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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

"they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language."

Change the word "retweet" to "publish/broadcast", and that describes most "mainstream" journalism.

I stopped when they referenced Snopes as a "fact checker"....the same Snopes that "fact-checked" a satirical article in the Babylon Bee about whether Brett Kavanaugh should prove via DNA that he's not the son of Hitler. [1]

The authors should write an article on the more fundamental issue of 'truthiness' -- it was once a joke by Stephen Colbert, but now people actually talk in terms of "my truth" and "her truth" -- not _the_ truth.

If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even species? With objectivity lost, then they're surely unlikely to find its vestiges on Twitter.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/democrats-demand-kavanaugh...

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>If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even species?

Why do you need gender and race to be objective?

As for species, we've gotten that wrong too https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/019501958X

  If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even species?

Sorry, mule. You have to choose /s

> If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even species?

Race is absolutely a state of mind, more so than gender. All else being equal, a person who would identify as "POC" in the USA would simply be seen as "white" in many other Western countries.

> Race is absolutely a state of mind, more so than gender.

Yes ...

> All else being equal, a person who would identify as "POC" in the USA would simply be seen as "white" in many other Western countries.

I'm struggling to think of what you mean here? The 20th century saw the transition of various southern european ethnicities into being "white" where they might previously not have been. And also a brutal war in the ruins of Yugoslavia among ethnicities that outsiders would find hard to distinguish and label together as "white".

Race is a state of mind - both in oneself and in the eyes of other people.

> I'm struggling to think of what you mean here?

An example would be how a broadly non-American audience commented to a video entitled "People Guess Who is White In a Group of Strangers" (though, to be fair, some Americans commenters were equally shocked) [0].

You are absolutely right about the huge variety of ethnic identities and conflicts in different cultures, and how they cannot be understood under the mores of a different culture. That is the spirit of my comment, offering a counterpoint to the implication that the idea of "race" is somehow objective.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ShitAmericansSay/comments/7d4aff/sa...

2+2=5

> I stopped when they referenced Snopes as a "fact checker"....the same Snopes that "fact-checked" a satirical article in the Babylon Bee about whether Brett Kavanaugh should prove via DNA that he's not the son of Hitler.

Are you suggesting that when something that is false is being circulated as true, fact checkers should ignore it if it originated on a satire site?

It's amazing how many people think that the Babylon Bee isn't satire, while there's little confusion over the Onion. Both state clearly that they're satire. Does Snopes fact-check the Onion? Do you think they should?

If an Onion article gets widely circulated on social media in such a way that people aren't realizing it is satire and people ask Snopes about it, then yes, they should do a fact check article on it stating that it was satire that originated at The Onion.

> It's amazing how many people think that the Babylon Bee isn't satire, while there's little confusion over the Onion.

I think there are a few things that contribute to this.

1. The way sharing works on many social media sites is that when you share a link to a story at some other site the social media site embeds the story in your post. It links back to the original site, but many people who see your post will just read the embedded story rather than click to go read it on the original site. They see the satirical article by itself rather than in the context of a whole site full of satirical articles, making it easier to not realize it is satire.

2. The Onion is more well known.

3. Due to things like Q, the Bee's satire is making claims that are often less wild than things that people already believe, reducing the chances that they will realize it is satire.

People on the left don't realize that the "fact checkers" are an extension of the propaganda arm of the left.

For anyone who disagrees, take a look at the "fact-checker" Twitter profiles here and tell me with a straight face they aren't literal mouth puppets of the extreme left and/or the communist party: https://www.truthorfiction.com/our-team/

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