Headlines like this along with the MSM's latest push to define "fake news" is pretty worrisome.
Even if you don't agree with Breitbart or other outlets, it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.
This phenomena is called 'Reputation'. It's not a replacement for evaluating the value of opinions, but it is a short cut.
If Breitbart et al have earned a reputation of being white nationalists, and others use that reputation to evaluate whether they want to consume their media, that seems totally reasonable. If Breitbart wants to eliminate that reputation, they can by regularly pushing content that discredits it.
Consider Buzzfeed, who is slowly turning their reputation around. It takes work, and more than one article with good individual content. You have to show a commitment to change, regularly, before that reputation changes.
I've been amazed by how many people still dismiss BuzzFeed entirely and aren't aware of BuzzFeed News or their investigative team. It really goes to show that first impressions last, and people use them as consumption heuristics.
Haven't we always lived in that world? Nobody really treats all sources exactly equally, and many people dismiss certain categories of sources as not worth looking into. Depending on the person, this might be outlets they think of as mainly peddling conspiracy theories (Infowars, etc.), it could be outlets they see as too right-wing to be worth looking into (e.g. Breitbart), outlets they see as too left-wing to be worth looking into (e.g. World Socialist Web), etc.
> Nobody really treats all sources exactly equally
The fact that were using the term "post fact voter" is pretty scary.
At one point media was more of a conscious buy, but now thats mostly auto-magic. You buy into a network and might not have any idea where your ad is showing up.
I think this is another confession that the system isn't perfect and were going to see some corrections.
> it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source
I think this is an inevitable consequence of a world where anyone with a domain name and a vps can start a "news" website. It takes more effort to debunk a fake news story than it does to write it.
No, in general establishments can refuse service to anyone they please - imagine a consultant forced to engage with every client who asks!
There are certain protected classes of people you cannot discriminate against. I'm having a really hard time seeing how Breitbart could fit any of those definitions. You can totally refuse to serve customers acting in a way you find objectionable.
"the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination by privately owned places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin."
If someone refuses me service as a jewish white man, that's illegal (despite jews/whites/men are not being a protected class)
My personal system of ethics is such that were I to run a service I would specifically ban some groups, organisations or uses from it, eg. peddlers or enablers of child pornography, Nazis, people engaging in deceitful propaganda to the detriment of society etc.
Organisations such as the daily mail, breitbart, anyone describing themselves as "alt-right" and more would be included in this. I'm not preventing you from doing the thing you want to do, I'm just not allowing it on my platform.
I would be interested to see what some of the people that were quoted in that rebuttal would say now. Speech is dangerous, speech is a weapon, that's why it needs to be protected, because people want to have the weapon only for themselves.
But the weapon of 1859 is a hatchet and the weapon of 2016 is a virus.
> Is there an example of a platform like the one you describe with a large audience?
I think the real platform is the Internet. Losing access to an advertising service is hardly denying platform access. I believe in net neutrality and believe that ISPs and IP providers should have common carrier status, and if someone wants to air an argument of prejudice and hate they can buy the IP connection and set up a web server. No-one is stopping them, but we're not amplifying fringe voices to the same volume as everyone else.
Okay. What part of it is problematic? You've expressed what you feel, but not why you feel it.
You're okay with letting corporations set the limits of our discourse, even as that flies in the face of the numerous quotes presented?
And the author actually presents a sort of rebuttal to what I think (I assume?) you're trying to get at, which I'll quote here:
> I’m not advocating that as a matter of law companies should be forced to allow dissenting opinions on their platform. [snip, for brevity] Rather, I am suggesting it is our duty as platform operators to allow the widest possible dissent on our platforms, and our duty as Internet citizens to hold our platforms to a high standard.
We should decide ourselves what we do and don't want to hear. Sometimes that takes the form of community moderation, like on Reddit and HN. Sometimes that takes the form of (on 4chan/8chan) only moderating to the degree that it fits within the law. There are plenty of people on Twitter that use automated blockbots and word filters to broadly block things they don't want to hear.
But all these people have set their own constraints. On HN, we give away our liberty to be gratuitously negative in the hopes that we might find a higher-quality discourse. And that's it. As long as we're nice to each other, we're allowed to hold just about whatever opinion we'd like, without even the minor repercussion of losing a lot of karma.
That ad exchange does not speak for me. Those running it don't give a shit about me. They shouldn't be the ones setting the limits of our discourse. It might be a pie-in-the-sky, ideal concept, but I think we should try our very best to hold ourselves to it.
Because "free speech" is generally understood (in the U.S. at least) to be in the First Amendment sense -- that is, "the government shall not prohibit".
What your rebuttal refers to is (exactly per xkcd 1357) an expected right to be "hosted" by mainstream sources -- an entirely different kettle of fish. And where it becomes a straw man is where it (implicitly) conflates "minority views" with either (1) irredeemable hate space or (2) puerile garbage (a.k.a. the bread and butter of sources like Breitbart).
We should decide ourselves what we do and don't want to hear.
Yup, that's what we already do. When we decide to spend time on sites like 4chan or Reddit, or FB or HN, or CNN or RT, we make, therewith, a decision to consume content as they've chosen to filter it. And I don't know about you, but I don't have much difficulty choosing sources from the above list to focus my attention resources on.
They shouldn't be the ones setting the limits of our discourse.
They're not. By visiting sites that certain guidelines (or make use of ad networks enforcing certain guidelines), you're choosing to accept those constraints.
That ad exchange does not speak for me.
Then... it's within you power to not spend quality time on sites that make use of those networks.
Main point being, the policies applied by ad networks can't meaningfully be called "censorship". Nor is what's happening to Breitbart anything really new (if anything, it's just a recalibration of long-existing policies to a changing media landscape).
Is it more frightening to think that stories will be judged based on their source, or frightening to note how many people believe false news stories to be true?
The real problem is one nobody talks about. News today is driven by advertising revenue. That revenue is driven by clicks. Clicks are driven by headlines that cause people to click. Headlines that outrage people do that more effectively. Truth does not enter into it.
Therefore advertising driven news has a natural tendency towards exaggeration, and then eventually making stuff up. With new stuff hitting emotional buttons established by the old. And once we've seen the same themes over and over again, they become believable to us no matter what the facts may be.
This was what caused the "yellow press" to be what it was a century ago. It remained so until The New York Times established a subscription model for news that actually rewarded verifiable facts. That subscription model has now broken down, and we are back to the yellow press again. :-(
I'm not at all worried about "fake" news becoming such a problem that it substantially distorts the public's perception of reality. That might have been an issue 100 years ago when information traveled slowly, but with the speed of communication and the ease of fact checking today any blatantly false news is pretty quickly snuffed out (and the reporter's reputation so damaged that they quickly become irrelevant).
Much more of a threat is a MSM (which is highly coordinated and have a mutual interest in maintaining their control) branding independent sources as "fake"
On the other side, see http://www.snopes.com/1998-trump-people-quote/ for a debunk of a widely shared statement that Trump purportedly made in 1998 about how he'd run as a Republican because Republican voters are so dumb.
Try this exercise. Every news story that you see on social media for a day, try to fact check it. Try to track down an authoritative source. I predict that you'll be shocked at how much stuff we hear that just ain't so.
That would be more correctly termed as a conspiracy theory, which have existed forever. Has Breitbart or any other major independent news source covered this?
> I'm not at all worried about "fake" news becoming such a problem that it substantially distorts the public's perception of reality.
> Much more of a threat is a MSM (which is highly coordinated and have a mutual interest in maintaining their control) branding independent sources as "fake"
Notice how frequency of use spikes by 500% over last 5 years. That means that either the world has got immensely more racist, we started noticing it more or the word has just got diluted to where it doesn't mean anything (by a factor of 5, to be precise).
You have every right to believe in whatever you want.
I'd suggest you read this piece by a someone who you can relate to - a "member of a desperate and discombobulated coastal elite" that discusses how definition of the term varies:
I totally understand the concern, but I'm struggling to think of how else we deal with this sort of phenomenon.
I suppose we've always treated fringe media outlets as what they are, to some extent. We don't place a huge amount of weight on what e.g. the Socialist Worker says, but of course we don't simply disregard all journalism from these sources. Maybe that's the answer for things like Breitbart – unashamedly biased sources should be less heavily weighted. Doesn't that seem reasonable?
As long as I, the consumer, can do the weighting. I'd rather continue reading both Milo and The Guardian rather than be stuck in left or right echo chamber.
This seems like a strong case of false equivalence. The whole moving the overton window.
To me your statements sounds strangely familiar to "I'd rather be reading both Mein Kampf and stuff written by FDR, rather than be stuck in a left or right echo chamber".
