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The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of inform

The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all. There have been multiple times when I've seen an insane video of something happening spreading around Twitter or WorldStar or some other "raw video" aggregation site, and then I'll see it on the NY Post, and that's it. The other major news sites will only show edited versions of the raw video with their own commentary playing over it, or they won't release it at all. As a theoretical example- Immediately after event: Twitter: OH MY GOD look at this kid driving a schoolbus! <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus> Two hours after event: NY Post: Child seen driving school bus <35 second video of a kid driving a schoolbus> Twelve hours after event: NY Times: Child Arrested for School Bus Joyride <3 minute video, containing 18 seconds of footage from original video with expert analysis diagrammed on top>

edmundsauto 6y ago
Is the "time to publication" a useful metric, when the cost is accuracy? Once something incorrect is published, it has a lot more weight than a retraction/correction.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I agree with you but I don't think that was the real essence of their criticism. It was more about releasing actual primary sources instead of a heavily edited version of their own narrative with very little of the prinary source remaining.
- Lammy 6y ago
  Tabloids aren’t new. Ever checked out the headlines in print at a grocery store check-out? If the NYPost want to be The Publication Who Cried Wolf and everything that comes with that reputation, let them.
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    Weren't they still able to do it on their own properties? Twitter has decided it doesn't want to amplify this kind of content, that seems reasonable.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      If that’s what you need to call it to be able to justify censorship to yourself, sure.
- quacked 6y ago
  It's not- I should have clarified in my comment. I was just showing an example timeline. The child commenter with the bit about the narrative and primary source removal is correct.
dimgl 6y ago
> The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven Implying that every other major MSM organization doesn't do the same exact garbage and aren't deserving of the same treatment. Edit: the point is that rules should not favor one MSM corporation over the other. It should be neutral.
- tbenst 6y ago
  This equivocation of news sources is how misinformation spreads. Look at how WSJ handled same story vs NYP. WSJ is indeed more reputable as is NYTimes
  - andrewem 6y ago
    Here's the New York Times article about how the Wall Street Journal's handling of this compared with the New York Post's. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-biden-wall-street-journal-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
  - dimgl 6y ago
    I'm not equivocating any news source. My stance on this is that there should be NO censorship, period.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  The New York Times once allowed itself to be used as a mouthpiece for Stalin, publishing Walter Duranty's denials of famine in Ukraine. They didn't come clean on this until 1990: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-trenchcoats-then-and-now.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-not... More recently, they allowed themselves to be used as the uncritical mouthpiece of the American federal government when they were starting an illegal war predicated on lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller If the NYTimes isn't pure, then surely none are. Genocide denial is particularly egregious, but at least they eventually came clean. I still read the NYTimes more than any other paper, but we must always remember to keep an open mind and to never be too trusting of what any newspaper says.
gabereiser 6y ago
Journalistic integrity means vetting sources of “news”, especially in this day in age when so many videos are just clips out of context. I completely agree with Twitter keeping NY Post account disabled. Until they can prove to be a real news source, they are tabloid fake news. The fact they they will publish articles other news sites won’t means not that they are “The Rogue News Organization in a sea of Liberal Media”, but more “They post bullshit that’s intended to incite culture war, not report the news”.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  Twitter shouldn't decide for me what I may or may not read.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Twitter shouldn't decide for me what I may or may not read. Of course, but Twitter doesn't do that and never has. You are still very able to read what the New York Post writes by typing https://nypost.com/ https://nypost.com/ into your browser, and Twitter's not going to stop you from doing that.
  - timdev2 6y ago
    Twitter has a 1st Amendment right to decide what you may or may not read on Twitter.
    - gabereiser 6y ago
      exactly, a tweet is a platform specific mode of communication that shouldn't be covered by one's 1st amendment rights. You have the right to say what you want, Twitter has a right to not let you on Twitter.
  - vel0city 6y ago
    Twitter doesn't decide for you what you may or may not read. I imagine you got here from some path other than Twitter. Therefore, you reading this reply to your comment comes irrespective to Twitter deciding what is allowable on their platform. If the moderators of this site decide my comment is out of line with the standards this site tries to uphold, does this make me unable to communicate entirely? No, I'm still able to write whatever nonesense on plenty of other websites. Or I can host my own website where I can freely post whatever nonsense I choose to post. All the way up to the point where no ISP will offer me an internet connection or all the regional number organizations refuse to give me even a single IP address.
