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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following

Those people have always existed. When I was a kid in the 80's, supermarkets carried tabloid newspapers with headlines like "Boy born with head of a bat" or "leading telekinetics agree that world will end in six days". The difference now is that while most of us just shook our heads and dismissed those tabloid newspapers, nobody was pressuring the supermarkets themselves to ban their sale.

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There’s a big difference, “Weekly World News” was in the grocery aisle between Archie comics and celebrity gossip. It was a fun distraction. Similarly, crazy public access programs were on a specific channel for the purpose of allowing local viewpoints.

Editorial standards in the normal media didn’t allow for the type of propaganda that is mainstream today. The NY Times didn’t write about Bigfoot, because it’s silly and would detract from their reputation. Who would take a publication talking about batboy seriously?

Reddit/Twitter/Facebook specifically denies accountability for anything - they hijack the credibility of organizations AND you to drive engagement, period. If the content is gross, it’s not “their fault”.

I think most of mainstream outlet are trying to get away with it by tagging these kind of article as "opinion"

The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.

There was a lot of that silly content in 1980s and 1990s BBS's, as well as on Usenet and the early Web. People could definitely find an audience for it. What we didn't have was "social" media and its pervasive matching of online with IRL identity and social ties.

So when deluded people read something outlandish online, they're now left free to assume that some halfway-trustworthy real-world entity must be endorsing those claims. There's no expectation of critical thinking or skeptical debate about what we see online because real-world norms are very different, and it all gets conflated as "what's mainstream".

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