Milo is a mysoginist provocateur who's trying to manipulate white males into believing that sexism and white supremacy are pretty good ideas. The fact that I even know this person makes me slightly vomit inside my mouth, and the way so many people listen and even respect his populism makes me pretty sad.
It's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.
No, it's prudent policy, actually -- and what news outlets have pretty much always been doing, all along.
In the old days, you wouldn't have expected the NYT to carry "wire" stories from outlets run by American Nazi Party or Scientology. Same basic principle at play -- just that with the internet, alternative outlets have proliferated, and hence have become harder to keep track of. So if anything, this is a move back to relative normalcy.
The thing to keep in mind is that, at the end of the day, this is not censorship -- it's content curation, operating on the same principles it pretty much always has.
re: " it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content."
Ha. That's what's called brand and reputation. If you build trust over ten articles just so you can exploit that trust for one uber-damaging faux one, that's NOT frightening. That's life. And it's EXACTLY how things should work.
That said, the road of "censorship" is a slippery one. The root problem is thinking - mainly critical thinking. Spoon feeding people the "right" info is just as bad - perhaps worse - than keeping people from the "wrong" info.
Sure, stop Breitbart and the like, but it's not going to solve the problem. So yeah, here we go again, dumping a ton of time and energy into solving a symptom - disease left completely unaddressed - that will only show up again elsewhere in some other slightly different form.
> it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.
If you think categorically dismissing sources is a new phenomenon, may i point you to 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' which has been around at least since the 15th century.
Whats worrying is the lack of news sources that can be trusted by people from any political camp.
How is this frightening? Why should we turn a blind eye to a source that continually posts provably fake and completely contrived news stories? This particular source also targets an audience that is demonstrably not capable of discerning what is probably true and what is absurdly false. It's not worth the price and risk of reading such a source, when the content they provide that is true can easily be consumed from other sources that are far more reliable.
Let's call this for what it is and always has been: yellow journalism. It's fake, it's damaging, and with the internet it gets spread far too quickly. And then, when enough momentum around the fake story is able to clearly paint it as false gets noticed by the majority of people, this particular source never issues a correction. They just silently let their mistake fall to the wayside, never bothering to inform their audience of their calculated mistake and what is actually true.
When you fail to acknowledge your mistakes, and when you do those mistakes repeatedly to the point where it can only be assumed to be purposefully done, you lose credence. Or at least you should. I'm not sure what's going on with this fetishization of false equivalency in American journalism. Not all journalistic entities are on the same platform; some of them clearly don't mind hiring people that have no principles as a citizen of their respective country or even principles as a decent human being, nor do they have respect for their fellow countrymen and maybe not even themselves.
You're advocating for censoring a source with a better track record than, say, buzzfeed which should by your standard also be censored.
Rather than taking your opinion of Breitbart from the companies who stand to profit from the destruction of their competition, take a look at their front page right now and find just one example of fake news. Feel free to post your findings here.
The argument that "these words are too dangerous to be in the hands of the masses" is the same one used to justify the book burnings in WWII and similar thought policing throughout history.
A private company is refusing to do business with a particular publishing entity. How is that censorship? How am I advocating we just shut them down? I said I don't see it as frightening that a private advertising company would do such a thing, nor do I find it frightening that other publishing entities would attempt to call out Breitbart on their yellow journalism, and I'm not afraid to condemn Breitbart for their spectacularly immoral publications.
There is also a significantly small number of people that most likely use Buzzfeed as their primary news source, especially in relation to politics. So I'm not sure why you're attempting to draw a comparison there.
What is the logical conclusion of your position if not censorship?
edit: in response to the second part about Buzzfeed, just in this thread there is someone with your stance on this who is advocating for them as a news source. Maybe a coincidence, but I'd say that speaks to it not being a "significantly small" amount.
The logical conclusion is obvious. We as private citizens, companies, and whatever have you, can denounce Breitbart and refuse to patronize them in anyway. We can spread awareness about the practices they use, and the people they employ. I will continue to denounce them until they prove they're willing to amend corrections to their articles, admit their mistakes, hire journalists with some amount of integrity, and cease their love affair with yellow journalism.
To claim I am calling for censorship is really kind of a cheap shot and completely distracting to the actual issues being discussed.
We don't allow businesses to ignore other ethical responsibilities - private companies theoretically aren't allowed to discriminate against or assault people. We shouldn't allow private companies - especially companies that effectively act as common carriers - to shape the messages we're allowed to see.
If your ISP refused to carry, eg, The Guardian because of the fake Duggan headline, would you be pissed off? I would.
This isn't an ISP blocking free speech, discriminating against minorities, nor assaulting anyone. It's an ad network that stopped doing business with a company that violated policies.
They're both common carriers. And I don't think there's a policy that's been violated - if there is please let us know since it's likely to be applied to a lot of sites on both sides of politics.
Genuinely curious: do you know precedent that supports the idea of an ad network considered a common carrier? I've seen people claim the same of websites like Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen evidence for this either. I've looked for some, but admittedly not extensively.
Was actually thinking of Twitter and FB rather than ad networks. Sorry, I appreciate original article was discussing ad networks, however same argument (no moral expectation of speech for private businesses) is always used to allow Twitter to inconsistency ban accounts that don't meet SF political mores.
Thanks for clarifying. It's still not clear to me that a website is a common carrier. Do you have a reference I can look at regarding the "no moral expectation…" argument?
Re 'no moral expectation of speech for private businesses', a frequent argument made against free speech is that free speech is only required to be enforced by the government, the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies. This is true, but assumes there is no moral imperative to compel private companies to enforce free speech.
On what axis? This stuff isn't single-dimensional.
Yeah, Buzzfeed may produce a lot more stuff, and maybe also a lot of fake stuff. However how much of that is harmless fluff versus hate speech and incitement to violence?
Also, frankly, looking at buzzfeed, i question that even on the dimension of truth/lie they fare worse than breitbart, particularly when normalizing against the total post count.
I rarely if ever have seen outright lies and propaganda on Buzzfeed, and I do see those things from Breitbart regularly. And now they also provide serious, top-notch coverage of a lot of serious news. There is no comparison between them and Breitbart.
While the dumb'ed down term making the rounds is "fake news" the really issue is what comes down to faux journalism. Publishing something a "news" that's been fact checked doesn't make it legit if there's a baked in spin/bias that intentional ignores other facts, different POVs, etc. We're getting mostly grade school story telling, and too often that's being passed off as journalism.
In short, the problem isn't fake news. That's easy enough to spot. The problem is the rampant propaganda as embraced by just about ever major mainstream "news" outlet. Most are perceived as legit, but few, at this point, actually deserve that level of respect.
Censoring? What law is being passed here? People are free to choose with whom they do business with, if people decide they don't want to do business with white nationalists, that's their choice, and more power to them.
> Let's call this for what it is and always has been: yellow journalism. It's fake, it's damaging, and with the internet it gets spread far too quickly.
Like all the mainstream press that called it for Hillary for months before the election? If you're not judging content by the content itself, than you've got blinders on. Let the content stand on its own.
Huh? At the time, most polls showed Clinton winning. How is it yellow journalism, or fake, for the press to accurately report what the polls indicate? Heck, for much of that time Trump's own internal polls and research said that Clinton was winning.
There's a big difference between reporting something that turns out to be wrong either due to later developments or mistakes in the research, and reporting things you know at the time are not correct but are reporting just to push your position.
Do you recognize the difference between a story speculating about a future event turning out to be wrong and a story about events in the past or present turning out to have made up its facts?
>Like all the mainstream press that called it for Hillary for months before the election?
This is a misunderstanding of what was statistically probable. It's extremely unfair to say that the "mainstream press" called it for Hillary, when it was always going to come down to key battleground states. The exit polls weren't even wrong, it was just an astoundingly low voter turnout: and there could be many reasons for this, that's irrelevant to the topic at hand.
What you see now though, is most news sources trying to explain how the election turned out the way it did. You see them investigating actual facts and figures, and sometimes even taking a retrospective look at their own articles! Show me one Breitbart article that takes a retrospective about "what went wrong" or one time Breitbart issued a bonafide correction to an article they published.
>If you're not judging content by the content itself, than you've got blinders on.
I'm not sure if pollsters putting their finger on the scale == fake news, but there's a pretty well-documented record of polls "magically [0]" converging at the end of campaigns.
Assuming pollsters are systemically altering their own polls at the very end of campaigns, I could argue that the news articles written about those altered polls are sorta fake news articles.