tomp 6y ago
> The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all. Interesting... after reading this, I immediately thought: same as Zero Hedge (also often criticised). But then again, that shouldn't be a surprise - basically a lower bar (on accuracy) should result both in lower reaction time, and in more false positives. A comment to a sibling comment: I personally find lower time-to-publish immensely valuable - I prefer to assess the accuracy of news stories myself (usually considering the original source and how aligned their interests are with the published information), and I find almost no value in the supposedly "trustworthy" media because they're not actually trustworthy to me (besides the obvious political bias, there's also plenty of high-profile non-culture-wars fake news, e.g. Iraqi WMD, Bloomberg's China spying debacle, the current (non-)coverage of Assange, ...). If there's anything I've learned in the past 10 or so years, is that the "experts" are barely any better than myself at discerning what's true or not, and much less trustworthy.
- olivermarks 6y ago
  Yikes - I've found Zerohedge to be scarily accurate over time! Depends on your political allegiances I suppose but my mother taught me when i was kid to always read the financial press - 'follow the money to find out what the b@stards are thinking' was her old line. (she used to work for the UK tory party in the '50's, despised them). ZH is what many city of London and wall street minions read live on their bloomberg terminals, for better or worse... Separately I view Twitter as breaking section 230 free speech regulatory agreements in meddling with what they 'publish'
  - droffel 6y ago
    > scarily accurate As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions. They have a consistently bearish bias (which rarely seems to play out), and ties to the Russian state, which brings into question the motivations behind their criticisms of the US (not that I'm the biggest fan myself). All of that said, ZH introduced me to a lot of economic literature and concepts I likely wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. They touch on niche subjects constantly, and I have to give them credit for broadening my understanding of economics in general.
cma 6y ago
After the Covington stuff, isn't it a good thing they are taking more time to figure out the context around short inflammatory videos?
- tathougies 6y ago
  No. Unless they want to be sued, like with the Covington kid...
- quacked 6y ago
  I didn't mention it in the original comment because I didn't want the heat, but the Covington event was actually the exact event I was thinking of. By the time I saw the fully unedited raw videos of the guy and the kid, I'd already seen dozens of memes and many official news articles/videos comparing the "Covington Kid" to anti-protestors during the Civil Rights movement. The full, unedited videos show the truth; it was a complete non-event. Totally changed my perspective on the kid and the protestor; they went from symbols of a struggle for rights to two people who happened to run into each other in Washington, D.C.
jkingsbery 6y ago
As someone who reads the NYPost regularly, I find that it's an interesting outlet. It publishes a lot of "tabloid" stuff that's worth skipping - celebrity sitings, silly videos that went virals about cats or people trying to escape the police by doing cartwheels, and outlandish headlines. But if you read certain sections (Sports, Business, Metro), the articles are written as they would be in any other outlet (with the exception that maybe the Opinion & Editorial section is more conservative leaning than other NY newspapers).
cjjuice 6y ago
It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false. Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. But then, everywhere on the platform.. "make a plan to vote". So you trust people to vote but don't trust them with the unfiltered information so they can inform themselves without outside intervention?
- cycrutchfield 6y ago
  If social media companies don't want to be used as transmission vectors of obvious foreign political influence, then they don't have to be. Just like if they don't want to be used as transmission vectors of pornography or any other type of content, then they don't have to be. In both cases it requires setting some sort of content standard and making decisions about whether the content meets that standard.
  - cjjuice 6y ago
    If it is truly foreign influence, then it is on the FBI/DoJ to do the investigation and publicly declare it as such and order it to be taken down. Social Media companies are not equipped to make that distinction and should not do so.
    - cycrutchfield 6y ago
      "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes"
    - Splendor 6y ago
      Are you arguing that social media companies should not remove posts and instead let normal individuals determine what's true; while also arguing that billion-dollar social media companies are not capable of determining what's true?
- La1n 6y ago
tathougies 6y ago
I mean, CNN and WaPo have admitted to lying about Nick Sandmann, but their accounts are still there. Clearly, Twitter is not interested in whether news outlets sometimes publish fake news.
guscost 6y ago
That is absolutely not why Twitter acted in this case, and everyone knows it.
- La1n 6y ago
