Stop Trusting Viral Videos | Hacker News Reader

Stop Trusting Viral Videos

theatlantic.com

27 pointsElof5 comments

It would be good if the Atlantic at large followed this advice.

Except, they've already painted the whole town of Covington as racists [1], I doubt they will encourage their contributors to follow these principles. And when the next viral video to rolls around, they will join in the outrage mob and gladly vilify children if it means they get clicks.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/01/mayor-covington-ke...

The fact that they are children is what upset me the most about the coverage discussed in this article even before the broader narrative started to unfold. Media should be held to higher standards, IMO

The authors point about people generally trusting video as truth even though there is tons of nuance in all of the various ways the video is captured and produced is a good one.

I feel like a lot of the points in the article can apply more broadly to almost all polarizing viral content. In the information economy it often pays off to be unobjectibe and manipulative

> polarizing viral content

I feel like the points in the article can apply even more broadly to all content, especially the ones that with more "professional" language and good typography, which people naturally tends to trust more, like the Atlantic.

edit: formatting

Stop trusting the newspaper full stop. They are a dying people, we should let them pass.

But seriously, it's entirely predictable that now the wokeology adherents have revealed themselves for the frothing, enraged mob they claim to hate, that now the thinkpieces come out calling for moderation and that nobody really knows what happened.

We already know what happened, and I don't mean what is or isn't in the video. I mean how it got to this point. Widespread indoctrination with collective guilt, then subsequently laser focused on scapegoats.

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