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>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week t

>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room. That seems problematic.” I'm already hearing this in local debates. It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything. (PS: Open groups and channels are not encrypted on Telegram servers and can be reported. It is just that Telegram doesn't have a history of letting other abuse it.) Edit: I've been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now. Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done. Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing.

jameslk 6y ago
I wonder what Telegram and Signal are hosting on? Is it one of the big cloud providers? Could they be deplatformed for harboring "terrorists" on their platforms?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    > Signal and Telegram are already compromised. By whom? What topics are unable to be freely discussed on these applications?
- freedomben 6y ago
  If you take John Brennan at his word, yes, it is coming. Many powerful Democrat lawmakers are working toward allowing law enforcement (FBI, etc) to have the same tools against "domestic terror" as they do again foreign terror. Greenwald himself did a great write up about it: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-ter...
  - at-fates-hands 6y ago
    I'm still wondering how the incredibly large intelligence gathering apparatus in this country was unable to thwart an attack that was being planned openly on social media, in broad daylight. If you can't even stop an attack you should have known was imminent, how does giving them even MORE tools stem the massive failure that allowed the attack to happen in the first place?
    - call_me_dana 6y ago
      Well... simply, it was allowed to happen. Specifically to build support for new draconian domestic terror laws. The government is incredibly paranoid about a domestic uprising so they collectively start drooling when an opportunity to pass laws like this presents itself.
ceejayoz 6y ago
The "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?" article doesn't actually demand (or even propose) censorship as asserted by Greenwald, as far as I can tell. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/telegram-signal-misinformation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/t... > So what’s your take? Are you concerned? > KEVIN Honestly, not really? and > I’m not as worried about Signal. Similar to WhatsApp, Signal set a limit so that you can forward messages to only five people at a time. So it would be time-consuming for misinformation spreaders to make a message go viral. Also, Signal limits group chats to up to 1,000 people. That’s large, but not as huge as a Telegram group chat. It's an article about how misinformation can spread here, but probably less significantly than on other platforms.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman. "Hot Spot". Another sensationalist phrase used to scare readers into thinking anyone that even slightly disagrees with their point is out there somewhere planning another attack. The title also points to the continuation of painting tech as evil. As if "Private Messaging Apps" have anything to do with the primary concern, "Misinformation". It's a poorly written article with an even poorly written title. If you don't think articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices, it's going to be hard to find common ground.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". How about this one: "The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"
    - ryanSrich 6y ago
throwawaysea 6y ago
Thanks for the reminder on subscribing. I agree good journalism is extremely important, and a diverse set of sources is important as well. I've been feeling like we need alternatives to massive mainstream news media houses that increasingly seem like a battleground for ideological war in the newsroom. Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend?
- throwaway20875 6y ago
  Matt Taibbi is pretty good.
  - throwaway20875 6y ago
    I'm getting downvoted for recommending a journalist. We're headed for interesting times.
- eitland 6y ago
  I subscribe to my local newspaper and one national one. I also sometimes send a bunch of money to the Guardian when I read something interesting there, probably more than I feel like for just the Guardian, but there's nowhere else I can pay for stories, everyone else want me to subscribe.
- hackissimo123 6y ago
  > Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend? I pay for Andrew Sullivan's Substack and reading his weekly column is always a highlight of my Friday. He's not really a "journalist" but John McWhorter's Substack is excellent too.
- mjcohen 6y ago
  Naked Capitalism.
eachro 6y ago
If people actually read that Chen/Roose piece they'd see that the conversation being had was much more tempered. I saw the point as about the dangers of being in a large echo chamber. For ex: on twitter, if a non-private account shares an article that completely misrepresents some statistc, there's a reasonable chance someone will swoop into their replies and push back on it. We see this all the time with both right leaning and left leaning pundits. Does this dynamic go away in large telegram chat rooms? My guess is it still happens in some form (give people some credit, most people are not blind fools). But then again, who really knows unless you're in the private group?