  You don't have to imply things, it's more useful to the discussion to just say it. Do say the quiet part out loud so people can actually interact with a comment like this.
  - guscost 6y ago
    Sure: Twitter is trying to tip the election in favor of Biden. When the shoe was on the other foot, they never blocked news outlets (no matter how trashy) that promoted anonymous accusations without evidence, or shared illegally-obtained information. The laptop and its contents seem to have been obtained legally in this case, and even if the whole thing reeks of parallel construction, they are not even honestly enforcing their stated rule (which again, does not seem to apply when it benefits the other faction).
    - ganoushoreilly 6y ago
      Further, nothing in the story has actually been disputed yet Either. That's where i'm conflicted here. If it were a flat out lie, I'd say go for it, ban it. But as is stands, No one has denied, they've even gone as far as to say they won't deny them. We've had the FBI confirm the laptop. We've had one of the business partner Confirm the contents of the email. We know that multiple investigations are going on State / Federal level. This is news worthy, regardless of what side you're on. There's 0 chance that they block any negative controversial stories about the Trump campaign or it's related parties. It's a foolish place to stand your ground, when the outcome is going to be far worse for all sides than if they'd just let it die off naturally. The controversy itself has now given some on the right another reason to double down on their positions. It's divisive by the nature of the action.
influx 6y ago
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the NY Times pushing false information that led to the second Iraq War? Should they get penalized on Twitter after pushing a narrative that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths? From the NY Times itself (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...) "But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge. On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified."
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I don't think there's any evidence that the times purposefully published information that they strongly suspected to be untrue. That is what the post did. The times made mistakes, but they admitted it and apologized, as seen in the link you posted. The post maliciously overruled their own newsroom to post fake news.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    What fake news did the NY Post publish?
- munk-a 6y ago
  I think the pro-establishment lean of media back in the day (and advocacy for the Iraq war is a great example) is really the heart of the problems we've got today. Society and media is reacting to the overly heavy censorship of established platforms - but what we're seeing today with widely embraced conspiracy theories is pretty dangerous to society. Was the Iraq war a one-off event where media held far too much trust and abused it? Is it just the continuation of a pattern of media being used as a tool of the state (either wittingly or unwittingly)? I'm leaning toward the second option but I still don't know if the inherent pro-establishment bias you get with large media conglomerates outweighs the benefits of vetted news. The only thing I can say for sure is that public media funding (like PBS and the like) to subsidize the cost of media companies ends up having rather little effect on those outlets' biases, while forcing media to depend on corporate sponsorship absolutely does corrupt the messaging delivered to the populace at large. So I'm not certain what our media landscape should look like, but I'm definitely against people who decry any government sponsorship of news as being political mouthpieces - public radio and tv should form part of our news digest, their funding is diverse enough to allow them to freely criticize both national and local governments and while it probably won't yield the really valuable investigative journalism we need to fight corruption it's definitely part of the solution.
koolba 6y ago
Nothing in your comment says the information is fake or false. In fact, the Biden campaign and his son Hunter have not denied any of the information either. Given that Twitter has allowed people to publish anything and everything about Trump regardless of source (or lack thereof), this is a clear cut case of bias to push their preferred candidate. A different take on the same idea, Google now adds "fact checks" when searching for videos of Biden, in his own words, describing his flip flopping position on fracking. Try it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biden+fracking https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biden+fracking I'd love to know what other fact checks they've added. I can't find an explicit list. I submitted an Ask HN to see if anyone knew how to get that list. But that post was flagged as some people may feel that information is too dangerous to disclose. Both actions are clearly driven by bias. Whether they're allowed to do it on a private platform is a separate topic. But you can't claim to be for free speech when the only speech you suppress or "clarify" is that which is negative to your candidate of choice.
- ganoushoreilly 6y ago
  You're allowed free speech as long as its our free speech.
fuckyah 6y ago
What happened to freedom of press? This is clearly censorship. Period.
bastardoperator 6y ago
It's all headlines and nothing more. Buzzfeed and TMZ use an identical model. The fact they published the recent laptop story means they don't care at all about integrity or facts. Money is king! We need to reinstate the fairness doctrine to restore honesty in media. The "news" we have today used to be called "entertainment" and half the people on cable news are opinionated talk show hosts if you can even stand to watch any of it.
