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Corporate media institutions have been more wrong for longer and on a far larger scale than Infowars. Why single it out?
by kodyo 4y ago
Corporate media institutions have been more wrong for longer and on a far larger scale than Infowars. Why single it out?
- epgui 4y agoBecause combatting mis/dis-information is largely a problem at the tail-end of the distribution (ie.: the crazier, most unhinged end of it). It's one thing to argue with each other about complicated nuances, it's another thing when people feed bleach to their children because someone on the internet told them it would help with the autism.
- kodyo 4y agoI’m willing to let stupid people sacrifice themselves rather than sacrifice everybody else’s freedom.
- epgui 4y agoThat's nice, except sometimes innocent people are the victim. Like the children. Or, in the context of a pandemic, all the other people who are exposed because Bob and Steve won't put a mask on or get a jab.
- kodyo 4y agoPeople were censored and deplatformed for being more correct than the public health experts.
- epgui 4y agoYou'll have to provide examples of this, because I don't think that's clear and obvious.
- kodyo 4y agoJournalist Alex Berenson was banned from Twitter for saying the covid vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission. He was correct.
- epgui 4y agoExcept that's not exactly true either, depending on how you look at it. At the population-scale, they do prevent infection and transmission, and they prevent it very very well. This particular individual has said many other things during and about the pandemic, and this was part of a much broader line of messaging that was, broadly speaking, both incorrect and harmful. (I'm a biochemist, and immunology and extracellular vesicles are my areas of expertise. No conflict of interest.)
- kodyo 4y agoAlright we’ll I’m opposed to censorship over pissy word-mincing. He wasn’t wrong.
- junofan 4y agoPeople say dumb and destructive stuff about my area of expertise too. I don’t think they should be silenced.
- epgui 4y agoDoes it spread like wildfire and cause people to lose their lives in a way that could totally be prevented? (What field?)
- junofan 4y agoYep. Finance. Resource allocation has life-or-death impact. Whether your immunology research finds applications, a hospital gets acquired instead of wound down, or an N95 factory gets built can be a few parameters pushed through a model. Parameters dictated by sentiment.
- kansface 4y agoWhat doesn’t this argument cover? What wouldn’t it allow or apply to?
- epgui 4y agoIf people want to do something that puts their own life in danger, and they ought to have known the risks (ie.: in ethical jargon, they have both "moral competence" and autonomy), then that's their business. If people do things that can hurt other people, and these other people don't have a say in the matter, then with the exception of certain fiduciary-like situation, that's not okay.
- vincnetas 4y agodon't forget, that disinformation does not appear magically in heads of less bright people. it is engineered by very smart adversaries. so this is not like less educated people are guilty and can be sacrificed.
- kodyo 4y agoDon’t conflate education with intelligence.
- epgui 4y agoDon't make the mistake of thinking there are some people (you?) who are so innately special that they don't require any training.
- kodyo 4y agoAd hominem aside, I was thinking of the midwits with lots of education who conspire with their in-group to manage others. The right thing to do is tell them to leave us alone.
- epgui 4y agoJust to clarify, it was not really meant to be directed at you, it was meant as a generalized statement about people. I don't think I made that clear, sorry.
- ok123456 4y agoLiterally, "Think of the Children!" Parents have claimed religious exceptions to performing recommended medical procedures and inoculations since the dawn of modern medicine, and sought out alternative treatments. The same parents who would try to cure autism by bleach injections are the same ones who would just as readily practice Mesmerism or whatever other 18th century nonsense you can think of. The only difference is that instead of a stranger coming to town in a tent, like something out of Blood Meridian, it's some glowing words on a box.
- epgui 4y ago> Parents have claimed religious exceptions Yes, and these are often allowed. However, there are guardrails. Hospitals have multidisciplinary teams of lawyers, ethicists, psychologists and religious counsellors to ensure that these are legitimate beliefs and that risks are within certain boundaries. You can't exactly apply the same care to the internet at large.
