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Reading into the details, the rationale was because Zerohedge allegedly failed to manage their comment section to Google's standards for what other companies do

Reading into the details, the rationale was because Zerohedge allegedly failed to manage their comment section to Google's standards for what other companies do. In a parliamentary system, if you want to know what a government is doing, you listen to the opposition. They are almost always a bunch of clowns slinging mud, but when it sticks, they are miles ahead of the courtiers who populate the press gallery and newsrooms. ZH is one of the fastest news reaction sites on the web, with no pretense of objectivity other than as a reliable opposition party to the sanctimonious tone that has come to characterize the recent mainstream. I haven't seen that comment section in years, but it was so terrible it looked like people trying to plant things in it to discredit the site. ZH itself has always been farcically provocative, and at least %90 useless, but when they get it right, they really get it right. They are also to financial literacy for younger generations what punk was to music. This reflects more on Google (and previously, Twitter) and whoever else piles on than it does on ZH.

bmarquez 6y ago
> the rationale was because Zerohedge allegedly failed to manage their comment section to Google's standards for what other companies do Out of curiosity, is there a precedent for YouTube banning channels based on the channel comments and not the channel video? Sounds like ZH is being punished for the actions of third parties. As someone who follows finance, I like ZH. There is a ton of noise and little signal, but when they're right, they're right. I remember ZH commenters giving away free bitcoin back in 2013 calling it the next big thing.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  > Out of curiosity, is there a precedent for YouTube banning channels based on the channel comments and not the channel video? Sort of. They've disabled comments on whole swaths of videos, like videos featuring children. I wouldn't be surprised if they've disabled comments for other problematic channels. I'm not aware of any specific situations where they've banned channels outright as a result of problematic comment activity, but it wouldn't surprise me if it'd happened.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Youtube does also demonitize videos based on comments, rather than just the video's content.
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      Indeed. Comments can often bring to light aspects of a video which might not be obvious from watching the video without context. One example is videos which cater to obscure fetishes -- a video of a woman slowly blowing up and popping balloons isn't obviously sexual, for instance, but comments could make its intent more obvious.
      - White_Wolf 6y ago
        the way that the video is interpreted says a lot more about the person that wrote the comment than the creator.
        mrguyorama 6y ago
        No, in this case (inflation) it's an actual fetish and many "non-obvious" fetishes post their stuff on youtube instead of normal porn avenues. These videos are created and distributed with the intent of causing arousal
mercer 6y ago
I got 'into' ZH during the great recession and when things settled down I kind of forgot about it. But I was left with the impression of, as you say, a 'punk'-ish site that generally was more direct and even correct than most of the mainstream media. I vividly remember being obsessed with the news and reading MSM articles that would basically just quote Merkel or who the fuck else saying <x>, where ZH said <x> is stupid and wrong, and sure enough a few days later even Merkel (or who the fuck else) would backtrack on or directly contradict <x>. A while ago I checked out ZH again out of curiosity (or maybe some nostalgia because I was once again in 'read all the news' mode), and I would definitely not consider it a good source of news. And thankfully I've found better approaches to get an idea of what's going on. But your comment reminded me of a time in my life where I started 'properly' getting interested in current affairs and politics and whatnot, and the role ZH played in all that.
- Borish_Johnson 6y ago
  I am trying to get away from social media for my news, can you suggest anything? What have you found since ZH?
adventured 6y ago
No coincidence that both Twitter and Google have targeted ZeroHedge recently. The group-think platforms are making their move in tandem to smash anything they disagree with politically. Twitter recently reversed their de-platform move against ZeroHedge because they're about to get into deep legal shit for intentionally applying different standards to different users (ZH got nuked off of Twitter for a doxxing event (that wasn't a doxxing at all) that occurred on the ZH website, not on Twitter; but Twitter has ignored some other prominent cases of doxxing that actually happened on Twitter, including an infamous case by Spike Lee in which he publicly posted an incorrect address for George Zimmermann, which could have easily gotten someone killed). The ZeroHedge ban was a prominent and obvious instance of bias on the part of Twitter, so they had to clean it up.
- TylerE 6y ago
  You're kidding yourself if you don't recognize that ZH and The Federalist are both exceptionally irrational groupthink cults.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    > ZH and The Federalist are both exceptionally irrational groupthink cults So is Google.
  - Noos 6y ago
    The federalist isn't, it's articles are closer to national review but maybe more populist. It was a shock to see it was mentioned; it's not something like Unz or anything.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      Uh, the NE has done a great job of turning itself into a clown show of late...
BubRoss 6y ago
Zero hedge for some reason had a crazy downward spiral in their comments. Many years ago I don't remember them being out of the ordinary, but one or two years ago I checked back and they were full of insane alt right conspiracies and super pro trump adoration.