varispeed 6y ago
This still reeks of hypocrisy. For example almost any large and "reputable" outlet writes outright lies about drugs and their effects or use them to sensationalise the event (for example if there was an accident there is almost always a mention that someone had cannabis in their system even if it was obviously not related to anything). This is extremely harmful as it creates stigma for people who need cannabis or other drugs as a medicine and often they cannot access it at all because lawmaker believe what these outlets write. So when Twitter blocks someone because they think their reporting is dishonest, I don't understand why they won't block all outlets that spew lies.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  There isn't a binary outcome here. Twitter can stop an account which causes harm without being immediately required to block all accounts which may cause harm.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    I reported many Tweets from "reputable" news outlets that have this type of propaganda and lies and literally none were addressed. That makes me think Twitter has an agenda that is not very nice.
symlinkk 6y ago
A lot of people are missing your point, which is a good one - that big name news outlets rarely ever post raw, unedited videos. This is a shame in my opinion.
- quacked 6y ago
  Thanks. Personally, I think that access to raw, unedited videos (that more often than not do exist these days) would clear up the majority of modern political controversies. Often, either the truth becomes clear, or the video disqualifies itself as being a source of news.
duxup 6y ago
The NYT had an article about how the questionable accusations targeting Hunter Biden was supposed to be published by the Wall Street Journal. But WSJ was taking its time, skeptical of the story, and then the Post ran with it... WSJ never ran the story as was intended. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-biden-wall-street-journal-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid... But yeah I've seen the post basically copy and paste accusations as fact (without claiming they're facts, but not qualifying them in any way) about all sorts of things.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Yet everything you list was never enough for Twitter to lock their account. But something against this political candidate was... I'm left leaning but honestly if we want to win the bias needs to be more subtle.
underwater 6y ago
I'm not expert, but I did work in the same office as journalists from a more respectable news organisation. News rooms are not trying to be Twitter. The goal is not to gather and disseminate information as fast as possible. They're more interested in telling a coherent story around a news event. So they might hold off while they verify or find supporting information. Who was the child? What was the outcome? Was anyone hurt? There were multiple occasions when the organisation had information about a breaking news event but held off rushing to publish while, I assume, they verified information. One story that stuck in my mind was the murder of a woman and her children by her estranged husband. First reported as a car fire, and then later confirmed as a murder suicide. Ultimately no information was withheld, but care was taken to make sure the event was not turned into salacious clickbait by publishing rumours or rushing to be first. This seemed counterintuitive to me, but at the same time, what do we gain by having that kind of news arrive more quickly? It's not actionable information.
reaperducer 6y ago
Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up. It's not about the quality of the Post's journalism. It's about whether Twitter should restrict it. I've been reading the Post off and on for the last 40 years, and you are correct that it is a rag. But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter. Not every article is going to be to your taste, or ape your point of view. And as newspapers go, it is very sensational. This is not a secret. Everyone knows what to expect when they pick up a copy. And they read it with that filter in mind. This is literacy 101. But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer. It isn't. It's a legitimate newspaper, whether you like it or not. 99.9% of the Post criticism I see on HN is from people who have never lived in New York. Never actually read the Post, or any other newspaper. They just amplify and repeat the echo chamber hyperbole they see from other people who have never read the Post. Some of the most vocal have stated in other threads that they are Twitter employees. If I have to choose between the Post being an information gatekeeper and Twitter, I'll go with the Post every time.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up. It's not about the quality of the Post's journalism. It's about whether Twitter should restrict it. Twitter is a private company. They constantly, if unevenly, exercise their right to ban hate speech and what causes it. > But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter. Twitter is not a newspaper. Or a news organization. It's a social network. > But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer. That's debatable. You admit it's a rag, that publishes some of the lowest quality journalism. It's also very politically biased, in a way that damages the very fabric of society. Restricting its reach is the responsible thing to do in their case. As for the National Enquirer, nobody takes them seriously or call it a legitimate newspaper. That's why it's important to hold the NY Post to a higher standard.
  - kshacker 6y ago