- ok123456 4y agoMost of that boils down to very politely asking the parents to follow the recommended standard of care. Unless there's outright abuse, like broken bones without a satisfactory explanation, there's no real intervention. You want to take a guess at how often an old order Amish child goes to the pediatrician?
- epgui 4y agoI would guess not very often! But as with anything, you have to think about how things scale. The Amish are a small fraction of the population, and there's no imminent danger that suddenly everyone will take up the behaviour and stop taking their children to the paediatrician. Amish videos aren't "trending" on TikTok. :) If ever there was, or if that happened, then we might have a crisis on our hands, and we might be talking about doing something about it. None of this happens in a vacuum, nor should it be considered as if it did.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI feel like Infowars can only exist as part of an ecosystem of misinformation. It's easier to talk about, because it's dumb, but it's probably not the most vital thing to address. If it's a mainstream belief that the whole of climate science is a secret marxist plot to undermine capitalism, then is it really that weird to suggest those same marxists are faking school schootings?
- rhdunn 4y agoMis/dis-information is not only located to the fringe/tail-end. See for example: 1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, and others [1]. 2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2] 3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating climate change. [3] Then there is reporting of technical or scientific discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source for information, not to mention the consistency of reporting on subjects where a company or other organization has made a PR statement. There is little investigative journalism and fact checking by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source. This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part that paying people to take time to do research for little gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases slanting articles or news reports. Taking time to read each article (instead of just the headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify everything that is being reported on. Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able to minimize the issues to a small number of incidents). The UK government were briefed, who then briefed the press. The press (including the BBC) hyped it up by including people who thought the world would end, and people who were preparing for the worst. When not a lot of issues occurred, people have been decrying that Y2K was fake, in part because of the way the media overhyped the issues and failed to properly convey the potential problems to readers/viewers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Media_portrayal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Media_po... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815 [3] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-balance-in-climate-reporting-reveals-bbcs-sensitivity-to-political-pressure/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-balance-in...
- epgui 4y ago> not only located to the fringe/tail-end This is true, but the fringe and the tail-end are by far the easiest problem to solve. It's what I decided to focus on, because it seems like people can't even agree that it's a problem in the extremes.
- seattle_spring 4y agoThat's quite a claim. Any [reliable] sources to back it up?
- kodyo 4y agoI’m not here to convince you. I can tell you that if there’s a desire to combat misinformation, clean up the institutional dishonesty, secrecy and never ending shilling for the establishment that causes mistrust.
- ok123456 4y agoSo the plan to increase trust in our institutions is to control how you can criticize them, and label any dissent "disinformation?"
- ctoth 4y agoI'll play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq... Or has Infowars started a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people which I haven't happened to read about?
- epgui 4y agoHow does this point to a special failing of the media? Judith was let go and prosecuted, was she not? What other system of publication would have prevented these things? How is infowars protected from things like this, and how can anyone argue that it has an overall better track record?
- ctoth 4y agoLet's hear from James Risen, reporter at the Times at the time. :) > What angered me most was that while they were burying my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding that I help match stories from other publications about Iraq’s purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this that when the Washington Post reported that Iraq had turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him that the story was bullshit and I wasn’t going to make any calls on it. As a small protest, I put a sign on my desk that said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” It was New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst’s supposed line to artist Frederic Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to illustrate the “crisis” there before the Spanish-American War. I don’t think my editors even noticed the sign. So no, this wasn't just poor old Judy, who provided a convenient scapegoat. You ask for what protections a blog has? Its protection is that it's a darn blog on the internet just like any random person can make. It has no authority, asks for no special recognition. Whereas the flagship paper sends goons with golfclubs to threaten writers into following the narrative. The original comment I'm responding to asks for examples of corporate media being more wrong for longer. If starting a literal war 15 years ago doesn't count I'm not sure what you're looking for.