I am honestly not even sure what your point is anymore. Their data doesn't make their reports "truth." Them accurately reporting on a poll is what makes them truthful. "Poll's show Hillary's chance of winning at 80%" might be astoundingly wrong at the end of the day, that doesn't make their report about the poll a lie. Whether that poll reflects reality is a matter of statistical methodology, not journalistic integrity.
> Yet as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has noted, many of the recent climatological events and trends “can be explained by the natural variability of the climate system,” without excluding an indeterminate influence from atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. In the same report, the WMO said that, at this time, researchers have not yet been able to ascertain “the respective roles being played by climate variability and human-induced climate change.”
The report is six years old, the first quote is taken out of context, the second doesn't even exist in the paper, and here's the first paragraph of the paper's conclusion:
> Understanding the Earth’s climate and trends in temperature, precipitation and extreme events is of vital importance to human wellbeing and sustainable development. As the report The Global Climate 2001–2010 confirms, climate scientists can now link some natural oscillations to seasonal climate trends. They also understand the mechanisms by which humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions are raising global average temperatures.
Regardless of where you stand on climate change, this is a pretty gross abuse of the source.
Repeat this kind of thing across most articles, throw in some editorializing to push your opinion in "news" pieces (see paragraph 3/4 of article), add "PHD" to your byline even if your field has nothing to do with the material being covered...
Bad sources aren't about deliberately lying, they're about constructing an alternative, semi-plausible reality that meets idealogical goals. Frankly, I'd class most anti-AGW articles as provably fake based on the scientific consensus for the last twenty years, but who am I to judge.
I'm curious about this too. A cursory search showed a couple of Politifact articles, one where Breitbart incorrectly said the Californian flag was supposed to be a pear, not a bear, and another where they mistakenly said that Loretta Lynch was a member of Bill Clinton's defense team.
My suspicion is that the people trying to muzzle Breitbart have never read it extensively. It has a very obvious conservative slant to it, but I've never seen flagrantly false articles by them (like the one claiming that Trump actually won the popular vote).
>Always, but always, it has been about the cynical exploitation of mass crowd hysteria and about the sly manipulation by activists and crony capitalists of the political system in order to advance the cause of global governance.
Let's not be disingenuous. There's tons and tons of stories like this.
I personally believe in global warming, but I also previously believed that major cities would be underwater by the year 2000 due to the 'greenhouse effect' (since that's what we learnt in school) so can understand someone else believing that news organisations often tend to sensationalize science.
>This article is a report of findings by US physics professor Mike van Biezen.
That's a very liberal reading of that article. Like most yellow journalism and conspiracy theories, there's always of tinge of truth or credibility. The rest of it dives down into completely contrived fear mongering and conspiracy theories, as well as willfully ignoring the mountain of contradicting evidence to the point the article is trying to make. The professor's finding are a very small, small part of the overall article, and certainly a very small part of their overall narrative.
It cites real data from a real scientist. I disagree with the conclusion and the premise just like you do, but it's absolutely not "fake news".
>The professor's finding are a very small, small part of the overall article, and certainly a very small part of their overall narrative.
You could say this for a ton of MSNBC and Fox News articles. Should they also be banned as fake news?
People in this thread generally aren't saying Breitbart should be considered a reputable source for anything; in fact I'd bet most of the Breitbart defenders in here are leftists or at least not far-right like Breitbart. I'm saying there shouldn't be calls for it to be censored in any way. Censorship is extremely dangerous; far, far more dangerous than Breitbart publishing their silly headlines.
>Why should we turn a blind eye to a source that continually posts provably fake and completely contrived news stories?
I interpreted your statement here to mean you should group it along with other fake news distributors and which Facebook and Twitter are now beginning to block. If you didn't mean that, then I apologize.
It's reporting on sources. Opinionated, yes. False? Maybe. But let's remember all the decades when the MSM were peddling stories how e.g. salt is bad, saturated fat is bad, etc. (now, we're starting to see stories about the reverse).
A large part of the coverage I have seen of Breitbart on mainstream news sources has taken the headlines of some of their overly provocative satire pieces and made the claim that they were reporting those headlines as fact.
As an aside, I think that if we were to nitpick CNN, FOX, or any of the other "real" sources we would find just as much "fake news" as they are claiming exists on alternative news sites. Of course it would be in their interest to discredit those sources when they fear losing viewership to them.
Personally I would love to know which stories you consider to be 'provably fake and completely contrived'. I have personally been the victim of multiple racial attacks both verbal and physical throughout my life. As a consequence I have v. low tolerance for racism, toward any race, and am thoroughly convinced we are all fundamentally equal in ability. And yet I am also fine with Breitbart's stance of wanting to eliminate the racial hypocrisy of political correctness for minorities only. As the OP I would love to know what articles in particular offend you. I'm just curious.
He's citing university studies there. I disagree with the premise and the conclusions, but it's not fair to call it misogyny. More just like paleo-conservatism/traditionalism/neo-reaction.
It's a (I think, false) belief that traditional gender roles led to a more cohesive society or something. It's quite a stretch to jump from there to misogyny. Perhaps sexism, but not misogyny.
It outright is misogyny, particularly since his claim about the washing machine being bad in any way is entirely unsupported and completely false.
Further complete idiocy:
Yes, he gets his claim of "women unhappy" from an actual study, but either ignores or misrepresents the results of said study, which concludes largely that women consider themselves to have better lives, and have better lives, but feel unhappy because they now compare themselves to a larger scope of possible achievements.
And while he's correct that the pill is shit and does a lot of harm in women, it's utterly disgusting to turn that around into "the church is right". No, the conclusion here is that men need to "man the fuck up" and get their tubes tied, and their rubbers on. (And the refusal of many here probably also is a good source for the unhappiness above.)
I could go further, but to properly address how much of that article is vile lies would require a post bigger than the article itself.
At the end of the day he is absolutely posting with a fucking agenda, and that is misogyny. Trying to deny that is utterly incomprehensible and reprehensible.
misogyny/mɪˈsɒdʒ(ə)ni/noun
dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
Trying to claim the correct thing to do is to make women happier by limiting the scope in which they can live their lives and by making them more "blissfully unaware" entirely fits this.
Again I think there is a double standard at work here. This is misogyny, these articles? To me misogyny would be an article that argues that women are not as smart as men, not as capable. I think this writer is arguing women would be happier if they reverted back to traditional roles because data shows they are not as happy today in modern times. Personally I think he's wrong. My wife is a professional, I want my daughter to be a professional. But the case that this website should be censured seems flimsy to me, I think we can tolerate these views. Can't we hear a case why women shouldn't be in the army? Can't we hear why someone things girls should play with dolls and boys should play with action men? I mean are our values so flimsy that they can't withstand a little breeze like this? I just googled some articles on how women are better at x,y,z. Not hard to find: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/advice/g1711/women-bet..., http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/seven-things-wom..., http://www.thehealthsite.com/fitness/6-things-women-can-do-b..., http://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/09/03/7-things-science-....
I mean, are we scrubbing all this stuff? Is this 1984?
Misogyny is not some kind of flag that gets thrown once a certain level of horrible is passed, it describes a stance towards women, and those articles do take it.
Also, you're strawmanning yourself am entire farm there, even if you didn't intend to.
'Strawmanning an entire farm', I like that, it's cute.
I refer to these other articles because I'm saying there is a double standard. Why are we suddenly talking about banning Breitbart? For writing a provocative article on why women would be happier in traditional rules? If we look at the articles I mention and replace the word 'woman' with 'man', I can't see a lot of difference between what we now are supposed to be outraged by.
How is pointing out a double standard in these contrasting articles a straw man?
Man, i can't tell if you're trolling me, or really can't see it. I'm actually kinda pissed because if you're serious you're being really dense, and if you're trolling you're being really good.
The article IS saying women aren't as smart as men, particularly not smart enough to handle freedom and responsibilities without being unhappy.
Then you try to bring "capable" as an example, which is ... just a superset of smart?
Then you say bb is being censured for that one article, when it's the fact that they're constantly and almost exclusively producing similar hateful stuff.
Then you start bringing up imaginary examples that are not at hand, which is honestly the purest kind of strawmanning.
And then you try to bring up articles that you claim should be deserving of the same reaction, but are very dissimilar.
I hope this helps you grok things, and if not, there's nothing left to say to you.
Exaggerated, sure, but it's not fake news by any means. It's biased news, like many other news outlets.
Ad agencies are perfectly free to not associate with them anymore, but calls to mark them as fake news is extremely dangerous and would be a clear case of censorship. I strongly disagree with Breitbart's agenda but there are times when publications like WaPo post stories that are at roughly the same degree of the bias axis as Breitbart, just in the opposite direction.