- downerending 6y ago
  The reason is that they're one of the few sites that doesn't moderate comments into the dust.
- collyw 6y ago
  Trump is your elected president (assuming yo are in the US), plenty of people voted for him, why would it be unusual that a lot of people are pro Trump? Especially considering the vast majority of the media seems to be against him.
  - BubRoss 6y ago
    Read the comments on zero hedge and see if you think they seem like real people reading the story and commenting.
downerending 6y ago
I read ZH pretty regularly. It carries a wide variety of opinions, and they often have the scoop many hours before any MSM. Yes, the comment section is useless. They don't do any real moderation, and it's filled with, well, a lot of inappropriate material. So, I don't read the comments. (They don't even show by default.) Is this really a good reason to "cancel" the site, though? Yeah, unmoderated free speech isn't pretty, but how much do you really hate it?
- irjustin 6y ago
  Unmoderated/fully-self-moderated free speech for political content trends towards extreme ends of either stance. I've seen it repeatedly in reddit, 4chan and others. Reddit attempts to walk the balance of site-moderation vs user-moderated and it's extremely difficult on that knife edge. The hope with ZH that it would span the political divide and allow proper discourse and exchange of ideas from both/any side of thinking. But without moderation, it trends towards mud-slinging, vitriol where arguments become so divided that it's no longer discourse.
  - downerending 6y ago
    Given the choice between Reddit moderation and ZH, I'll take the latter. Really, though, I rarely read the comments on either platform anymore.
  - nfoz 6y ago
    > But without moderation, it trends towards mud-slinging, vitriol where arguments become so divided that it's no longer discourse. I think of it as performance art of insane babble, satire, potty-humour. Should "proper discourse and exchange of ideas" be the only thing allowed to exist? (I have no problem with advertisers pulling away from it, either.)
    - wyclif 6y ago
      No site, not even ZH, has a worse comments section than YouTube. Seems to me that it's going to be really hard for Google to escape charges of hypocrisy by banning sites not because of news content but because of unorthodox and offensive comment threads.
diogenescynic 6y ago
I disagree with the punk analogy because Zerohedge always seemed decidedly right wing or libertarian at best. Always heard the Ron Paul types talking about it. It’s basically conspiracy theories for economics and finance.
- emmelaich 6y ago
  I tend to regard punks as libertarian. e.g. Ramones. But they're a mixed bag.
  - diogenescynic 6y ago
    Punk is mostly left-wing with a lot of anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, pro-feminist, anti-racist themes. There are exceptions to the rule (TSOL), but for the most part it was not right wing. They were on the far end of the spectrum to yuppies in the 80s and have only moved further left. Think of Dead Kennedys, Crass, and other classic punk like Bad Brains. There were definitely nazi-punk and other exceptions, but still a minority. Downvoters are free to explain why I’m wrong instead of downvoting since they are upset with facts.
    - Pinegulf 6y ago
      >anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, pro-feminist, anti-racist themes. Well, based on wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture) anti-authoritarian is right rest a bit more debatable. Putting punk into box is kind of anti-punk.
    - fwn 6y ago
      I've no idea about punk, but our parent didn't talk about wings but about libertarianism. I also believe that those themes you listed in your first sentence are there to imply that they are somehow inherently left-wing, which would be a partisan statement. For example: there is certainly an authoritarian left and an authoritarian right as well as an anti-authoritarian left and an anti-authoritarian right. But, more generally I think that "left" and "right" do more harm than good for describing political content dimensions.
emmelaich 6y ago
I don't read Zerohedge often and never read the comments. So I did just then, to check. For maximum controversy sake, I chose a Pat Buchanan article and looked at the comments sorted by 'worst' first. There's nothing there that is too outlandish or objectionable that I could see. The top rated (worst) comment was from a leftish perspective. Shrug.
- arcticfox 6y ago
  After some brief experimentation, sorting by 'best' might be a better strategy to find controversial comments. I also only checked one article (https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vote-mail https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vote-mail), and the 'worst' comment: > Vote by mail is the best option. The 'best' comment: > This November ends in civil war no matter who wins or loses. The other side wont accept the results because of vote by mail. I don't know about you, but I am glad I'm on the side with all the guns, ammo, land, tools, water, food production and tradesmen. They've got big cities and computers. Ha. Enjoy kiddos. Given that I live in a state with an incredibly successful history of vote by mail, I tend to love that worst comment and hate that 'best' comment.
  - emmelaich 6y ago
    Indeed! I realised that after posting. So I went back and sorted by 'best' and 'oldest'. But I think the comments server is getting hammered at the moment and did not return. That 'best' comment is extremely pessimistic, but nothing particularly objectionable.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      "Stochastic terrorism": if enough people talk up a civil war long enough, they can make it happen. Or at least get some mass shootings to happen. e.g. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/steven-carrillo-david-underwood-murder-santa-cruz-deputy-fatal-shooting-fatal-oakland-federal-building-shooting/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/steven-carrillo... or https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/09/three-nevada-boogaloo-bois-arrested-fbi-firebombing-plot https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/09/three-nevada-...
