Comment by jscipione | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jscipione | Hacker News Reader

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"In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good." No they were not, these three organizations have always been in the business of top-down centralized information control where a few rich and powerful individuals use these organizations to control and subjugate the powerless masses.

Since the social media revolution we now have alternatives to these centralized control structures. The push back to their loss of centralized control of information is labelled as "disinformation" and it is a disingenuous attempt for the cabal to maintain their power over us.

Hundreds of millions of people have been killed by this cabal of ruling elites and their thirst for war and power. ABC, NBC, and CBS are the real sources of disinformation in this world from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to a Kentucky Gun Show misrepresented as Syrian warfare. By breaking their oligopoly on information we are for the first time in human history achieving real freedom and this is scaring the elites who seek to maintain their power over us by writing articles like this one.

Break your chains, block out corporate media, seek real truth, and you will find it. And when you do, come back and we will fight side-by-side together against our corporate overlords and we will win our freedom.

If you read past the first two paragraphs you'd realize this was an ironical statement. But I guess this is HN now, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.

Heh.

I subscribe to the New Yorker. Every week I open it on Monday and I probably read about half of it by Sunday. I live in Europe, so I'm keenly aware of when the weekly issue comes out. (Due to timezone differences, it's typically not available in the app until Monday afternoon, so I start reading over afternoon coffee, not morning coffee.)

Every few weeks, within minutes or hours of a good 20-page article coming out--an article that will take me the week to digest--I see it posted on HN.

And of course, all the top commenters have strong, strong opinions on it.

Guess they're all just faster readers than I am.

Foot in mouth. I think you’re right that the article is arguing against censorship in the name of combatting disinfo. I still can’t tell but I think so. Go ahead and downvote me to oblivion.

Please delete your bashing of the HN community at large, so I can upvote you without reservation.

>By breaking their oligopoly on information we are for the first time in human history achieving real freedom...

Didn't realize that seeing my aunt telling hundreds of people that there are microchips in all modern medicine was part of us experiencing real freedom for the first time in human history

"Break your chains, block out corporate media, seek real truth, and you will find it."

Or you could try reading beyond the first sentence. Seriously, your first remark on the article makes it clear you didn't read any more. You made up your mind before you read the article.

In fact, your comment is an example of what you rail against. What motives do you have that run counter to truth? What are you selling?

I am happy someone worded it for HN. Here in the trenches, we constantly mock the blatant “inaccuracy” (intended bias) of corporate information, but there is a disconnect in society with people who have never been confronted with the systematic bias of some topic in the media.

When people argue that there shouldn't be a downvote option on HN, this is the type of comment that I'd point to as a counterpoint.

It's the same type of populist drivel that led people to believe that they are fighting for their freedoms by rejecting food standards, environmental regulation and vaccinations.

Everybody has an agenda. At least with large centralised organisations their position is relatively clear, compared to the murky dark money world of political influencers. Not taking sides, but this approach to the topic is absolutely toxic to civil discussion.

> At least with large centralised organisations their position is relatively clear,

Unfortunately I don't see that as being the case, especially the "relatively clear" part. My first job in my early youth (~20 years ago) was to professionally read newspapers, I did that for about 3 years to get me through school, and even as a professional newspaper reader I couldn't get the "position" for most of the newspapers. Of course, the political rags were pretty obvious, but the mainstream newspapers seemed objective and with no clear bias.

That has changed dramatically in the last few years (I had taken a break from reading the newspapers/magazines shortly before that). Now I open the Economist and I can see that almost every article on the likes of China or Russia has to include something, anything, that can be seen as negative, like "why don't are they like us, Westerners? Why don't they are ruled by a democracy? Because of that they are beneath us".

That goes the other way, too. Major negative stuff happening in the US and in most of Europe is not presented under its true colours, there's always an undertone of "we will get through this, because we are a democracy and the the will of the people will finally prevail".

And the Economist is on the soft side, just reading the headlines of the NYTimes makes it clear as day how biased they are, while the WashPo is owned by a literal oligarch (btw, why isn't anyone in the West up in arms about that?). The only mainstream newspaper that still retains a modicum of neutrality (or which manages to hide its biases pretty well) is the Financial Times.

Again, it took me many years to realise all of this, I'm afraid lots of people are still blind to the biases I exemplified above.

Not sure how your comment relates to that point. The bias of the Economist is well known. Same for the NYT and the Guardian, for example. Who their readership is and how they are funded is more or less public knowledge. The tint of their lens is more or less a given. So it's a known quantity, we can deal with that.

What isn't so well known is who is funding the people making content on Youtube, or Facebook or TikTok. It's a unknown quantity, with the potential to do a lot of damage (to whoever the target is, good or evil), so much so that regimes like the China/CCP (and Russia to an increasing extent) are adamant that it must be controlled at all costs.

Information is a tool. It can be used to do good, but also do terrible things and this is regardless of whether it is traditional media or social media.

> The bias of the Economist is well known. Same for the NYT and the Guardian

I used to regard those type of institutions as pillars of the mainstream media and as such as very solid members of the Fourth Estate. I used to think that we do need a non-partisan, even independent Fourth Estate for our democracy to actually work. My realisation that those media institutions were very biased and as such that the Fourth Estate was itself biased and non-independent kind of shattered my hopes in the future well-being of our democratic process.

> Information is a tool.

That's the thing, I didn't regard (not ultimately, at least) information as being a tool, I genuinely did think that the powers that be behind those mainstream media institution had the interest of the public in mind.

Russia's methods of controlling the social media are, shall we say, a leetle bit different from that of China…

I think one could make a pretty good case that Russia has indeed controlled social media to their benefit. Not tracelessly, but to a really impressive extent. Pity they choose to do with it, what they've done.

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