People just need to treat media sources with a grain of salt. Facebook and Twitter should only ban the websites that are clearly just fake article mills, posting nothing but completely fabricated information.
As a gay man, no it doesn't matter. You can have completely off base opinions no matter who you are. He panders to an audience, and damages the rest of the community in the process.
Calling those articles "exaggerated" is extremely forgiving. The article I quoted uses a combination of outdated pseudo-science and philosophically iffy reasoning behind its pretext. As someone who struggled to come out, I can't tell you how absolutely disheartening and difficult it is to get past your family when they read pieces like that, and clearly don't have the skills necessary to understand why the rationale is bad in the first place. It makes me want to just yank Milo by the neck and show him what irreparable damage he is doing to people (if I could); if he even has the morality to care.
And then you have things like this. Is this supposed to make up for everything else they do? You gave me a list of articles, but these aren't contradictory to their other practices. To my original point: why bother with the source when you can consume that information elsewhere, from a source that is far more likely to be reliable?
To your point about other publications such as the Washington Post being on the other axis of bias, I have trouble understanding how you can simply say they're just on the other side. From everything I've seen from the Washington Post, they're nowhere near as advertently dishonest as Breitbart is, accidentally or otherwise.
>When I express views like this, I’m sometimes called a reactionary. People say I want to go back to the 50s. And they’re right – but it’s the 650s BC I want to return to, because Sparta had the right idea about male love. You can spend all day wrestling and wanking each other off if you want to, chaps, but you still have to get married, have kids and go off to fight wars.
Sure it combines "outdated pseudo-science and philosophically iffy reasoning behind its pretext". But it's not fake news. It's just shitty news, like so much other shitty news out there. I'm not defending Breitbart, I'm just saying it is a press outlet and it should be allowed to exist as one. It shouldn't have to suffer from censorship. No media source should have to suffer from censorship. Fake news mills aren't media sources.
>It makes me want to just yank Milo by the neck and show him what irreparable damage he is doing to people (if I could); if he even has the morality to care.
Milo is a partisan asshole but he's not a total idiot. Instead of calling for his website to be blacklisted, why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject? You could probably even get him to agree with a lot of your points, and perhaps even empathize.
Healthy dialogues are critical in a democratic society. Censorship is the antithesis of everything our society stands for.
>To your point about other publications such as the Washington Post being on the other axis of bias, I have trouble understanding how you can simply say they're just on the other side. From everything I've seen from the Washington Post, they're nowhere near as advertently dishonest as Breitbart is, accidentally or otherwise.
I don't have any particular examples right now, but just as Breitbart will group together articles of alleged attacks by immigrants or minorities, I've often seen WaPo group together articles of alleged attacks against immigrants or minorities on their top bar. I think Breitbart is probably more biased on average, but they both spin things pretty heavily. Between Breitbart, Fox, Drudge, Huffington, NYT, NBC, WaPo, there is not a single source of objective and neutral news analysis out there. It's probably more fair to put Breitbart and Huffington Post at the same bias degrees than Breitbart and WaPo, but the point is that all these sources are pretty shitty and biased and calling for just one of them to be censored is quite silly.
> why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject?
Exclamations like that are just baffling. There's this continuous hateful, spiteful and just awful bigotry being spewed, but when one labels it as such, suddenly one is being unreasonable and one has to engage. I won't take the bait. No sir, thank you.
I don't think that particular position is necessarily a hateful one. He's arguing from pragmatism. I don't agree with him at all (in this case or any other), but he's an openly gay (and self-admittedly promiscuous) man himself, so you can't say everything out of his mouth stems from homophobic bigotry.
Also, for whatever reason or other, I have at least one openly gay friend (who isn't even that conservative) who agrees with him. Clearly there's room for open debate here.
Ignoring him is probably better than engaging, but that's different from calling for social media providers to censor references to him.
No one is arguing Breitbart should be prohibited from existing. Other people choosing not to subsidize or do business with them is not a ban.
Also, degree of ideological bias is not the same thing as degree of journalist integrity or factual falsity. A "news" outlet can have no particular ideological bias and be completely disconnected from the truth, or it can have a strong ideological bias and be completely reliable on facts and even have high integrity in presenting all relevant facts in the stories it covers (while, or even would assume, being quite selective in its selection of which stories to cover at all.)
So, saying Breitbart is no more biased than HuffPo is not an argument that they are no more fake than HuffPo.
>You can spend all day wrestling and wanking each other off if you want to, chaps, but you still have to get married, have kids and go off to fight wars.
You really don't see anything incongruent about the article's premise and his "conclusion", nor do you see that it's a preposterously philosophically-foolish position to take? He's okay with marrying a women I will not love nor have any emotional stake in. She'll just marry me, we'll live together, and she'll just be a semen vessel? Spare me the willful ignorance.
>But it's not fake news. It's just shitty news
Can we stop nitpicking? These publications often rely on crappy news in aggregate to push a narrative. It doesn't matter that an article here and there is seemingly rational, or has bits of truth cited by 10 year old studies with whimsical interpretations of those studies, while completely ignoring those studies were never replicated again. Those stories in aggregate begin to build up a narrative. That narrative then becomes accepted by certain people and sometimes unfortunately unquestionably so; the narrative is surrounded by a maze of complete and utter drivel. For some people, it's too much to shift through so they don't even bother to self-critique. The "maze of crap" can even have the nocuous effect of lending credence to the publishing organization. It's the same thing with anti-vaccination people, it's the same thing with flat-earthers, or people who want to claim evolution is fake. The problem becomes muddled when you get into something grey, like politics. But it's still the same pattern.
>why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject?
You are effectively asking for a dialogue "reset" Not only would that be extremely exhausting to rehash the past couple of decades of why we are where we are in regards to certain subjects, but also would basically be a waste of time. People like Milo have no interest in honest debate, or "truth" if you will. If they did, they'd write far more eloquent positions addressing the actual evidence and perspectives that exist in whatever subject is being discussed; they certainly wouldn't take willfully ignorant positions on those subjects either. They'd also conduct themselves accordingly when being filmed. Watch any of Milo's interviews on video and watch him twist himself in circles. He spends the majority of the time backpedaling on things he said rather than take some affirmative position with evidence to back it up.
He and Breitbart are free to publish what they want, in whatever manner they choose. That doesn't mean they deserve people's attention or money. That doesn't mean people need to respect them.
>I think Breitbart is probably more biased on average, but they both spin things pretty heavily.
There is a difference here. Everyone is biased, so let's not use it as a talking point. The principle behind all this is willing to admit when you got something wrong. The principle is having the integrity to inform your readership of the wrong, and correct it. The principle is not ignoring blatantly well supported positions on certain subjects just so you can tickle your audience's emotions and fears.
And to the overall censorship point: No one is calling for censorship. Private citizens and companies don't want to deal with Breitbart. Companies like facebook probably just don't have the ability nor the resources to sort through every single thing that starts trending from Breitbart, only to have it be removed because it's fake. We are talking about a publishing source that posted so many fake news stories, Facebook and Twitter decided to hell with it, we'll just get the story from elsewhere. Breitbart is in this position because of their own actions, not because there's some conspiracy theory to silence one side.
>You really don't see anything incongruent about the article's premise and his "conclusion", nor do you see that it's a preposterously philosophically-foolish position to take? He's okay with marrying a women I will not love nor have any emotional stake in. She'll just marry me, we'll live together, and she'll just be a semen vessel? Spare me the willful ignorance.
I see many, many issues with it. Did you not read my post?
>Can we stop nitpicking? These publications often rely on crappy news in aggregate to push a narrative.
Yes, that's true. Again, so do other sources, including many left-leaning ones.
>Watch any of Milo's interviews on video and watch him twist himself in circles. He spends the majority of the time backpedaling on things he said rather than take some affirmative position with evidence to back it up.
Right, because he's mostly going for clickbait and ad revenue and just general attention and self-aggrandizement. But the point is that he has a right to do that, and you have a right to challenge him on it.
>And to the overall censorship point: No one is calling for censorship. Private citizens and companies don't want to deal with Breitbart. Companies like facebook probably just don't have the ability nor the resources to sort through every single thing that starts trending from Breitbart
It seems we agree on most things except this.
First off, as far as I'm aware, Facebook and Twitter have absolutely no plans to block Breitbart. They're only blocking fake news outlets. Outlets that completely fabricate stories and evidence and interviews etc.
Facebook is a private corporation, but like it or not they are a massive monopoly.
No, it's not censorship in the sense of government censorship, but it has a similar effect. We don't have to call it censorship for the horrible effects to become apparent, so I'll stop calling it that.