- kgog 6y ago
  I used to respect Greenwald a LOT. But his newsletter and rhetoric lately is just an anti-journalism dog whistle.
stonogo 6y ago
> Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing. I haven't seen Greenwald do much other than outrage manufacturing in some years. I guess it's paying the bills.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  What about the time he broke the story of Sergio Moro in Brazil and flipped the story of the Operation Car Wash corruption investigation (for which he was regularly threatened with bodily harm)?
- astrange 6y ago
  Greenwald’s pretending to be a libertarian journalist (but actually just hating US Democrats) is better than what he did before, defending neo-Nazis pretending to be a free speech advocate (but actually because he was one of them).
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Accusing Greenwald of being a Nazi is pretty uncalled for. I (a Jew) despise Nazis, but I can certainly distinguish between someone calling for the older liberal line of free speech for everyone (something Noam Chomsky has done [0]) and advocating for racial purity via ethnic cleansing. You can say that such a position might help Nazis, but to draw zero distinction is troubling. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair
    - astrange 6y ago
      I am not making a general claim, I’m making a specific claim about him. https://twitter.com/heresysquad/status/1191762909325492225?s=21 https://twitter.com/heresysquad/status/1191762909325492225?s... He was so enthusiastic about defending his clients (who were neo-Nazis, yes real ones, they do exist) that NY judges called him unethical in court and the bar banned his behavior after the fact. https://twitter.com/charliearchy/status/1110344950674186240?s=21 https://twitter.com/charliearchy/status/1110344950674186240?...
klmadfejno 6y ago
It blows my mind that someone would read > 'the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram.' and then decide this was good quality, unbiased journalism worth paying for. And then go on to post that sentence as evidence of its goodness. Looks like anger porn to me.
- dkjaudyeqooe 6y ago
  You don't have look far to see how popular anger porn is today. I guess he knows his market.
- eitland 6y ago
  Journalism doesn't have to be boring. It is not a requirement. It doesn't even always have to be unbiased. But it should stick to the facts, something he does if you can ignore the witty parts. Besides, that decision was made after reading more of the post, not just that part.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I think Greenwald uses a lot of snark, and I wish he would restrain himself a bit because I think he turns a lot of people off with that approach. That said, he has a level of authenticity and honesty about his biases that is sorely lacking in many journalists these days. A lot of reporters feel as passionate about the subjects they cover as he does, but they aren't forthright about it. Regarding journalistic value, his pieces are always loaded with links and references. I like reading his articles because I can easily read the stuff he is referencing to see if I interpret them the same way, and try to see whether I see things differently.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    > A lot of reporters feel as passionate about the subjects they cover as he does, but they aren't forthright about it. First-rate journalism highlights the subject's corruption or bad behavior with such persuasive and overwhelming evidence that the audience generally judges the person or organization under discussion to be a mendacious object of derision. That is an accurate characterization of the journalism on the Snowden leaks that Greenwald won the Pulitzer for. E.g., the story on NSA spying on Petrobras. Second-rate journalism simply cuts out the middle-man and casually derides the person directly for an audience that is drooling to see that person taken down a peg. E.g., "Liz Cheney is a compulsive liar who will say anything to manipulate the public, just like her father taught her to do."[1] I have no idea why Greenwald insists on using techniques of second-rate journalism in his op-eds-- op-eds which quite obviously also include a lot of background research. But I find his consistent use of second-rate journalism steers his rhetoric in directions that directly mislead the reader. E.g., when AOC tweeted about WSB, Greenwald alleged that she wanted to "claim these Redditors as their own," as he wrote in one of his articles. That's a mischaracterization of what she did, and apparently those Redditors agree with me: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6fg8q/aoc_got_our_backs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6fg8q/aoc_... The responses there are a lot of fun to read-- lots of riffs, some surprising agreement, some reasonable disagreement. But as far as I can tell, nearly every default-visible comment there understood that she was uttering a relevant and common refrain from her political platform, not attempting to "claim" the users of WSB as current or even future social democrats. Politicians do this all the time-- e.g., Bernie Sanders did when as a presidential candidate in 2016 he spoke to Liberty University-- communicating to people with obvious opposing viewpoints where they are (albeit in her case with a bit of obvious snark) by focusing on common ground. That is fundamentally different than a politician claiming a constituency for