themark 6y ago
There must have been a thread that tipped the scales. Anyone know what it was?
onetimemanytime 6y ago
To be fair, I assume that a lot of Google advertisers would not want their ad next to that. So while it smacks of censorship (and it may be) there are also a lot of valid reasons to stop the ads. Google has to sorta police their ad partners' content.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  sounds like they should just have another bucket for more controversial properties like porn sites and this
  - onetimemanytime 6y ago
    I'm sure Google studied the numbers and not worth the taint. Google also removed a while back ads from domain parking and controversial content always is a checkbox away from being left ad-less.
- thu2111 6y ago
  There's tons of extreme left wing content out there too, Google never seems to care about that. I think the problem is that the left cancels, the right doesn't. So it's always the left attacking and it's always the right being attacked, but never attacking back. Doesn't seem stable or sustainable: this is how countries end up being taken over by communist revolutions run by extreme minorities.
  - midasz 6y ago
    > So it's always the left attacking and it's always the right being attacked, but never attacking back. Please tell me this is satire. Because I don't think being calling eachothers bullshit out on the internet is an issue. The problems begin when people take actions on it. You talk about 'attacking' but I can give you 2 examples from 2019 where right-wing extremists literally attacked. Those ideas were perpetuated in right-wing echochambers and eventually led to the deaths of many. - Christchurch mosque shootings - El Paso shooting Both had right-wing extremist motivations, citing garbage such as 'the Great Replacement'. But yeah, go ahead and crawl into the victim role because we don't want to read racist bullshit.
throwablePie 6y ago
I read ZH regularly for the nuggets of truth found nowhere else. They have changed a lot over the years. And, not for the better. The comment section used to be an equal opportunity Fight Club with omnidirectional contempt for mainstream orthodoxy regardless of source. The U.S., Chinese, and occasionally the Russian governments met with distrust and ridicule. So balanced was ZH that ZH (and HN) used to be available in China without a VPN. But now both ZH and HN are blocked there. But, over the past two years or so, ZH content has become much more partisan and white nationalist; and the comment section has morphed from Fight Club into Racist and Anti-Semitic Sewer nonpareil. The racism free-for-all in the comment section could be laid at the feet of non-moderation if ZH's comments section were indeed a free-fire zone. But ZH manually approves all commenter accounts and it consistently violates its stated policy on racism by refusing to remove blatantly racist comments or commenters. > Racism, to include any religious affiliation, will not be tolerated in ANY FORM on this site, including the disparagment of people in the comments section. > To report any form of discrimination, please right click on the comment number, copy the link to the comment, and send the comment link to abuse [at] zerohedge.com. > Any user found to be discriminating against ANY race, religion, or affiliation, will be banned immediately, and have their comments removed from the system. https://www.zerohedge.com/help/notice-racism https://www.zerohedge.com/help/notice-racism
- qtplatypus 6y ago
  I don't think being allowed in China without a VPN is a sign of being balanced.
  - throwablePie 6y ago
    It's a possible sign that the Chinese have not determined that the media outlet is being used for (semi-)automated astroturfing propaganda operations such as: Earnest Voice: > Operation Earnest Voice is an astroturfing campaign by the Federal government of the United States.[1] The aim of the initiative is to use sockpuppets to spread pro-American propaganda on social networking services based outside of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice and JTRIG: > The scope of the JTRIG's mission includes using "dirty tricks" to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt" enemies by "discrediting" them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ I look for balance in my news sources and since many powerful governments employ online propaganda ops, I look for signals of relative neutrality or non-bias. ZeroHedge used to have those in abundance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propa...
yedava 6y ago
It has been years since the media ecosystem split into multiple mainstreams. There is no one canonical Mainstream anymore. Several enterprising individuals have recognized this fact and established thriving careers catering to various viewpoints across every ideological spectrum you can think of. So it is interesting to see the staying power of the narrative of the canonical Mainstream vs the underdog whose voice can so easily be suppressed.
vl 6y ago
Orwell was afraid of censorship by the government. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t envision that we’ll voluntarily out-source censorship to the private corporation. Reality stranger than fiction.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Orwell was afraid of censorship by the government. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t envision that we’ll voluntarily out-source censorship to the private corporation. Private publishers pushing an agenda in what they choose to relay via their resources wasn't a new concept in Orwell’s time or one be was unfamiliar with, nor was audience pressure on publishers as to how they would exercise that power. It would have surprised Orwell not at all. Which can be easily seen, because he wrote an essay in which he addressed private censorship as a then-current issue, noting, in part: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
not_a_moth 6y ago
The timing of this is a day after Twitter reinstated ZH, admitting they had made an error banning them. Hard not to read this as a reaction to that.