Facebook has so much reach that you could equate them to a state in many ways. Blocking Breitbart would only solidify conservatives' beliefs that liberal elites are trying to stifle their voice and prevent them from sharing any contrary opinions, and make them feel even more marginalized. It would be a major boon to Trump and his administration. I think that one single action could be the start of a path that makes our country much more divisive than it is now. Zuckerberg was 100% right to be extremely wary about blocking any news sources pre-election.
An advertiser dissociating with Breitbart is one thing, but major social media outlets that effectively act as common carriers should not ban things without a very good reason, like law-infringing material or scams (which fake news outlets generally are).
Most of Breitbart's inflammatory-headline stories are based on real scientific studies.
This is sort of like pointing out (correctly) that a lot of junk food in fact also contains perfectly healthy ingredients. At the end of the day, it's a quality issue. And as applies to Breitbart, what it comes down to is that a lot of their stories are just really insipid (and basically contain way more noise than signal), even though (snippets of them) may make reference to more "reasonable" sources.
I strongly disagree with Breitbart's agenda but there are times when publications like WaPo post stories that are at roughly the same degree of the bias axis as Breitbart, just in the opposite direction.
MSM outlets do go a bit overboard, at times. But the extent to which (even during their worst lapses) their output resembles of the puerile drivel that sources like Breitbart produce every day, in nearly every every article -- just picking a random snippet from one of your sample articles posted above, at random:
This is a group that thinks anything ending in “salad” is health food. A pound of taco beef and a huge scoop of guac? It’s fine as long as it’s called a “taco salad”! Greens smothered in 700 calories of oily dressing? SOD OFF YOU STICK INSECT, IT’S A SALAD!
The Honorable New York Times said Saddam had Chemical Weapons, and was a party for enabling a Trillion dollar war. I think they should be definitely be labeled "fake news".
I am not fan of Breitbart, but when Reason magazine is labeled "fake news", this is not a crusade for truth, but to stamp out opposition "Stalin style".
"liberal mainstream" colluded with GOP during 2003 because of the shadow of 9/11. If you remember history correctly, Dubya had high approval rating for couple years after 9/11 and they found it inconvenient or expedient to play along.
NYT has its share of "fake" stories, where they either willfully misguided or parroted the White house talking points because of pressures of the day.
At the end of the day, NYT is a propaganda machine most of the time leaning left, except when it is uncomfortable.
My point was broadly that labeling Reason as fake news demonstrates this whole news stories about fake news is in itself fake outrage.
On your suggestion of spreading lies, I sure do introspect, and in this case, I find you acting childish and narrative driven rather than facts.
I don't really watch any major news source to be quite honest. I gleam around and try to measure credibility where I can. But thanks for being completely dismissive based on absolutely nothing except for you trying to get a quick cheap shot.
Here's the NYT letter that recently talks about this to their subscribers. In the letter they admit they published dishonest news stories and after the election have rededicated themselves to "honesty".
We know we totally weren't honest during the election, but guys, we are now! You can trust us! Said the media establishment losing control of the narrative.
I'm sorry, but I don't trust any news from ANYONE nowadays. Not breitbart, not the NYT, not ANYWHERE. If you do, I feel bad for you because you have been fed somebody's propaganda.
People are down-voting you a because you describe somebody as a neo-nazi. That's pretty strong, but I can't help but similarly feel somebody is self-labelling themselves as "alt-right if they use "MSM" seriously. It's similar to, albeit not as strong as, using "SJW".
If anything, the precursor to the ministry of truth is a political figure making it clearer than ever that coverage he doesn't like will be severely punished. Not just by loss of access, but by lawsuits and changes to the law.
It's hardly new that news organizations have to be a bit friendly to anyone they cover in order to preserve access. I cannot waltz into the White House press room and expect equal access, no matter how fair and intelligent my non-existent media empire is.
But the scope and severity we have been promised is an order of magnitude worse.
Ah yes. Any contradictory discretion is immediately escalated to "thought control by the government."
It's curious how many forms this "equal time" complaint comes in, but it's almost universally used as a bludgeon to imply that left-leaning news has an obligation to offer a platform for all sorts of things.
I'd like equal time on Rush Limbaugh's show to talk about how health care should be socialized. I think I have a cogent case that would demand scrutiny and be convincing to his audience. Will you help me petition for time there? I'll of course expect his advertising revenue for the time there (who works for free on this day and age?)!
The world we are moving to is one where ad exchanges, google, and facebook get to decide what can survive on the web. This doesn't seem like a good thing.
White nationalism can still create and post content to the web. But there's no responsibility for other companies to financially support them.
If a company like Breitbart cannot survive without Google's ad network, the onus is on them to figure out they can support themselves. Especially if supporting white nationalism undermines Google/Facebook's ability to hire and retain their own employees or impacts their reputation in a negative way.
Breitbart isn't a white nationalist news source. Bannon might be an asshole but I urge you to judge it by the content on the site. I don't agree with most of it but I support their right to post truthful content and editorials as they wish.
I really don't see the similarity (though I'm not familiar with the NYT, I assume it's a bit like The Guardian in the UK for this discussion).
Can you give examples of fake news, or what I'd consider to be biased propaganda? (this last category I'd suggest something like climate change denial) in the NYT?
That's a legit criticism, and likely shows a bias, though the paper did seem to acknowledge error, and the tone of the article was contrite, and lets face it, we're looking at a report of the paper's error in the paper itself.
All UK papers are obliged to acknowledge errors found by the PCC, and it's in their interest to maintain a good relationship with the PCC.
I can remember seeing the headline and how it didn't match the finding in the article - which was that there was a gun in the car, hence the subject being armed - and thinking all someone who needs an excuse is going to do is read the headline, not buy the paper, and unleash more violence.
The Guardian also kept saying reports that Duggan was a criminal were inaccurate as he had no record: he was a self confessed member of Star Gang and posed as such all over his Facebook. Either he was an adult human lying about being a member of a serious gang (which would have severe consequences) or he actually was involved in organised crime.
It does seem like it's going to be hard to know what actually happened at the incident.
The Guardian may have had a left/right bias here certainly, though it doesn't seem totally clear cut in this instance. It could as much be a case of "the reporting could have been more considered" rather than "deliberately misleading".
Was unarmed was misleading as found by the PCC, had no criminal record is provably false ( see Wikipedia link above ) and wasn't a gang member is contradicted by the subject's own Facebook page. It's fairly clear cut to me and I imagine many others.
Most articles about Russia. E.g. currently most MSM (edit: mainstram media) are on a propaganda roll regarding Mosul (Iraq/US) vs. Aleppo (Syria/Russia) reporting.
Most Western media report on Mosul being infested by "ISIS" and being "liberated" by the Iraq/US coalition, whereas Aleppo is a stronghold of "resistance" and viciously "attacked" by the Syria/Russia coalition. Of course, no proofs are given of any way, and it blatantly ignores reports that in Syria, "rebels" and "ISIS" are mostly one and the same, with individual fighters simply fighting for whomever pays better at the moment.
I try to maintain an open mind, and an air of distrust over things I read and things governments do.
However Russia has form for brutality, wether they are liberating or conquering, or both. Russia might mean well (I don't believe they do, as with a lot of government actions), but I would tend to believe reports that whatever their motives they were going about it in an un-necessarily violent way.
US attacked and destroyed 4 countries (well, only 3 officially, and supporting "rebels"/ISIS in Syria) in the past 15 years, and you're accusing Russia of brutality?!
It doesn't matter what source you read from. The vast majority of news is bullshit, especially in today's day and age. It's not enough to say "oh, Fox News/MSNBC, it's obviously trash". Individually inspect articles for their truth. Look for the other side of every argument. Because brand loyalty is bullshit.
That's fair enough, though I don't see anything quite as "extreme" as the examples of breitbart articles (which as far as I'm aware they are standing by).
Everyone has bias, and everyone lies, and sometimes people just make mistakes, but there is a scale to this that I personally see breitbart being further along than the NYT from the limited evidence I've seen overall.
> There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.
> Natural conservatives can broadly be described as the group that the intellectuals above were writing for. They are mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.
> The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt, includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions.
> For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe.
> Halting, or drastically slowing, immigration is a major priority for the alt-right. While eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.
> You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows. In short, they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the “kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option.
> The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.
> In response to concerns from white voters that they’re going to go extinct, the response of the Establishment — the conservative Establishment — has been to openly welcome that extinction. It’s true that Donald Trump would not be possible without the oppressive hectoring of the progressive Left, but the entire media is to blame for the environment in which this new movement has emerged.