themselves who is likely opposed to their views in reality. When a politician does that it's at the very least condescending, and you can probably imagine how a group of trash-talking free marketheads on Reddit would respond if AOC actually tried to do that. Greenwald's writing is littered with enough of these little boogers that it consistently gets in the way of his larger points. And in op-eds like his, there usually isn't that much original research in the first place-- there are plenty of other authors covering this territory who don't hurl completely unnecessary insults at people. Just look at the comment sections of his articles to get a sense of what kind of person this type of writing attracts. It's not as rabid and pretentious as a David Foster Wallace fan club, but it's close. [1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-edward-snowden https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...
alasdair_ 6y ago
>Edit: I've been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now. >Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done. Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten to after the mess at The Intercept.
newacct583 6y ago
> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything. If it's really possible for "some folks" to deplatform "whoever they want" "for anything", why is this power not available to me or anyone I know? I know it's glib, but... come on folks. The anti-anti-anti-cancel-culture hyperbole is officially out of control. It should be possible to have a legitimate conversation of whether or not Lorenz is correct about Andreesen, and whether or not the accusation constitutes behavior that should be condemned, without resulting to this kind of culture war screaming. If you really want good journalism, do you really believe the stuff you quoted from Greenwald qualifies? "Stasi notebooks", really?
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  As Greenwald points out, these journalists work at major outlets and have huge followings which they can use - and have used - to shut down speech. Cancel culture is real and we must not allow it to be tolerated. I've been told that I'm "problematic" and should reconsider blogging... because I recommended a $40 pair of hair shears. Greenwald is being a bit melodramatic, but his substance isn't wrong. A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure - and if it wasn't for that conversation being widely heard she likely would of seriously harmed his reputation with her lie.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    > A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted: "@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything" Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied: "Thanks for clarifying that it was Felicia saying that word, rather than Marc as many in the room heard it. I hope you can understand how some people in the room felt hearing it" I mean, as I (someone who reads and values Lorenz's work) read it, she was offended (more, it seems, at the casual use of "retarded" going unchallenged than at the specific speaker), and tweeted about it, but made a mistake in attribution which she recognized (while pointing out that her original offense was that the word wasn't challenged). And Greenwald wrote like 1000 words to go after her. And his essay, not her tweet, is at the top of HN right now. So... who's cancelling who here?
randomfool 6y ago
One side of it is deplatforming, but the other side is protecting more vulnerable family and community members. The fact is that there are pied-pipers of disinformation on these platforms leading vulnerable members of our communities down rabbit-holes to who-knows-where. Normally we would address this with in-person confrontation but I think people are struggling to find the tools to protect their friends and families. People are being preyed upon and the victims may not be the ideal rational individuals that we aspire to. I'm not trying to say that censorship is a good thing, just that the tools that we may have once used to protect our communities are not adapting to the new environments.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > the tools that we may have once used There were tabloid magazines full of "fake news" sold in supermarkets throughout my entire childhood. People would shake their heads and laugh at the silly headlines, but nobody, ever, talked seriously about censoring the tabloid newspapers just because they didn't believe what they were saying.
  - vippy 6y ago
    We didn't worry that tens of millions of people would read a false claim in a tabloid and storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election either.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  I'm not necessarily saying this point is incorrect, but the structure of the argument bears a striking similarity to the same justification for laws against heresy and blasphemy in the time of Galileo.
  - jb775 6y ago
    The shift in social discourse over the past few years helped me understand how the Salem Witch Trials came to be.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
Spivak 6y ago
> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything. Jeez. At least give your opponents a charitable take on their argument. This stuff isn't some make-believe silencing of online Socratic circles that just happen to have "non-approved" viwes or "wrongthink". I don't think you get how scary some of these mobs are. They're online witch-hunts fueled by hate and the belief that their marks are the cause of the bad in the world. And when you add actually crazy people into the mix it bleeds over into the real world. They will doxx you, stalk you, find every public picture of you, your friends, your family online and send them to you with death threats. They will Photoshop those pictures so it looks like you're being tortured or raped and pass them around. If they find your address you'll start getting them in the mail and eventually messages with pictures of your house. Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy. Trading other people's safety for my liberty doesn't sound quite as noble.
- eitland 6y ago
  > Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy. I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power? Also remember: public groups and channels on Telegram are public. You can join them and report them if you want. What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry. The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities, because some well connected journalists said it was the next evil thing after Parler. People believe this, just like they believe that MeWe is an alt-right hotspot (it is mostly ex-googleplusers discussing chili growing, general gardening, sharing landscape photos etc - unless maybe I haven't searched for the magic string that unlocks all the evil..?) The result is that ordinary people shy away from newer, better technology and fall back to/stick with abusers line Facebook. Yep. Facebook, the place that has hosted much more hate speech than any alternative platform I know of.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    > I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power? I'll assume you mean doesn't but that's not at all what I'm saying. It's easy to take an absolute stance as long as your blind to or don't care about the consequences of it. > What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry. What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces. > The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities Look this shit sucks. It's terrible that the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch have been flocking to different corners of the internet trying to find a place that won't kick them out to self organize. As Facebook/Twitter/Reddit have shown you don't actually have to get rid of them at large just make a good-faith attempt.
dogman144 6y ago
God I'm pretty lefty but "problematic" is becoming... problematic. On top of that, just completely asinine tech reporting is becoming problematic. Bloomberg supermicro? Never retracted, lead reporter on it is now BBG's cyber reporting czar. NYT's NSA hacked Baltimore author? Came out with that smooth brained "Jetbrains == SolarWinds" story. The wear and tear from a complex field only getting more complex, it governing a larger and growing share of our civil society, and already substantial roadblocks to explaining the layman "how to HTML," is really, really, really showing these days. Sorry for the rant. I work in infosec, and this dynamic has been brewing for a while. Once the "r/WSB, a sometimes alt-right subreddit for stock trading" stories started hitting from all the otherwise top tier news outlets, I lost it finally. I'm not barking up a MSM tree, but legitimately when and how does this dynamic start to change? It's getting absurd.
- call_me_dana 6y ago
  When we see the rise of citizen journalism and independent media. Mainstream media is completely biased and not trustable. Matt Taibbi keeps stressing the need for a unbiased news site but if it has corporate backing, it will eventually become compromised.
  - dogman144 6y ago
    I think I am with you on your first sentence being a way forward. Substack is pretty interesting in that regard. I run into some issues with your use of Taibbi as a good anecdote though for unbiased reporting, and I won't touch your MSM comment. I think Taibbi is a competent, honest, and candid reporter. That said, I was around during his coverage of GS in the Rolling Stone in '08-'09. Is he good at speaking truth to power and creating compelling narratives? Yes. But he's biased in his coverage in the same way that Greenwald is. I don't necessarily agree with blurring* the line between OpEd and reporting is the direction that solves the disconnect. Additionally, honest, citizen journalists with independent funding can misunderstand tech the same way a NYT reporter can. It's still a complex field only getting more complex.
    - 6y ago
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” I hope they mean “the next” after traditional media.
Camillo 6y ago
> Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done. But what if in a few years Greenwald falls (further) from grace and you find yourself in hot water for having financed him? Better use a prepaid card.
- eitland 6y ago
  At some point one has to stand up for something. Everyone else should of course feel free to use a prepaid card.
seventytwo 6y ago
Unreal. If the so-called watchmen of the “MSM” even for a second tired to meet the standards in their own writing that they hold for others, they’d be crushed. This goes triple for the biased “journalist” in the OP. It’s so gross to see someone like this snipe and cherry pick examples from the vast, vast media system, and then have otherwise smart people take the bait because thinking it’s some enlightened, contrarian position. It’s just a way to sell ads to the “ackshyually...” crowd.