edmundsauto 6y ago

Is the "time to publication" a useful metric, when the cost is accuracy? Once something incorrect is published, it has a lot more weight than a retraction/correction.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
I agree with you but I don't think that was the real essence of their criticism. It was more about releasing actual primary sources instead of a heavily edited version of their own narrative with very little of the prinary source remaining.
Lammy 6y ago
Tabloids aren’t new. Ever checked out the headlines in print at a grocery store check-out? If the NYPost want to be The Publication Who Cried Wolf and everything that comes with that reputation, let them.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Weren't they still able to do it on their own properties? Twitter has decided it doesn't want to amplify this kind of content, that seems reasonable.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    If that’s what you need to call it to be able to justify censorship to yourself, sure.
quacked 6y ago
It's not- I should have clarified in my comment. I was just showing an example timeline. The child commenter with the bit about the narrative and primary source removal is correct.

dimgl 6y ago

> The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven Implying that every other major MSM organization doesn't do the same exact garbage and aren't deserving of the same treatment. Edit: the point is that rules should not favor one MSM corporation over the other. It should be neutral.

tbenst 6y ago
This equivocation of news sources is how misinformation spreads. Look at how WSJ handled same story vs NYP. WSJ is indeed more reputable as is NYTimes
- andrewem 6y ago
  Here's the New York Times article about how the Wall Street Journal's handling of this compared with the New York Post's. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-biden-wall-street-journal-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
- dimgl 6y ago
  I'm not equivocating any news source. My stance on this is that there should be NO censorship, period.
bigbubba 6y ago
The New York Times once allowed itself to be used as a mouthpiece for Stalin, publishing Walter Duranty's denials of famine in Ukraine. They didn't come clean on this until 1990: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-trenchcoats-then-and-now.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-not... More recently, they allowed themselves to be used as the uncritical mouthpiece of the American federal government when they were starting an illegal war predicated on lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller If the NYTimes isn't pure, then surely none are. Genocide denial is particularly egregious, but at least they eventually came clean. I still read the NYTimes more than any other paper, but we must always remember to keep an open mind and to never be too trusting of what any newspaper says.

gabereiser 6y ago

Journalistic integrity means vetting sources of “news”, especially in this day in age when so many videos are just clips out of context. I completely agree with Twitter keeping NY Post account disabled. Until they can prove to be a real news source, they are tabloid fake news. The fact they they will publish articles other news sites won’t means not that they are “The Rogue News Organization in a sea of Liberal Media”, but more “They post bullshit that’s intended to incite culture war, not report the news”.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
Twitter shouldn't decide for me what I may or may not read.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Twitter shouldn't decide for me what I may or may not read. Of course, but Twitter doesn't do that and never has. You are still very able to read what the New York Post writes by typing https://nypost.com/ https://nypost.com/ into your browser, and Twitter's not going to stop you from doing that.
- timdev2 6y ago
  Twitter has a 1st Amendment right to decide what you may or may not read on Twitter.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    exactly, a tweet is a platform specific mode of communication that shouldn't be covered by one's 1st amendment rights. You have the right to say what you want, Twitter has a right to not let you on Twitter.
- vel0city 6y ago
  Twitter doesn't decide for you what you may or may not read. I imagine you got here from some path other than Twitter. Therefore, you reading this reply to your comment comes irrespective to Twitter deciding what is allowable on their platform. If the moderators of this site decide my comment is out of line with the standards this site tries to uphold, does this make me unable to communicate entirely? No, I'm still able to write whatever nonesense on plenty of other websites. Or I can host my own website where I can freely post whatever nonsense I choose to post. All the way up to the point where no ISP will offer me an internet connection or all the regional number organizations refuse to give me even a single IP address.