> The really interesting members of the alt-right though, and the most numerous, are the natural conservatives. They are perhaps psychologically inclined to be unsettled by threats to western culture from mass immigration and maybe by non-straight relationships. Yet, unlike the 1488ers, the presence of such doesn’t send them into fits of rage. They want to build their homogeneous communities, sure — but they don’t want to commit any pogroms along the way. Indeed, they would prefer non-violent solutions.
This is, by definition, white nationalism. If Breitbart is the platform of the alt-right, and this is the alt-right, then Breitbart is a white nationalist news source.
How is this "by definition" white nationalism?! They barely mention race, and when they do, it's in a completely neutral context. There are even scientific studies supporting their position, i.e. that more homogenous culture makes for more trustworthy communities [1]. Of course, I'm the first person to doubt sociological research, but even if it's false, I see no reason to force people to live with others they don't like.
Well, if a white person cites that research as a reason to halt immigration and preserve their racial and cultural homogeneity, then they are a white nationalist. I did not make a value judgement in my comment, I'm just comparing the text to the definition.
As to why this is specifically white nationalism, I'll pull some more quotes for you.
> Natural conservatives can broadly be described as the group that the intellectuals above were writing for. They are mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.
"Natural conservatives" here are a group that the authors have identified as a key member of the alt-right coalition.
> This follows decades in which left-wingers on campus sought to remove the study of “dead white males” from the focus of western history and literature curricula. An establishment conservative might be mildly irked by such behaviour as they switch between the State of the Union and the business channels, but to a natural conservative, such cultural vandalism may just be their highest priority.
Here, alt-right members are concerned specifically by the removal or dilution of white culture. They might respect the promotion of other cultures in other countries, but in America they support their own culture only, which as we have seen, is white culture.
> Although the alt-right consists mostly of college-educated men, it sympathises with the white working classes and, based on our interviews, feels a sense of noblesse oblige.
Notice that white working classes specifically are worthy of sympathy, not all working classes.
> In response to concerns from white voters that they’re going to go extinct, the response of the Establishment — the conservative Establishment — has been to openly welcome that extinction.
Here, the Establishment is accused of not caring about white extinction. There is no concern about the extinction of other racial cultures, in fact that is the goal. Other races can stick to their own countries.
There is a section about neo-Nazis, but the authors dismiss them as generally unwelcome in the alt-right movement.
Yes, this article does promote the idea that racial nationalism is a natural impulse for people of any race, but it is written from a white American perspective, and promotes the idea that America should be a culturally white nation with limited immigration. I encourage you to read the whole article. I am not taking things out of context or twisting words, this is a description of the alt-right movement as a bunch of white people who want to preserve their own culture and halt immigration.
"Well, if a white person cites that research as a reason to halt immigration and preserve their racial and cultural homogeneity."
You keep inventing stuff. None of the immigration comments referred to race/ethnicity in any way. You do realize that white people immigrate too, right?
I do realize that. Again, I am not uncovering some hidden subtext here, I'm just reading what is written. These are the intended meanings.
A couple more quotes to elaborate the immigration thing:
> Immigration policy follows a similar pattern: by the numbers, cheap foreign workers on H1B visas make perfect economic sense. But natural conservatives have other concerns: chiefly, the preservation of their own tribe and its culture.
We don't have to guess what tribe and culture mean here. The very next paragraph says they're talking about Western Europeans, so Western European immigrants would not be a problem. If you're still not convinced that "tribe" has anything to do with race or ethnicity:
> The alt-right do not hold a utopian view of the human condition: just as they are inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe, they recognise that other groups – Mexicans, African-Americans or Muslims – are likely to do the same.
> You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows. In short, they doubt that full “integration” is ever possible.
Clearly the immigration concerns are directly linked to concerns about racial and ethnic mixing.
> Halting, or drastically slowing, immigration is a major priority for the alt-right. While eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.
The movement dislikes immigration specifically because of demographic displacement. As the rest of the piece makes explicitly clear, that demographic is "white".
Ok so for you "nationalism" in a predominantly white country equals "white nationalism". Well, I guess there's not much I can say against that definition, except that the term is usually used in a much more emotionally charged way (and with much more negative connotations)
Can you tell me your definition? I could be wrong.
There's a little more to it than just nationalism in a predominantly white country, though. Nationalism generally means support of national identity above all else. This article promotes white identity above national identity, but the outlet for that feeling is to make the nation into a white nation, so that supporting white culture and supporting the nation are one and the same. Note that the article never talks about American culture. It talks about white culture and white identity politics.
I'm trying very hard not to criticize anything in these comments. I'm really just trying to summarize the description that article provides. It's not like I'm uncovering a hidden subtext, I think the authors would generally agree with my summary.
I'm not using white nationalist as an insult, I'm calling Breitbart white nationalist because that accurately describes the beliefs that they cater to. Maybe Steve Bannon wouldn't call himself that because it's obviously a politically and emotionally charged term, but if he agrees with the views described in this article, he is a white nationalist.
I checked a few articles, the word "nigger" is either in the comments or in quotes. It's true, however, that they don't abbreviate it as "n-word" like most MSM. But we all know what "n-word" means, so I find that practice kind-of pointless anyways.
There is literally abundant fake news, primarily distributed through Facebook. Actual lies. [0] Whether Breitbart is abjectly white nationalist is more debatable, likely by design.
I was asking about fake news specifically on Breitbart. I know they exist online, even on "reputable" news sites like CNN (so probably Breitbart as well), but to claim Breitbart is infested with fake news is patently absurd.
No. Not two days ago, I listened to a self described white nationalist leader speak at length in his own words. He was not a made up smear, but a real person with real (awful) opinions, who now feels he has kindred spirits at the top of government. So, again, no, "white nationalism" is simply not "mainly a smear used by the MSM".
Breitbart itself describes itself very clearly as a champion for the neo-nazis that have re-branded themselves as "alt-right". Much of the news they provide is clearly misleading.
I wouldn't necessarily go so far as saying Breitbart produces fake news, however there are sites that produce fake news. Completely made up stuff targeting conservatives to make money. This is a very real problem and it needs to be solved.
The world we are moving to is one where ad exchanges, google, and facebook get to decide what can survive on the web. This doesn't seem like a good thing.
Actually it's the world we've already been living in for quite some time. A world not flooded with pop-up ads for hardcore porn ads, for example (like the internet actually was, not too many years ago) -- but in which you're more than welcome to go to certain sites (whose names and URLs everyone knows) to blast your eyesockets with exactly those same images, 24x7, if that be your inclination.
Yes. You can stand towards Trump as you want, but he deconstructed the media in a textbook example of the Socratic method, for which we all should be a bit grateful.
Breitbart claims it isn't: Breitbart responded saying it "has always and continues to condemn racism and bigotry in any form".
The exchange refuses to say what triggered their action:
"We use a number of third-party standards to determine what is and isn't hate speech, and if we detect a pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group, we determine that to be non-compliant and we simply won't serve ads against it," AppNexus's spokesman Joshua Zeitz told the BBC.
"I'm not going to put the examples out there because I'm not going to engage in a tit-for-tat on what is compliant."
The article lists some headlines that they consider somewhat questionable, but you can easily google similar headlines focused on other groups from sites like the Huffington Post; e.g. "White People Are Too Dumb to Know They're Racist". Do you think we will see similar action taken against those such sites?
Breitbart got its big start, I believe, from the atrocious hoaxes itperpetrated on ACORN, NPR, and other organizations to destroy their reputations unfairly. It has come a long way; it's now simply a very biased news organization that sometimes does decent reporting on undercovered topics.
Yes, it is every ad network's right to refuse to associate with Breitbart or anyone else for that matter. But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in? Do we want ad networks taking activist stances about news websites? Do we want everyone to have to pick a side? Do we want people's careers destroyed for holding relatively mainstream opinions that happen to contradict the majority opinion?
>Yes, it is every ad network's right to refuse to associate with Breitbart or anyone else for that matter. But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in?
Yes, this is the direction we as a society want to move in. The opposite direction from hate speech. A direction in which large commercial ad enterprises do not support neo-Nazi content and do not support neo-Nazis making a lot of money off said content; at least not on AppNexus' dime.
This is precisely the direction we want to move in.
So all we have to do to silence someone is say they're a neo-nazi? Breitbart has strongly and repeatedly denied any association with hate, bigotry, neo-nazis, etc.
Incidentally, Breitbart himself was Jewish, as is the CEO. Neo-nazi seems a particularly bizarre term to apply especially given for a site that was specifically started by Breitbart and Solov to be pro-Israel.
Of course Breitbart claims that. Go to a prison and you'll see all the inmates claiming innocence. If this is the best argument you can up with I'd advice to not bring it up at all.