jameslk 6y ago

I wonder what Telegram and Signal are hosting on? Is it one of the big cloud providers? Could they be deplatformed for harboring "terrorists" on their platforms?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- elliekelly 6y ago
  > Signal and Telegram are already compromised. By whom? What topics are unable to be freely discussed on these applications?
freedomben 6y ago
If you take John Brennan at his word, yes, it is coming. Many powerful Democrat lawmakers are working toward allowing law enforcement (FBI, etc) to have the same tools against "domestic terror" as they do again foreign terror. Greenwald himself did a great write up about it: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-ter...
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  I'm still wondering how the incredibly large intelligence gathering apparatus in this country was unable to thwart an attack that was being planned openly on social media, in broad daylight. If you can't even stop an attack you should have known was imminent, how does giving them even MORE tools stem the massive failure that allowed the attack to happen in the first place?
  - call_me_dana 6y ago
    Well... simply, it was allowed to happen. Specifically to build support for new draconian domestic terror laws. The government is incredibly paranoid about a domestic uprising so they collectively start drooling when an opportunity to pass laws like this presents itself.

ceejayoz 6y ago

The "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?" article doesn't actually demand (or even propose) censorship as asserted by Greenwald, as far as I can tell. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/telegram-signal-misinformation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/t... > So what’s your take? Are you concerned? > KEVIN Honestly, not really? and > I’m not as worried about Signal. Similar to WhatsApp, Signal set a limit so that you can forward messages to only five people at a time. So it would be time-consuming for misinformation spreaders to make a message go viral. Also, Signal limits group chats to up to 1,000 people. That’s large, but not as huge as a Telegram group chat. It's an article about how misinformation can spread here, but probably less significantly than on other platforms.

ryanSrich 6y ago
Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman. "Hot Spot". Another sensationalist phrase used to scare readers into thinking anyone that even slightly disagrees with their point is out there somewhere planning another attack. The title also points to the continuation of painting tech as evil. As if "Private Messaging Apps" have anything to do with the primary concern, "Misinformation". It's a poorly written article with an even poorly written title. If you don't think articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices, it's going to be hard to find common ground.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". How about this one: "The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"
  - ryanSrich 6y ago

throwawaysea 6y ago

Thanks for the reminder on subscribing. I agree good journalism is extremely important, and a diverse set of sources is important as well. I've been feeling like we need alternatives to massive mainstream news media houses that increasingly seem like a battleground for ideological war in the newsroom. Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend?

throwaway20875 6y ago
Matt Taibbi is pretty good.
- throwaway20875 6y ago
  I'm getting downvoted for recommending a journalist. We're headed for interesting times.
eitland 6y ago
I subscribe to my local newspaper and one national one. I also sometimes send a bunch of money to the Guardian when I read something interesting there, probably more than I feel like for just the Guardian, but there's nowhere else I can pay for stories, everyone else want me to subscribe.
hackissimo123 6y ago
> Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend? I pay for Andrew Sullivan's Substack and reading his weekly column is always a highlight of my Friday. He's not really a "journalist" but John McWhorter's Substack is excellent too.
mjcohen 6y ago
Naked Capitalism.

eachro 6y ago

If people actually read that Chen/Roose piece they'd see that the conversation being had was much more tempered. I saw the point as about the dangers of being in a large echo chamber. For ex: on twitter, if a non-private account shares an article that completely misrepresents some statistc, there's a reasonable chance someone will swoop into their replies and push back on it. We see this all the time with both right leaning and left leaning pundits. Does this dynamic go away in large telegram chat rooms? My guess is it still happens in some form (give people some credit, most people are not blind fools). But then again, who really knows unless you're in the private group?

kgog 6y ago
I used to respect Greenwald a LOT. But his newsletter and rhetoric lately is just an anti-journalism dog whistle.

stonogo 6y ago

> Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing. I haven't seen Greenwald do much other than outrage manufacturing in some years. I guess it's paying the bills.