bmarquez 6y ago

> the rationale was because Zerohedge allegedly failed to manage their comment section to Google's standards for what other companies do Out of curiosity, is there a precedent for YouTube banning channels based on the channel comments and not the channel video? Sounds like ZH is being punished for the actions of third parties. As someone who follows finance, I like ZH. There is a ton of noise and little signal, but when they're right, they're right. I remember ZH commenters giving away free bitcoin back in 2013 calling it the next big thing.

duskwuff 6y ago
> Out of curiosity, is there a precedent for YouTube banning channels based on the channel comments and not the channel video? Sort of. They've disabled comments on whole swaths of videos, like videos featuring children. I wouldn't be surprised if they've disabled comments for other problematic channels. I'm not aware of any specific situations where they've banned channels outright as a result of problematic comment activity, but it wouldn't surprise me if it'd happened.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Youtube does also demonitize videos based on comments, rather than just the video's content.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Indeed. Comments can often bring to light aspects of a video which might not be obvious from watching the video without context. One example is videos which cater to obscure fetishes -- a video of a woman slowly blowing up and popping balloons isn't obviously sexual, for instance, but comments could make its intent more obvious.
    - White_Wolf 6y ago
      the way that the video is interpreted says a lot more about the person that wrote the comment than the creator.
      - mrguyorama 6y ago
        No, in this case (inflation) it's an actual fetish and many "non-obvious" fetishes post their stuff on youtube instead of normal porn avenues. These videos are created and distributed with the intent of causing arousal