tomp 6y ago

> The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all. Interesting... after reading this, I immediately thought: same as Zero Hedge (also often criticised). But then again, that shouldn't be a surprise - basically a lower bar (on accuracy) should result both in lower reaction time, and in more false positives. A comment to a sibling comment: I personally find lower time-to-publish immensely valuable - I prefer to assess the accuracy of news stories myself (usually considering the original source and how aligned their interests are with the published information), and I find almost no value in the supposedly "trustworthy" media because they're not actually trustworthy to me (besides the obvious political bias, there's also plenty of high-profile non-culture-wars fake news, e.g. Iraqi WMD, Bloomberg's China spying debacle, the current (non-)coverage of Assange, ...). If there's anything I've learned in the past 10 or so years, is that the "experts" are barely any better than myself at discerning what's true or not, and much less trustworthy.

olivermarks 6y ago
Yikes - I've found Zerohedge to be scarily accurate over time! Depends on your political allegiances I suppose but my mother taught me when i was kid to always read the financial press - 'follow the money to find out what the b@stards are thinking' was her old line. (she used to work for the UK tory party in the '50's, despised them). ZH is what many city of London and wall street minions read live on their bloomberg terminals, for better or worse... Separately I view Twitter as breaking section 230 free speech regulatory agreements in meddling with what they 'publish'
- droffel 6y ago
  > scarily accurate As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions. They have a consistently bearish bias (which rarely seems to play out), and ties to the Russian state, which brings into question the motivations behind their criticisms of the US (not that I'm the biggest fan myself). All of that said, ZH introduced me to a lot of economic literature and concepts I likely wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. They touch on niche subjects constantly, and I have to give them credit for broadening my understanding of economics in general.

cma 6y ago

After the Covington stuff, isn't it a good thing they are taking more time to figure out the context around short inflammatory videos?

tathougies 6y ago
No. Unless they want to be sued, like with the Covington kid...
quacked 6y ago
I didn't mention it in the original comment because I didn't want the heat, but the Covington event was actually the exact event I was thinking of. By the time I saw the fully unedited raw videos of the guy and the kid, I'd already seen dozens of memes and many official news articles/videos comparing the "Covington Kid" to anti-protestors during the Civil Rights movement. The full, unedited videos show the truth; it was a complete non-event. Totally changed my perspective on the kid and the protestor; they went from symbols of a struggle for rights to two people who happened to run into each other in Washington, D.C.

jkingsbery 6y ago

As someone who reads the NYPost regularly, I find that it's an interesting outlet. It publishes a lot of "tabloid" stuff that's worth skipping - celebrity sitings, silly videos that went virals about cats or people trying to escape the police by doing cartwheels, and outlandish headlines. But if you read certain sections (Sports, Business, Metro), the articles are written as they would be in any other outlet (with the exception that maybe the Opinion & Editorial section is more conservative leaning than other NY newspapers).

cjjuice 6y ago

It should not be the job of the social media companies to be judge and jury for truth. Let the people decide for themselves what is true and false. Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor. That to me is an extremely damning view of the common person. But then, everywhere on the platform.. "make a plan to vote". So you trust people to vote but don't trust them with the unfiltered information so they can inform themselves without outside intervention?

cycrutchfield 6y ago
If social media companies don't want to be used as transmission vectors of obvious foreign political influence, then they don't have to be. Just like if they don't want to be used as transmission vectors of pornography or any other type of content, then they don't have to be. In both cases it requires setting some sort of content standard and making decisions about whether the content meets that standard.
- cjjuice 6y ago
  If it is truly foreign influence, then it is on the FBI/DoJ to do the investigation and publicly declare it as such and order it to be taken down. Social Media companies are not equipped to make that distinction and should not do so.
  - cycrutchfield 6y ago
    "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes"
  - Splendor 6y ago
    Are you arguing that social media companies should not remove posts and instead let normal individuals determine what's true; while also arguing that billion-dollar social media companies are not capable of determining what's true?
La1n 6y ago

tathougies 6y ago

I mean, CNN and WaPo have admitted to lying about Nick Sandmann, but their accounts are still there. Clearly, Twitter is not interested in whether news outlets sometimes publish fake news.

guscost 6y ago

That is absolutely not why Twitter acted in this case, and everyone knows it.

