6 ms·

Do you think that there's a link between an extreme proliferation of misinformation and people wanting to control it?

zmgsabst 2y ago
No. Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance. Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  The chain of custody issues alone render the laptop story incredible
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    Tell that to the courts, I guess. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-bid... Excerpt: > The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      iCloud isn’t the laptop, let’s be clear
    - Sabinus 2y ago
      Incredible that in this comment thread there are suggestions the Biden government is fascist, even though Biden allowed his son to be prosecuted but if the reverse happened Trump would obviously interfere.
      - haccount 2y ago
        [flagged]
        sofixa 2y ago
        So Biden is a fascist and dangerous, but extremely week and can't remember his own kids? This is the classic far-right nonsense of the enemy is both super weak and to be crushed, and super dangerous and powerful.
        cmrdporcupine 2y ago
        Might-makes-right morality... and to prove how right I am, I will show you my might by beating on some victim. The mistake is to analyze this kind of discourse from a position of looking for justice or other classical liberal concepts. Authoritarian right or left start from an entirely different positioning, similar to that of a schoolyard bully: if you cry injustice, you're already weak. Winning is most important above all, not being right. And if the winner is doing something "wrong", then what is wrong is redefined. Epstein is evil because he was weak and got caught, so his accusers&victims are right... but if allegations are made against Trump for the same things, those making the allegations are liars, because Trump is strong. There's literally no way to make an accusation against him without being, yourself, cast as a villain. Even Christianity itself is redefined, its core moral precepts rewritten from "turn the other cheek" and "blessed are the meek", to prosperity gospel and "God's favoured nation"
      - philwelch 2y ago
        Federal prosecutors tried to make an extremely favorable plea deal with Hunter Biden that granted immunity to a host of crimes he wasn’t charged with. The judges ended up throwing it out. Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton pardoned their ne’er-do-well relatives, and it’s very common for Presidents to issue pardons during their final days in office.
  - ivewonyoung 2y ago
    To add to the sibling comment about the courts, from Wiki: > Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered
    - dirtyhippiefree 2y ago
      This whole thing is sounding alot like the one about Bill Murray, the son of famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (not the famous one from SNL). His mom really influenced his behavior, so it has to be a conspiracy: William J. Murray III is an American Baptist minister, and social conservative lobbyist. Murray serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. that lobbies Congress on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist countries.
  - smsm42 2y ago
    It's fascinating to see the true believer. It's like those cult members that stayed in the cult when the day of the end of the world came and passed and nothing happened. They just said "well, it's probably going to happen next year". It's both sad and fascinating - there's literally nothing too ridiculous that people couldn't believe given the opportunity.
- happosai 2y ago
  It's weird how every single example of supposed suppression of information is something like "hunter Biden laptop" that has been reported in news ad nauseam.
  - account42 2y ago
    The comment you are replying to has two examples, only one of which has to do with Hunter Biden.
- Paradigma11 2y ago
  The Hunter Biden laptop story is highly improbable and has many typical hallmarks of Russian Disinformation. It also happens to be true. That is all there is to it.
smsm42 2y ago
Yes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > We have seen it happen many, many times. Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.
  - smsm42 2y ago
    Yes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding the public is not smart enough to make correct decisions based on facts, and needs to be manipulated by the same gatekeeper class by telling them what they need to hear, for their own good. Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      > Again, this happened many times just in the recent years. Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many! > if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war against Russia, the pizzagate nonsense, people who believe in the magical powers of rhino horns and shark fin soups and on and on and on. There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.

No. Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance. Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.

selimthegrim 2y ago
The chain of custody issues alone render the laptop story incredible
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  Tell that to the courts, I guess. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-bid... Excerpt: > The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    iCloud isn’t the laptop, let’s be clear
  - Sabinus 2y ago
    Incredible that in this comment thread there are suggestions the Biden government is fascist, even though Biden allowed his son to be prosecuted but if the reverse happened Trump would obviously interfere.
    - haccount 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - sofixa 2y ago
        So Biden is a fascist and dangerous, but extremely week and can't remember his own kids? This is the classic far-right nonsense of the enemy is both super weak and to be crushed, and super dangerous and powerful.
        cmrdporcupine 2y ago
        Might-makes-right morality... and to prove how right I am, I will show you my might by beating on some victim. The mistake is to analyze this kind of discourse from a position of looking for justice or other classical liberal concepts. Authoritarian right or left start from an entirely different positioning, similar to that of a schoolyard bully: if you cry injustice, you're already weak. Winning is most important above all, not being right. And if the winner is doing something "wrong", then what is wrong is redefined. Epstein is evil because he was weak and got caught, so his accusers&victims are right... but if allegations are made against Trump for the same things, those making the allegations are liars, because Trump is strong. There's literally no way to make an accusation against him without being, yourself, cast as a villain. Even Christianity itself is redefined, its core moral precepts rewritten from "turn the other cheek" and "blessed are the meek", to prosperity gospel and "God's favoured nation"
    - philwelch 2y ago
      Federal prosecutors tried to make an extremely favorable plea deal with Hunter Biden that granted immunity to a host of crimes he wasn’t charged with. The judges ended up throwing it out. Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton pardoned their ne’er-do-well relatives, and it’s very common for Presidents to issue pardons during their final days in office.
- ivewonyoung 2y ago
  To add to the sibling comment about the courts, from Wiki: > Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered
  - dirtyhippiefree 2y ago
    This whole thing is sounding alot like the one about Bill Murray, the son of famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (not the famous one from SNL). His mom really influenced his behavior, so it has to be a conspiracy: William J. Murray III is an American Baptist minister, and social conservative lobbyist. Murray serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. that lobbies Congress on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist countries.
- smsm42 2y ago
  It's fascinating to see the true believer. It's like those cult members that stayed in the cult when the day of the end of the world came and passed and nothing happened. They just said "well, it's probably going to happen next year". It's both sad and fascinating - there's literally nothing too ridiculous that people couldn't believe given the opportunity.
happosai 2y ago
It's weird how every single example of supposed suppression of information is something like "hunter Biden laptop" that has been reported in news ad nauseam.
- account42 2y ago
  The comment you are replying to has two examples, only one of which has to do with Hunter Biden.
Paradigma11 2y ago
The Hunter Biden laptop story is highly improbable and has many typical hallmarks of Russian Disinformation. It also happens to be true. That is all there is to it.

smsm42 2y ago

Yes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.

sofixa 2y ago
> We have seen it happen many, many times. Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.
- smsm42 2y ago
  Yes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding the public is not smart enough to make correct decisions based on facts, and needs to be manipulated by the same gatekeeper class by telling them what they need to hear, for their own good. Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > Again, this happened many times just in the recent years. Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many! > if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war against Russia, the pizzagate nonsense, people who believe in the magical powers of rhino horns and shark fin soups and on and on and on. There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.