mercer 6y ago

I got 'into' ZH during the great recession and when things settled down I kind of forgot about it. But I was left with the impression of, as you say, a 'punk'-ish site that generally was more direct and even correct than most of the mainstream media. I vividly remember being obsessed with the news and reading MSM articles that would basically just quote Merkel or who the fuck else saying <x>, where ZH said <x> is stupid and wrong, and sure enough a few days later even Merkel (or who the fuck else) would backtrack on or directly contradict <x>. A while ago I checked out ZH again out of curiosity (or maybe some nostalgia because I was once again in 'read all the news' mode), and I would definitely not consider it a good source of news. And thankfully I've found better approaches to get an idea of what's going on. But your comment reminded me of a time in my life where I started 'properly' getting interested in current affairs and politics and whatnot, and the role ZH played in all that.

Borish_Johnson 6y ago
I am trying to get away from social media for my news, can you suggest anything? What have you found since ZH?

adventured 6y ago

No coincidence that both Twitter and Google have targeted ZeroHedge recently. The group-think platforms are making their move in tandem to smash anything they disagree with politically. Twitter recently reversed their de-platform move against ZeroHedge because they're about to get into deep legal shit for intentionally applying different standards to different users (ZH got nuked off of Twitter for a doxxing event (that wasn't a doxxing at all) that occurred on the ZH website, not on Twitter; but Twitter has ignored some other prominent cases of doxxing that actually happened on Twitter, including an infamous case by Spike Lee in which he publicly posted an incorrect address for George Zimmermann, which could have easily gotten someone killed). The ZeroHedge ban was a prominent and obvious instance of bias on the part of Twitter, so they had to clean it up.

TylerE 6y ago
You're kidding yourself if you don't recognize that ZH and The Federalist are both exceptionally irrational groupthink cults.
- m0zg 6y ago
  > ZH and The Federalist are both exceptionally irrational groupthink cults So is Google.
- Noos 6y ago
  The federalist isn't, it's articles are closer to national review but maybe more populist. It was a shock to see it was mentioned; it's not something like Unz or anything.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Uh, the NE has done a great job of turning itself into a clown show of late...

BubRoss 6y ago

Zero hedge for some reason had a crazy downward spiral in their comments. Many years ago I don't remember them being out of the ordinary, but one or two years ago I checked back and they were full of insane alt right conspiracies and super pro trump adoration.

downerending 6y ago
The reason is that they're one of the few sites that doesn't moderate comments into the dust.
collyw 6y ago
Trump is your elected president (assuming yo are in the US), plenty of people voted for him, why would it be unusual that a lot of people are pro Trump? Especially considering the vast majority of the media seems to be against him.
- BubRoss 6y ago
  Read the comments on zero hedge and see if you think they seem like real people reading the story and commenting.

downerending 6y ago

I read ZH pretty regularly. It carries a wide variety of opinions, and they often have the scoop many hours before any MSM. Yes, the comment section is useless. They don't do any real moderation, and it's filled with, well, a lot of inappropriate material. So, I don't read the comments. (They don't even show by default.) Is this really a good reason to "cancel" the site, though? Yeah, unmoderated free speech isn't pretty, but how much do you really hate it?

irjustin 6y ago
Unmoderated/fully-self-moderated free speech for political content trends towards extreme ends of either stance. I've seen it repeatedly in reddit, 4chan and others. Reddit attempts to walk the balance of site-moderation vs user-moderated and it's extremely difficult on that knife edge. The hope with ZH that it would span the political divide and allow proper discourse and exchange of ideas from both/any side of thinking. But without moderation, it trends towards mud-slinging, vitriol where arguments become so divided that it's no longer discourse.
- downerending 6y ago
  Given the choice between Reddit moderation and ZH, I'll take the latter. Really, though, I rarely read the comments on either platform anymore.
- nfoz 6y ago
  > But without moderation, it trends towards mud-slinging, vitriol where arguments become so divided that it's no longer discourse. I think of it as performance art of insane babble, satire, potty-humour. Should "proper discourse and exchange of ideas" be the only thing allowed to exist? (I have no problem with advertisers pulling away from it, either.)
  - wyclif 6y ago
    No site, not even ZH, has a worse comments section than YouTube. Seems to me that it's going to be really hard for Google to escape charges of hypocrisy by banning sites not because of news content but because of unorthodox and offensive comment threads.

