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Someone not wanting to explain what is in 50 news articles to new commenters does not make them a conspiracy theorist, why should they do your google searches f

Someone not wanting to explain what is in 50 news articles to new commenters does not make them a conspiracy theorist, why should they do your google searches for you? Yes, this is definitely one of the cookie-cutter responses. Dubious claims of "so many sources" but they are just super busy and can't be bothered to link to a single one.

zo1 6y ago
Honestly, I'd say a lot of time there aren't any "legitimate sources" to prove the claims being made. That's a good chunk of the problem, because it seems that legitimate investigation and "linking" of said facts to prove the claims is next to impossible without serious government-level powers of acquiring evidence. So inference needs to be used, unfortunately. And once you start inferring without direct evidence, you start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, which is now being used to shut-down dissent and questioning. It's not like a journalist right now can tell Robinhood "give us all your internal emails so we can verify the reason you've stopped trading these stocks". Or "Hey Discord, let's look at your internal slack comms so we can figure out what evidence you had to conclude that the WSB chat rooms were filled with hatespeech." Or "give us a data-dump of all the users and comments you identified as hatespeech". How about some regulation in that regard? Hey EU? Here's an idea for a possible scenario and how it could look: 1. Public company makes contentious claims. 2. Curious individual (maybe journalist) makes formal request for data to confirm. 3. By law, company above is obligated to provide access. 4. Individual gets given a secure-room, no-data-copying-allowed physical access to inspect and analyze said data. 5. Individual is allowed to report on said data. Edit. Formatting.
- Railsify 6y ago
  Excellent points, well said. If any claims that were not immediately supported by secret video were not at least thought about then no investigations would ever start. At this point the allegations are 50/50, either true or false, the onus is on our regulators/journalists/whistleblowers to investigate and find out if the claims are true.

zo1 6y ago

Honestly, I'd say a lot of time there aren't any "legitimate sources" to prove the claims being made. That's a good chunk of the problem, because it seems that legitimate investigation and "linking" of said facts to prove the claims is next to impossible without serious government-level powers of acquiring evidence. So inference needs to be used, unfortunately. And once you start inferring without direct evidence, you start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, which is now being used to shut-down dissent and questioning. It's not like a journalist right now can tell Robinhood "give us all your internal emails so we can verify the reason you've stopped trading these stocks". Or "Hey Discord, let's look at your internal slack comms so we can figure out what evidence you had to conclude that the WSB chat rooms were filled with hatespeech." Or "give us a data-dump of all the users and comments you identified as hatespeech". How about some regulation in that regard? Hey EU? Here's an idea for a possible scenario and how it could look: 1. Public company makes contentious claims. 2. Curious individual (maybe journalist) makes formal request for data to confirm. 3. By law, company above is obligated to provide access. 4. Individual gets given a secure-room, no-data-copying-allowed physical access to inspect and analyze said data. 5. Individual is allowed to report on said data. Edit. Formatting.

Railsify 6y ago
Excellent points, well said. If any claims that were not immediately supported by secret video were not at least thought about then no investigations would ever start. At this point the allegations are 50/50, either true or false, the onus is on our regulators/journalists/whistleblowers to investigate and find out if the claims are true.