La1n 6y ago
You don't have to imply things, it's more useful to the discussion to just say it. Do say the quiet part out loud so people can actually interact with a comment like this.
- guscost 6y ago
  Sure: Twitter is trying to tip the election in favor of Biden. When the shoe was on the other foot, they never blocked news outlets (no matter how trashy) that promoted anonymous accusations without evidence, or shared illegally-obtained information. The laptop and its contents seem to have been obtained legally in this case, and even if the whole thing reeks of parallel construction, they are not even honestly enforcing their stated rule (which again, does not seem to apply when it benefits the other faction).
  - ganoushoreilly 6y ago
    Further, nothing in the story has actually been disputed yet Either. That's where i'm conflicted here. If it were a flat out lie, I'd say go for it, ban it. But as is stands, No one has denied, they've even gone as far as to say they won't deny them. We've had the FBI confirm the laptop. We've had one of the business partner Confirm the contents of the email. We know that multiple investigations are going on State / Federal level. This is news worthy, regardless of what side you're on. There's 0 chance that they block any negative controversial stories about the Trump campaign or it's related parties. It's a foolish place to stand your ground, when the outcome is going to be far worse for all sides than if they'd just let it die off naturally. The controversy itself has now given some on the right another reason to double down on their positions. It's divisive by the nature of the action.

influx 6y ago

I'm curious what your thoughts are on the NY Times pushing false information that led to the second Iraq War? Should they get penalized on Twitter after pushing a narrative that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths? From the NY Times itself (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...) "But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge. On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified."

colinmhayes 6y ago
I don't think there's any evidence that the times purposefully published information that they strongly suspected to be untrue. That is what the post did. The times made mistakes, but they admitted it and apologized, as seen in the link you posted. The post maliciously overruled their own newsroom to post fake news.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  What fake news did the NY Post publish?
munk-a 6y ago
I think the pro-establishment lean of media back in the day (and advocacy for the Iraq war is a great example) is really the heart of the problems we've got today. Society and media is reacting to the overly heavy censorship of established platforms - but what we're seeing today with widely embraced conspiracy theories is pretty dangerous to society. Was the Iraq war a one-off event where media held far too much trust and abused it? Is it just the continuation of a pattern of media being used as a tool of the state (either wittingly or unwittingly)? I'm leaning toward the second option but I still don't know if the inherent pro-establishment bias you get with large media conglomerates outweighs the benefits of vetted news. The only thing I can say for sure is that public media funding (like PBS and the like) to subsidize the cost of media companies ends up having rather little effect on those outlets' biases, while forcing media to depend on corporate sponsorship absolutely does corrupt the messaging delivered to the populace at large. So I'm not certain what our media landscape should look like, but I'm definitely against people who decry any government sponsorship of news as being political mouthpieces - public radio and tv should form part of our news digest, their funding is diverse enough to allow them to freely criticize both national and local governments and while it probably won't yield the really valuable investigative journalism we need to fight corruption it's definitely part of the solution.

koolba 6y ago

Nothing in your comment says the information is fake or false. In fact, the Biden campaign and his son Hunter have not denied any of the information either. Given that Twitter has allowed people to publish anything and everything about Trump regardless of source (or lack thereof), this is a clear cut case of bias to push their preferred candidate. A different take on the same idea, Google now adds "fact checks" when searching for videos of Biden, in his own words, describing his flip flopping position on fracking. Try it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biden+fracking https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biden+fracking I'd love to know what other fact checks they've added. I can't find an explicit list. I submitted an Ask HN to see if anyone knew how to get that list. But that post was flagged as some people may feel that information is too dangerous to disclose. Both actions are clearly driven by bias. Whether they're allowed to do it on a private platform is a separate topic. But you can't claim to be for free speech when the only speech you suppress or "clarify" is that which is negative to your candidate of choice.

ganoushoreilly 6y ago
You're allowed free speech as long as its our free speech.

fuckyah 6y ago

What happened to freedom of press? This is clearly censorship. Period.

bastardoperator 6y ago

It's all headlines and nothing more. Buzzfeed and TMZ use an identical model. The fact they published the recent laptop story means they don't care at all about integrity or facts. Money is king! We need to reinstate the fairness doctrine to restore honesty in media. The "news" we have today used to be called "entertainment" and half the people on cable news are opinionated talk show hosts if you can even stand to watch any of it.