diogenescynic 6y ago

I disagree with the punk analogy because Zerohedge always seemed decidedly right wing or libertarian at best. Always heard the Ron Paul types talking about it. It’s basically conspiracy theories for economics and finance.

emmelaich 6y ago
I tend to regard punks as libertarian. e.g. Ramones. But they're a mixed bag.
- diogenescynic 6y ago
  Punk is mostly left-wing with a lot of anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, pro-feminist, anti-racist themes. There are exceptions to the rule (TSOL), but for the most part it was not right wing. They were on the far end of the spectrum to yuppies in the 80s and have only moved further left. Think of Dead Kennedys, Crass, and other classic punk like Bad Brains. There were definitely nazi-punk and other exceptions, but still a minority. Downvoters are free to explain why I’m wrong instead of downvoting since they are upset with facts.
  - Pinegulf 6y ago
    >anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, pro-feminist, anti-racist themes. Well, based on wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture) anti-authoritarian is right rest a bit more debatable. Putting punk into box is kind of anti-punk.
  - fwn 6y ago
    I've no idea about punk, but our parent didn't talk about wings but about libertarianism. I also believe that those themes you listed in your first sentence are there to imply that they are somehow inherently left-wing, which would be a partisan statement. For example: there is certainly an authoritarian left and an authoritarian right as well as an anti-authoritarian left and an anti-authoritarian right. But, more generally I think that "left" and "right" do more harm than good for describing political content dimensions.

emmelaich 6y ago

I don't read Zerohedge often and never read the comments. So I did just then, to check. For maximum controversy sake, I chose a Pat Buchanan article and looked at the comments sorted by 'worst' first. There's nothing there that is too outlandish or objectionable that I could see. The top rated (worst) comment was from a leftish perspective. Shrug.

arcticfox 6y ago
After some brief experimentation, sorting by 'best' might be a better strategy to find controversial comments. I also only checked one article (https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vote-mail https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vote-mail), and the 'worst' comment: > Vote by mail is the best option. The 'best' comment: > This November ends in civil war no matter who wins or loses. The other side wont accept the results because of vote by mail. I don't know about you, but I am glad I'm on the side with all the guns, ammo, land, tools, water, food production and tradesmen. They've got big cities and computers. Ha. Enjoy kiddos. Given that I live in a state with an incredibly successful history of vote by mail, I tend to love that worst comment and hate that 'best' comment.
- emmelaich 6y ago
  Indeed! I realised that after posting. So I went back and sorted by 'best' and 'oldest'. But I think the comments server is getting hammered at the moment and did not return. That 'best' comment is extremely pessimistic, but nothing particularly objectionable.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    "Stochastic terrorism": if enough people talk up a civil war long enough, they can make it happen. Or at least get some mass shootings to happen. e.g. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/steven-carrillo-david-underwood-murder-santa-cruz-deputy-fatal-shooting-fatal-oakland-federal-building-shooting/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/steven-carrillo... or https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/09/three-nevada-boogaloo-bois-arrested-fbi-firebombing-plot https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/09/three-nevada-...

themark 6y ago

There must have been a thread that tipped the scales. Anyone know what it was?

onetimemanytime 6y ago

To be fair, I assume that a lot of Google advertisers would not want their ad next to that. So while it smacks of censorship (and it may be) there are also a lot of valid reasons to stop the ads. Google has to sorta police their ad partners' content.

