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Comment by originalvichy | Hacker News Reader

This was the original ”fake news”. News mills in places like North Macedonia creating clickbait fake news for ad clicks. Breitbart’s are more sophisticated. They are whitewashing lies by having a look of authenticity. Doesn’t help that your president regularly links to it. He might have lost the election but he took a big win in the information war. American journalism is fighting for its dear life because you elected a person who is immune to facts. Now it’s a party that’s immune to it. Soon it’s the voters.

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The causation runs in the other direction. The Breitbarts made the voters immune to facts. The party followed them, and they elected a leader who matched.

There's a feedback loop as well: Breitbart found fertile ground because of decades of partisan separation from the facts, including a TV news network run by former political operative for the party. There's positive feedback between manipulation and profit motive. That primed people for a tenous connection to reality, waiting to be broken by fake news sites, and then to vote for candidates who rely on it.

> This was the original ”fake news”.

No, that is a narrow view of history. The history of propaganda, yellow journalism, sensationalism and fake news has a long and storied history beyond today's talking heads

Trump isn't the cause of the problem with American journalism; at most he's a symptom. They American news media has been eating its own tail for decades.

Yes and they are not exactly objective either.. when democrats say theres russian collusion there is full media coverage of rumours and gossip.

When trump say there is fraud or bidens son has stuff in ukraine its "fake news" and its tweet are censored.

There is a so high level of despising the people who voted for trump... You guys in america got what you deserved..

If you can't or won't stop posting political flamebait to HN, we are going to have to ban your account. It's not what this site is for, and we've asked you more than once already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How on earth is this flamebait ? The truth is that the double standards of the american media is an insult to the entire trump vote base and thats why they vote for him.

This is 100% objective from a french guy, i would vote bernie sanders if I was american. The extreme right in my country goes up for the exact same reason and people who think they are so smart by hating trump are arrogant and unable to see it's just tribalism from both side.

How can twitter think they have the right to hide some claims from one camp and not from the other when at the end of the day no one really has any fact at hand ?

I support the left ideas but they have no way to win if they dont have the regular people on their side or worse, despise them.

"You guys in america got what you deserved" is obvious flamebait. The problem is that it's hard to see this sort of thing in one's own comments.

I agree the wording may sound agressive but the meaning is stiln the same:

Most outlets and people who criticized trump in the name of being more "reasonable" or "presidential" or more "intelligent" ended behaving with the same tribalism and arrogance by insulting and laughing at his user base. To the point of not even realizing that by fighting and insulting him, they were alienating their user base more than it was already and actually helping him being elected.

Thats what i wanted to point out with they got what they deserved: democrats and media arrogantly thinking they were "so smart" but having stances that gave the opposite result. In the end trump was the only one openly owning completly a "tribal" behavior, the only one not hypocritical about that, and probably the only one who knew what he was doing.

P.s. Policing words and arguments on a forum like here or reddit is the same essence: you think you improve the level of the debate but actually people who stay are all the same polite makov chains that doesnt want to offend each other and agree, and the angry disagreeing ones just leave to the_donald or the manosphere. So much for improvement..

Fight and provocation are good and should be in the open. Its the only think that make people move. Read about how the google culture when it started.

You can't compare the google culture when it started, which was a tiny group of people engaged in intensely bonding activities (in more ways than one!) to an online community of millions of people who have basically no relationship with each other. Fight and provocation strengthen community in the former case, and destroy community in the latter.

I've posted about this many times. A partly-related comment from today is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956. An earlier one is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24620683 and there are links to a bunch more explanations. If you read those, and still have a question that isn't answered by them, I'd be curious to know what it is.

I think your arguments in linked posts are reasonable for a tech forum. I am not so convinced of their relevance for political discussion, especially american politics where being "nice" versus "confrontational" has almost been an implicit political stance for democrats versus republicans in the campaigns, and one which could almost entirely explains Trumps popularity.

Political discussions will always messy and confrontational because its about real people issues.. Only rich and priviledged people can afford being nice about it because they dont care.

Maybe you should just ban the political discussions altogether on HN if you want to avoid the drama.. no one will blame you

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