How many of those involved plea deals? If you can't afford legal representation, you won't get anything that deserves to be called that in the US. If you're then also faced with the ridiculously high sentences you can get in the US, you'll no doubt find yourself pleading guilty to a lot of things to get a deal.
> is this really the direction we ... want to move in?
It's been like this since at least the 18th century. People/organisations should absolutely have the right of association and I'm glad that they exercise it.
> Do we want people's careers destroyed
I'm not sure what you're referring to. I definitely have no particular issue about a news organisation going to the wall if it can't find readership or funding. If you mean people losing their jobs due to it then that's personally unfortunate but doesn't strike me as a societal problem necessarily.
If you mean someone being persecuted by the state or a powerful actor because they have a moderate view that is disagreed with then, yes, that's a very bad thing. Not sure it applies here though.
But is this really the direction we, as a society, want to move in?
Isn't is exactly the direction we want society to move in? What could be more free and fair than allowing anybody to publish their views, and allowing the public/advertisers to decide who receives their money?
We want people to be free to publish their views, and free to decide who gets their money - absolutely. But we also want to be careful how we exercise those rights.
I think the idea that the only time censorship matters is when it is done by the government is a little silly. Free speech is something we work toward as a society. The First Amendment does not ensure free speech; it ensures the preconditions exist for free speech to be possible, i.e., the government cannot itself restrict free speech.
If every single person in the United States of America refuses to speak, associate with, or do business with someone who believes the world is flat, and consequently such believers cannot find a place to live, can't buy food, can't live a normal life, free speech does not exist, whether or not the government does anything.
Yes, there has to be a balance between the two extremes of total shunning and total acceptance. It has to be OK sometimes, for some people to refuse to associate with people solely on their views. The extremity of said views should probably be a factor. So, maybe, should be the relationship and power of the entities involved. But the absolutist position that there is no problem whatsoever with things like this happening is extremely dangerous: a self-censoring society is in practice no different from a tyrannical government - a democratic government is, after all, no more than one of many enforcement mechanisms of the people - and the principle of free speech and the spread of ideas is dead.
I don't agree with Breitbart's positions - which again, are fairly mainstream - but I don't want these tactics normalized and used against you and me, and end up in a world where everyone has to pick sides or face immediate financial consequences. And I think this is a people-problem, not necessarily an ad-network problem: I'm pretty sure they're only doing this because of pressure being put on them directly or indirectly by interested consumers.
With authors like Milo Yiannopoulos posting articles like "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths" I would say they dug their own grave. If we really have to explain or justify why this is bad journalism maybe it shouldn't be considered journalism at all. I'm ok with that, but there should be open discussion and some methodology behind the future of journalistic classification.
This kind of article is exactly why it's hard to take criticism of Breitbart seriously. People are so offended of having sacred sensibilities offended that they can't see it's satire, a form of reductio ad absurdum at the claim by a feminist academic that women need special treatment in universities and should possibly have segregated classes. The whole point of it is to use demographic quotas, which most conservatives hate, as an argument to prove the absurdity of a claim which he disagrees with. People who can't see it for what it is need to reevaluate their sense of humor, because we always need to consider the consequences of our most cherished ideas, and humor is often the best kind of criticism.
Hi, I find your comment problematic for two reasons. 1) If you replaced "women" with "men" in that title, I'm sure you'd have no problem with it. In fact, no doubt you'd probably gleefully Facebook it to all your tweet snapchatters on Instagram. and 2) Milo is a homosexual. You speak from a position of straight white male privilege and as such you are in no position to judge his journalistic skills or even question if it should be considered journalism at all. It sounds like what you really want is to only classify "journalism" as "stuff written by privileged straight white athiestic males and females with a liberal bent".
I don't believe there should be a cap on anyone's education; male, female, or otherwise. I also don't think that Milo is qualified to define what the word "journalism" means any more than I am. I can write opinions on a blog or onto a piece of paper. That doesn't make my work "journalism." Neither does declaring that I'm a journalist or declaring that my work is journalism. Also, sexual orientation doesn't give Milo a free pass to write click-bait and pass it off as journalism. It also doesn't excuse him from saying misogynistic things. I will respect Milo's right to say what he wants. That's it.
> If you replaced "women" with "men" in that title, I'm sure you'd have no problem with it
A complete fabrication. Brietbart actually published that article; your claim is about an imaginary person in your head.
> Milo is a homosexual
That doesn't make him any less sexist (or even less homophobic if that's what he is - many leading homophobes have been homosexual themselves). Being homosexual isn't some sort of license of credibility. Who he sleeps with doesn't seem relevant.
It's interesting to me that people on the hateful right sometimes believe their own propaganda about how normal people think: That somehow we all walk around thinking that someone's sexual preferences can put them on a moral pedestal. Everyone is just people; some people's rights are abused at a much higher rate than other people's, so we try to do something about that - because they are people.
It's really trolling, but it presents itself using the trappings of journalism which has a few benefits over old-fashioned trolling: First some people believe things which are presented in a certain way, through a "news site" etc. Secondly claiming to be a journalist provides some legal defences.
There are examples of this in the UK too: Katie Hopkins is a master troll pretending to be a journalist (and with a column in a tabloid newspaper too).
Worth noting this is Appnexus, not Google AdExchange. Appnexus is still a very large ad exchange, but Breitbart's business shouldn't necessarily be affected. Its not unlikely that Appnexus and Breitbart don't even have a direct relationship, and Appnexus is just going to block bids on that domain.
I see little wrong with this. I understand the idea that it's not necessarily right that ad companies stop supporting something based on ill-defined criteria, and I do support the idea that the criteria should be well defined. In this case, I think the criteria is pretty well defined: "pattern of speech that could incite violence or discrimination against a minority group." Although the site says that they, "have always and continue to condemn racism and bigotry in any form," their actions, in this case articles like, "Why There Ought to Be a Cap on Women Studying Science and Maths"[1], doesn't reflect that message and this in particular is discriminatory against women. There are other examples in the BBC article as well. The BBC article also mentions that the articles in question were written by a guest author, not a staff member, but the onus on posting something on the website falls on the staff, so that argument falls flat.
The other and simpler reality is that they are a private company that can do what they want when it comes to how they utilize their resources. If they don't want to serve ads on Breitbart then it's their choice. Even if they just arbitrarily chose to disallow Breitbart on their platform, it might be unjust but it's their right and choice.
On a more philosophical note, consider that all these issues of "fake news losing ad revenue" and the one mentioned here are generally only possible because the media is very free to post whatever they want and get paid for it, thanks to the USA's extremely free media laws. It isn't ideal for sure, but in some respects I'd rather have this reality where we worry about a specific news organization losing ad revenue than the reality where the only news that I can read is state sponsored.
This is quite frankly bad. Even the spokesman said he wasn't going to get into it (because it might hurt the PC police). It truly seems like there is a political backlash war going on. It seems so childish, but they are only trying to hurt Breitbarts bottom line.
As long as Breitbart has a large audience that advertisers wish to sell things to, economic pressure will lead them to advertise there. If this particular ad network won't, then they will find one that will.
One of the things that isn't really being talked about is the fact that Facebook, Google etc. are directly responsible for these organizations being promoted in the first place. Absent these content aggregators, Breitbart might never have had a significant following in the first place. In that context, them taking actions to lower its priority in various ways bothers me a lot less.
> But a spokesman said a "human audit" of Breitbart had flagged several articles that had caused it concern because of the language they had featured.
I'm not even a Breitbart reader but this strikes me as a ridiculously dangerous standard to use. "Human audit" is also my new favourite term for forming an opinion.
This is not dangerous in any way. This is not a free speech issue. Commercial enterprises are entirely free to support business activity that they agree with, and refuse to support activity that they do not agree with. For those who are improperly conflating this issue with free speech or First Amendment rights in any way, you probably need a reminder:
It is not legally a free speech issue. Sure. But it is in fact very, very dangerous. The amount of power that huge tech companies such as Google and Facebook have over people these days is not very far off from the power a government has over people. If they are using that power to silence people they disagree with then that is extremely dangerous. Even if you happen to agree with them this time, you might not in the future. The fact that they are not a government is irrelevant to how dangerous these actions are, considering they have the power to silence millions of people. It is not in any meaningful way comparable to a restaurant owner showing you the door, considering the scale of these networks.
But you see, if you call it "my personal opinion", it sounds small and unimportant, but if you call it "human audit", it sounds like a cutting-age scientific technology to evaluate content. So it's clear which one should be chosen.