andromeduck 6y ago
sounds like they should just have another bucket for more controversial properties like porn sites and this
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  I'm sure Google studied the numbers and not worth the taint. Google also removed a while back ads from domain parking and controversial content always is a checkbox away from being left ad-less.
thu2111 6y ago
There's tons of extreme left wing content out there too, Google never seems to care about that. I think the problem is that the left cancels, the right doesn't. So it's always the left attacking and it's always the right being attacked, but never attacking back. Doesn't seem stable or sustainable: this is how countries end up being taken over by communist revolutions run by extreme minorities.
- midasz 6y ago
  > So it's always the left attacking and it's always the right being attacked, but never attacking back. Please tell me this is satire. Because I don't think being calling eachothers bullshit out on the internet is an issue. The problems begin when people take actions on it. You talk about 'attacking' but I can give you 2 examples from 2019 where right-wing extremists literally attacked. Those ideas were perpetuated in right-wing echochambers and eventually led to the deaths of many. - Christchurch mosque shootings - El Paso shooting Both had right-wing extremist motivations, citing garbage such as 'the Great Replacement'. But yeah, go ahead and crawl into the victim role because we don't want to read racist bullshit.

throwablePie 6y ago

I read ZH regularly for the nuggets of truth found nowhere else. They have changed a lot over the years. And, not for the better. The comment section used to be an equal opportunity Fight Club with omnidirectional contempt for mainstream orthodoxy regardless of source. The U.S., Chinese, and occasionally the Russian governments met with distrust and ridicule. So balanced was ZH that ZH (and HN) used to be available in China without a VPN. But now both ZH and HN are blocked there. But, over the past two years or so, ZH content has become much more partisan and white nationalist; and the comment section has morphed from Fight Club into Racist and Anti-Semitic Sewer nonpareil. The racism free-for-all in the comment section could be laid at the feet of non-moderation if ZH's comments section were indeed a free-fire zone. But ZH manually approves all commenter accounts and it consistently violates its stated policy on racism by refusing to remove blatantly racist comments or commenters. > Racism, to include any religious affiliation, will not be tolerated in ANY FORM on this site, including the disparagment of people in the comments section. > To report any form of discrimination, please right click on the comment number, copy the link to the comment, and send the comment link to abuse [at] zerohedge.com. > Any user found to be discriminating against ANY race, religion, or affiliation, will be banned immediately, and have their comments removed from the system. https://www.zerohedge.com/help/notice-racism https://www.zerohedge.com/help/notice-racism

qtplatypus 6y ago
I don't think being allowed in China without a VPN is a sign of being balanced.
- throwablePie 6y ago
  It's a possible sign that the Chinese have not determined that the media outlet is being used for (semi-)automated astroturfing propaganda operations such as: Earnest Voice: > Operation Earnest Voice is an astroturfing campaign by the Federal government of the United States.[1] The aim of the initiative is to use sockpuppets to spread pro-American propaganda on social networking services based outside of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice and JTRIG: > The scope of the JTRIG's mission includes using "dirty tricks" to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt" enemies by "discrediting" them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intelligence_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ I look for balance in my news sources and since many powerful governments employ online propaganda ops, I look for signals of relative neutrality or non-bias. ZeroHedge used to have those in abundance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propa...

yedava 6y ago

It has been years since the media ecosystem split into multiple mainstreams. There is no one canonical Mainstream anymore. Several enterprising individuals have recognized this fact and established thriving careers catering to various viewpoints across every ideological spectrum you can think of. So it is interesting to see the staying power of the narrative of the canonical Mainstream vs the underdog whose voice can so easily be suppressed.

vl 6y ago

Orwell was afraid of censorship by the government. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t envision that we’ll voluntarily out-source censorship to the private corporation. Reality stranger than fiction.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Orwell was afraid of censorship by the government. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t envision that we’ll voluntarily out-source censorship to the private corporation. Private publishers pushing an agenda in what they choose to relay via their resources wasn't a new concept in Orwell’s time or one be was unfamiliar with, nor was audience pressure on publishers as to how they would exercise that power. It would have surprised Orwell not at all. Which can be easily seen, because he wrote an essay in which he addressed private censorship as a then-current issue, noting, in part: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

not_a_moth 6y ago

The timing of this is a day after Twitter reinstated ZH, admitting they had made an error banning them. Hard not to read this as a reaction to that.