tehjoker 6y ago
What about the time he broke the story of Sergio Moro in Brazil and flipped the story of the Operation Car Wash corruption investigation (for which he was regularly threatened with bodily harm)?
astrange 6y ago
Greenwald’s pretending to be a libertarian journalist (but actually just hating US Democrats) is better than what he did before, defending neo-Nazis pretending to be a free speech advocate (but actually because he was one of them).
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Accusing Greenwald of being a Nazi is pretty uncalled for. I (a Jew) despise Nazis, but I can certainly distinguish between someone calling for the older liberal line of free speech for everyone (something Noam Chomsky has done [0]) and advocating for racial purity via ethnic cleansing. You can say that such a position might help Nazis, but to draw zero distinction is troubling. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair
  - astrange 6y ago
    I am not making a general claim, I’m making a specific claim about him. https://twitter.com/heresysquad/status/1191762909325492225?s=21 https://twitter.com/heresysquad/status/1191762909325492225?s... He was so enthusiastic about defending his clients (who were neo-Nazis, yes real ones, they do exist) that NY judges called him unethical in court and the bar banned his behavior after the fact. https://twitter.com/charliearchy/status/1110344950674186240?s=21 https://twitter.com/charliearchy/status/1110344950674186240?...

klmadfejno 6y ago

It blows my mind that someone would read > 'the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram.' and then decide this was good quality, unbiased journalism worth paying for. And then go on to post that sentence as evidence of its goodness. Looks like anger porn to me.

dkjaudyeqooe 6y ago
You don't have look far to see how popular anger porn is today. I guess he knows his market.
eitland 6y ago
Journalism doesn't have to be boring. It is not a requirement. It doesn't even always have to be unbiased. But it should stick to the facts, something he does if you can ignore the witty parts. Besides, that decision was made after reading more of the post, not just that part.
freedomben 6y ago
I think Greenwald uses a lot of snark, and I wish he would restrain himself a bit because I think he turns a lot of people off with that approach. That said, he has a level of authenticity and honesty about his biases that is sorely lacking in many journalists these days. A lot of reporters feel as passionate about the subjects they cover as he does, but they aren't forthright about it. Regarding journalistic value, his pieces are always loaded with links and references. I like reading his articles because I can easily read the stuff he is referencing to see if I interpret them the same way, and try to see whether I see things differently.
- jancsika 6y ago
  > A lot of reporters feel as passionate about the subjects they cover as he does, but they aren't forthright about it. First-rate journalism highlights the subject's corruption or bad behavior with such persuasive and overwhelming evidence that the audience generally judges the person or organization under discussion to be a mendacious object of derision. That is an accurate characterization of the journalism on the Snowden leaks that Greenwald won the Pulitzer for. E.g., the story on NSA spying on Petrobras. Second-rate journalism simply cuts out the middle-man and casually derides the person directly for an audience that is drooling to see that person taken down a peg. E.g., "Liz Cheney is a compulsive liar who will say anything to manipulate the public, just like her father taught her to do."[1] I have no idea why Greenwald insists on using techniques of second-rate journalism in his op-eds-- op-eds which quite obviously also include a lot of background research. But I find his consistent use of second-rate journalism steers his rhetoric in directions that directly mislead the reader. E.g., when AOC tweeted about WSB, Greenwald alleged that she wanted to "claim these Redditors as their own," as he wrote in one of his articles. That's a mischaracterization of what she did, and apparently those Redditors agree with me: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6fg8q/aoc_got_our_backs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6fg8q/aoc_... The responses there are a lot of fun to read-- lots of riffs, some surprising agreement, some reasonable disagreement. But as far as I can tell, nearly every default-visible comment there understood that she was uttering a relevant and common refrain from her political platform, not attempting to "claim" the users of WSB as current or even future social democrats. Politicians do this all the time-- e.g., Bernie Sanders did when as a presidential candidate in 2016 he spoke to Liberty University-- communicating to people with obvious opposing viewpoints where they are (albeit in her case with a bit of obvious snark) by focusing on common ground. That is fundamentally different than a politician claiming a constituency for themselves who is likely opposed to their views in reality. When a politician does that it's at the very least condescending, and you can probably imagine how a group of trash-talking free marketheads on Reddit would respond if AOC actually tried to do that. Greenwald's writing is littered with enough of these little boogers that it consistently gets in the way of his larger points. And in op-eds like his, there usually isn't that much original research in the first place-- there are plenty of other authors covering this territory who don't hurl completely unnecessary insults at people. Just look at the comment sections of his articles to get a sense of what kind of person this type of writing attracts. It's not as rabid and pretentious as a David Foster Wallace fan club, but it's close. [1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-edward-snowden https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...