Well, AppNexus is certainly free to act out their ideological biases. I'm pretty sure there are more than one ad networks, including ones which don't make agreeing with network's management on political matters a prerequisite for doing business with them, and Breibart would be completely fine.
It hasn't anything to do with Boycotting. It is just that some advertisers don't wanna pay to have their adverts shown next to those gross discussions.
This. I simply cannot have my ads on this type of site. So I will seek and pay for ad networks that guarantee that my ads don't appear there. This is simply the free market.
So you just pay people you fundamentally disagree with? Not every boycott is undertaken to change things, they can also be done simply to have nothing to do with what the target is doing.
I don't think anyone is under the illusion that Breitbart can be boycotted or shamed. The market they cater to lives in a pretty air-tight bubble, the same bubble which sustains Fox News/Drudge Report/Rush Limbaugh etc....
You say this like the left doesn't have its own in the NYT, CNN, ABC, NBC, Huff, Salon, etc... that's much more of an bubbled echo chamber. At least on the right they get bombarded with MSM daily... they just know its straight up corrupt.
The left has its own biases, but to equate it with the Fox News/Breitbart bubble is dishonest. To take science as an example, the left has its own set of denialists (ex: anti-vaccers, anti-GMO), but the left has plenty of people who push back against such science denialism. The Fox News/Breitbart bubble doesn't have any such checking mechanism. There's a reason why creationism is popular in the US.
When will the liberals learn? Silencing only fuels this movement. Silencing is the path of least intellectual integrity. Don't they realize that every time they ban or block the alt-right, instead of refuting their arguments, the alt-right wins? People aren't that stupid, you can't just block the alt-right talking points out of their sight and thus out of their mind. Same thing with 'fake news'. The notion of 'hate speech' has been used so broadly that it is now inflated to complete meaninglessness.
The embargo on South Africa in protest of apartheid worked. I don't see why something similar wouldn't work here. Breitbart is first and foremost a business, and they have lots of employees on staff pushing these messages of hate that need to be paid. If their income stream dries up it makes it much harder to continue doing what they're doing.
I do appreciate what you mean by this, and I'm sure most people would agree that recently we've seen particularly abject failures of the left wrt. engaging with these issues. But I'm not convinced that there is an 'argument' to 'refute'. We're not talking about a coherent disagreement between well-informed parties. In fact, some groups seem to actively embrace ignorance – see Michael Gove's 'people have had enough of experts' nonsense.
Refuting arguments doesn't work when the source of the mistruth is either too stupid to understand truth, willfully shuns the truth, or is simply drowned out by their own echo chamber.
I hope you can see the irony in suggesting that any argument you disagree with (isn't "good") is "pseudo-sociological abstract bullshit".
The "alt-right" is not a great example of a rational "movement". The hyperbole about Clinton is/was similar to some of that used against Trump and their apparent champion (Trump) was repeatedly proven to have lied and seems unable to present a consistent response on many issues - Climate Change, Obamacare, whether Clinton will be investigated, removing any conflict of interest he may have, his foreign policy, his economic policy etc.
The "left" had a laundry list of falsehoods Trump's campaign was built on and it didn't matter at all. The (completely fair!) discussion of racism and bigotry as part of Trump's appeal was far from the "left"'s only argument.
That's not at all a valid statement. People rightly pointed out, over and over again, the inconsistency of Trump's views on several issues. The trope that the argument was nothing but shouting about racism is just not correct.
Just today Brietbart published articles pushing climate change denial and brigading Amazon reviews of a book because the said author disagrees with Donald Trump. How does one reason with such an obstinate worldview?
Well for me the way to deal with the whole "climate change" is wrong, if they were to say - "who wants cleaner air and water" - Nobody would argue and things would just move forward and avoid getting hung up on debate and endless papers and research to spell out the common sense. It is like arguing the compass direction to the nearest degree when if you said is the general wind N,S,E or west then everybody would agree it's just one of those and things would move in the right general direction instead of doing circles for years upon years, whilst time waits for nobody.
In short, its how you define the issue in a way that everybody can relate too better and if that means going indirectly with the side-effect being the target, then so be it.
SlateStarCodex once outlined how you might make a conservative case for dealing with climate change; the Archdruid Report discusses the subject, too. The key is to only argue climate change; it's much easier to persuade people that climate change is an issue, than to persuade them that climate change is an issue and the only solution is Communism. Think cap-and-trade, lasting strategic independence (at least one Iraq hawk drove a Prius), and the irresponsible foreigners fouling up the atmosphere while we do our bit to help...
> Well for me the way to deal with the whole "climate change" is wrong, if they were to say - "who wants cleaner air and water" - Nobody would argue and things would just move forward
I've tried this argument many times with climate change skeptics. It almost always comes down to economics for them. They want cleaner air and water, but not at the expense of their wallets.
Bringing up the long-term economic effects of climate change just brings us back to the original argument.
For one thing, come with an open mind. Don't just label it denial just because you disagree with it. Don't force your beliefs upon anybody else.
Not that any of that matters, we are way past the point now where this house can be united (other than, ironically, a war with Mexico), we can only wait for it to collapse.
Sorry if that was too snarky. I guess my point is there obviously isn't one correct tactic. The people who run ad tech (or any other) businesses have a very binary decision: either they allow someone to be a customer or they don't.
> In reply to knz, I hope you see the illogicality of interpreting what I wrote above as "suggesting any argument [I] disagree with is [...]".
Passing off the whole of the "alt-right" as "irrational" is exactly the sort of attitude that encourages previously-neutral people to leave social and progressive political groups. Unless you have a mathematical proof of this statement, I would be more humble in what one chooses to believe, and how one conducts one's arguments.
Sorry, I assumed from your choice of language ("pseudo-sociological abstract bullshit") that you were implying that much of the dissent falls into that category. Personally I have seen many good arguments made against the ideology of the "alt-right" but like most conservations it usually ends with the group being refuted rejecting any semblance of rational conservation ("lying media even if I was caught on video saying it").
I don't disagree that it would be a mistake to assume the concerns of the "alt-right" are all irrational or should be dismissed without consideration. I also don't believe that this problem is unique to media organisations on the right of the political spectrum but as others have pointed out they are far more effective at it.
Very True and often see some view dragged and labeled and dismissed under some label (however justified or not) and countered with polar-opposite extremist mentality and that is equally not acceptable.
Constructive debate without rhetoric and sound facts always wins over and does wonders. Indeed it is the glib dismissal and labeling that alienates people and fuels there issues even more.
Sure people can just boycott and ignore, that is a life chocie we all have from purchasing and engaging and something we should all do if we do nto do already. Be that buying products localy instead of shipped in and buying seasonal local products is a form of positive and sound purchasing on so many levels.
Today we have more than enough tools to avoid and block what we do not wish to engage in and nobody is forcing anything upon you via social media that you can not just block and avoid. Which is a better choice than just tossing of a glib you a racist rhetoric rant at hair trigger speed for something that was more than not a badly worded concern from somebody without a racist angst in their bone.
But certainly see extremist views form both wings and it does nothing more than fuel the concerns and transform them into hate, making things much worse for all.
But in a time in which one bad punctuation or worded comment can be straw-maned into something it is not and that gets run with and ridiculed in a way that is more vile than the straw-manned comment, then the word sanctimonious ends up being overlooked too often.
So in some area's it is hard to even talk about migration, economies, politics, religion and many other topics without the risk of just one person dragging it down into something utterly unproductive and the glibly tossing of labels in a way that fits those labels more than what they object to.
Just sad many people can't accept we are all different and this is why we do not all dress the same and look the same and have the same tastes and interests. But we are all human after all, even if humanity escapes so many at times.
But two area's in which I like to handle things and how:
people who are anti-gay: I point out that why are they trying to convert them into straight people, isn't that what you accuse gay people of doing and yet you the one actively actually trying to do that and why. If say you a male and you do not like male gays then think about it, statistically the more gay males then the more women there are for you and the better chance for you, so why are you trying so hard to create problems for yourself. Along those lines
as for race: Well it is fun to educate people upon how colour works and how we see refracted light and ends up pointing out that people who many class as white are actually darker skinned and refract back what light is not absorbed. As we know grass is not green but blue and red in colour so absorbs the red and blue light and refracts the green light, hence looks green. This gets down to explaining that what they think of as black people are actualy white skinned and what we see as white skined are actualy black skinned. This confuses them and all down to science proving that they hate themselves.
But doing things constructivly is an effect and need to be in the right mood, but always a way to have a constructive debate if you avoid the rhetoric and deal with the issue constructivly over having a playground flamewar.
Anyhow I hope I've worded that well and no offence ever intended.
Even if you don't agree with Breitbart or other outlets, it's frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.