varispeed 6y ago

This still reeks of hypocrisy. For example almost any large and "reputable" outlet writes outright lies about drugs and their effects or use them to sensationalise the event (for example if there was an accident there is almost always a mention that someone had cannabis in their system even if it was obviously not related to anything). This is extremely harmful as it creates stigma for people who need cannabis or other drugs as a medicine and often they cannot access it at all because lawmaker believe what these outlets write. So when Twitter blocks someone because they think their reporting is dishonest, I don't understand why they won't block all outlets that spew lies.

learnstats2 6y ago
There isn't a binary outcome here. Twitter can stop an account which causes harm without being immediately required to block all accounts which may cause harm.
- varispeed 6y ago
  I reported many Tweets from "reputable" news outlets that have this type of propaganda and lies and literally none were addressed. That makes me think Twitter has an agenda that is not very nice.

symlinkk 6y ago

A lot of people are missing your point, which is a good one - that big name news outlets rarely ever post raw, unedited videos. This is a shame in my opinion.

quacked 6y ago
Thanks. Personally, I think that access to raw, unedited videos (that more often than not do exist these days) would clear up the majority of modern political controversies. Often, either the truth becomes clear, or the video disqualifies itself as being a source of news.

duxup 6y ago

The NYT had an article about how the questionable accusations targeting Hunter Biden was supposed to be published by the Wall Street Journal. But WSJ was taking its time, skeptical of the story, and then the Post ran with it... WSJ never ran the story as was intended. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-biden-wall-street-journal-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid... But yeah I've seen the post basically copy and paste accusations as fact (without claiming they're facts, but not qualifying them in any way) about all sorts of things.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Yet everything you list was never enough for Twitter to lock their account. But something against this political candidate was... I'm left leaning but honestly if we want to win the bias needs to be more subtle.

underwater 6y ago

I'm not expert, but I did work in the same office as journalists from a more respectable news organisation. News rooms are not trying to be Twitter. The goal is not to gather and disseminate information as fast as possible. They're more interested in telling a coherent story around a news event. So they might hold off while they verify or find supporting information. Who was the child? What was the outcome? Was anyone hurt? There were multiple occasions when the organisation had information about a breaking news event but held off rushing to publish while, I assume, they verified information. One story that stuck in my mind was the murder of a woman and her children by her estranged husband. First reported as a car fire, and then later confirmed as a murder suicide. Ultimately no information was withheld, but care was taken to make sure the event was not turned into salacious clickbait by publishing rumours or rushing to be first. This seemed counterintuitive to me, but at the same time, what do we gain by having that kind of news arrive more quickly? It's not actionable information.

reaperducer 6y ago

Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up. It's not about the quality of the Post's journalism. It's about whether Twitter should restrict it. I've been reading the Post off and on for the last 40 years, and you are correct that it is a rag. But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter. Not every article is going to be to your taste, or ape your point of view. And as newspapers go, it is very sensational. This is not a secret. Everyone knows what to expect when they pick up a copy. And they read it with that filter in mind. This is literacy 101. But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer. It isn't. It's a legitimate newspaper, whether you like it or not. 99.9% of the Post criticism I see on HN is from people who have never lived in New York. Never actually read the Post, or any other newspaper. They just amplify and repeat the echo chamber hyperbole they see from other people who have never read the Post. Some of the most vocal have stated in other threads that they are Twitter employees. If I have to choose between the Post being an information gatekeeper and Twitter, I'll go with the Post every time.

rbanffy 6y ago
> It doesn't matter. This strawman is presented every time this topic comes up. It's not about the quality of the Post's journalism. It's about whether Twitter should restrict it. Twitter is a private company. They constantly, if unevenly, exercise their right to ban hate speech and what causes it. > But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter. Twitter is not a newspaper. Or a news organization. It's a social network. > But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer. That's debatable. You admit it's a rag, that publishes some of the lowest quality journalism. It's also very politically biased, in a way that damages the very fabric of society. Restricting its reach is the responsible thing to do in their case. As for the National Enquirer, nobody takes them seriously or call it a legitimate newspaper. That's why it's important to hold the NY Post to a higher standard.
- kshacker 6y ago