alasdair_ 6y ago

>Edit: I've been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now. >Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done. Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten to after the mess at The Intercept.

newacct583 6y ago

> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything. If it's really possible for "some folks" to deplatform "whoever they want" "for anything", why is this power not available to me or anyone I know? I know it's glib, but... come on folks. The anti-anti-anti-cancel-culture hyperbole is officially out of control. It should be possible to have a legitimate conversation of whether or not Lorenz is correct about Andreesen, and whether or not the accusation constitutes behavior that should be condemned, without resulting to this kind of culture war screaming. If you really want good journalism, do you really believe the stuff you quoted from Greenwald qualifies? "Stasi notebooks", really?

vorpalhex 6y ago
As Greenwald points out, these journalists work at major outlets and have huge followings which they can use - and have used - to shut down speech. Cancel culture is real and we must not allow it to be tolerated. I've been told that I'm "problematic" and should reconsider blogging... because I recommended a $40 pair of hair shears. Greenwald is being a bit melodramatic, but his substance isn't wrong. A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure - and if it wasn't for that conversation being widely heard she likely would of seriously harmed his reputation with her lie.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted: "@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything" Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied: "Thanks for clarifying that it was Felicia saying that word, rather than Marc as many in the room heard it. I hope you can understand how some people in the room felt hearing it" I mean, as I (someone who reads and values Lorenz's work) read it, she was offended (more, it seems, at the casual use of "retarded" going unchallenged than at the specific speaker), and tweeted about it, but made a mistake in attribution which she recognized (while pointing out that her original offense was that the word wasn't challenged). And Greenwald wrote like 1000 words to go after her. And his essay, not her tweet, is at the top of HN right now. So... who's cancelling who here?

randomfool 6y ago

One side of it is deplatforming, but the other side is protecting more vulnerable family and community members. The fact is that there are pied-pipers of disinformation on these platforms leading vulnerable members of our communities down rabbit-holes to who-knows-where. Normally we would address this with in-person confrontation but I think people are struggling to find the tools to protect their friends and families. People are being preyed upon and the victims may not be the ideal rational individuals that we aspire to. I'm not trying to say that censorship is a good thing, just that the tools that we may have once used to protect our communities are not adapting to the new environments.

commandlinefan 6y ago
> the tools that we may have once used There were tabloid magazines full of "fake news" sold in supermarkets throughout my entire childhood. People would shake their heads and laugh at the silly headlines, but nobody, ever, talked seriously about censoring the tabloid newspapers just because they didn't believe what they were saying.
- vippy 6y ago
  We didn't worry that tens of millions of people would read a false claim in a tabloid and storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election either.
dcolkitt 6y ago
I'm not necessarily saying this point is incorrect, but the structure of the argument bears a striking similarity to the same justification for laws against heresy and blasphemy in the time of Galileo.
- jb775 6y ago
  The shift in social discourse over the past few years helped me understand how the Salem Witch Trials came to be.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago

Spivak 6y ago

> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything. Jeez. At least give your opponents a charitable take on their argument. This stuff isn't some make-believe silencing of online Socratic circles that just happen to have "non-approved" viwes or "wrongthink". I don't think you get how scary some of these mobs are. They're online witch-hunts fueled by hate and the belief that their marks are the cause of the bad in the world. And when you add actually crazy people into the mix it bleeds over into the real world. They will doxx you, stalk you, find every public picture of you, your friends, your family online and send them to you with death threats. They will Photoshop those pictures so it looks like you're being tortured or raped and pass them around. If they find your address you'll start getting them in the mail and eventually messages with pictures of your house. Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy. Trading other people's safety for my liberty doesn't sound quite as noble.

eitland 6y ago
> Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy. I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power? Also remember: public groups and channels on Telegram are public. You can join them and report them if you want. What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry. The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities, because some well connected journalists said it was the next evil thing after Parler. People believe this, just like they believe that MeWe is an alt-right hotspot (it is mostly ex-googleplusers discussing chili growing, general gardening, sharing landscape photos etc - unless maybe I haven't searched for the magic string that unlocks all the evil..?) The result is that ordinary people shy away from newer, better technology and fall back to/stick with abusers line Facebook. Yep. Facebook, the place that has hosted much more hate speech than any alternative platform I know of.
- Spivak 6y ago
  > I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power? I'll assume you mean doesn't but that's not at all what I'm saying. It's easy to take an absolute stance as long as your blind to or don't care about the consequences of it. > What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry. What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces. > The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities Look this shit sucks. It's terrible that the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch have been flocking to different corners of the internet trying to find a place that won't kick them out to self organize. As Facebook/Twitter/Reddit have shown you don't actually have to get rid of them at large just make a good-faith attempt.

dogman144 6y ago

God I'm pretty lefty but "problematic" is becoming... problematic. On top of that, just completely asinine tech reporting is becoming problematic. Bloomberg supermicro? Never retracted, lead reporter on it is now BBG's cyber reporting czar. NYT's NSA hacked Baltimore author? Came out with that smooth brained "Jetbrains == SolarWinds" story. The wear and tear from a complex field only getting more complex, it governing a larger and growing share of our civil society, and already substantial roadblocks to explaining the layman "how to HTML," is really, really, really showing these days. Sorry for the rant. I work in infosec, and this dynamic has been brewing for a while. Once the "r/WSB, a sometimes alt-right subreddit for stock trading" stories started hitting from all the otherwise top tier news outlets, I lost it finally. I'm not barking up a MSM tree, but legitimately when and how does this dynamic start to change? It's getting absurd.

call_me_dana 6y ago
When we see the rise of citizen journalism and independent media. Mainstream media is completely biased and not trustable. Matt Taibbi keeps stressing the need for a unbiased news site but if it has corporate backing, it will eventually become compromised.
- dogman144 6y ago
  I think I am with you on your first sentence being a way forward. Substack is pretty interesting in that regard. I run into some issues with your use of Taibbi as a good anecdote though for unbiased reporting, and I won't touch your MSM comment. I think Taibbi is a competent, honest, and candid reporter. That said, I was around during his coverage of GS in the Rolling Stone in '08-'09. Is he good at speaking truth to power and creating compelling narratives? Yes. But he's biased in his coverage in the same way that Greenwald is. I don't necessarily agree with blurring* the line between OpEd and reporting is the direction that solves the disconnect. Additionally, honest, citizen journalists with independent funding can misunderstand tech the same way a NYT reporter can. It's still a complex field only getting more complex.
  - 6y ago

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

Camillo 6y ago

> Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done. But what if in a few years Greenwald falls (further) from grace and you find yourself in hot water for having financed him? Better use a prepaid card.

eitland 6y ago
At some point one has to stand up for something. Everyone else should of course feel free to use a prepaid card.

seventytwo 6y ago

Unreal. If the so-called watchmen of the “MSM” even for a second tired to meet the standards in their own writing that they hold for others, they’d be crushed. This goes triple for the biased “journalist” in the OP. It’s so gross to see someone like this snipe and cherry pick examples from the vast, vast media system, and then have otherwise smart people take the bait because thinking it’s some enlightened, contrarian position. It’s just a way to sell ads to the “ackshyually...” crowd.