>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room. That seems problematic.”
I'm already hearing this in local debates. It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything.
(PS: Open groups and channels are not encrypted on Telegram servers and can be reported. It is just that Telegram doesn't have a history of letting other abuse it.)
Edit: I've been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now.
Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done.
Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing.
God I'm pretty lefty but "problematic" is becoming... problematic.
On top of that, just completely asinine tech reporting is becoming problematic.
Bloomberg supermicro? Never retracted, lead reporter on it is now BBG's cyber reporting czar.
NYT's NSA hacked Baltimore author? Came out with that smooth brained "Jetbrains == SolarWinds" story.
The wear and tear from a complex field only getting more complex, it governing a larger and growing share of our civil society, and already substantial roadblocks to explaining the layman "how to HTML," is really, really, really showing these days.
Sorry for the rant. I work in infosec, and this dynamic has been brewing for a while. Once the "r/WSB, a sometimes alt-right subreddit for stock trading" stories started hitting from all the otherwise top tier news outlets, I lost it finally.
I'm not barking up a MSM tree, but legitimately when and how does this dynamic start to change? It's getting absurd.
While these reporters no doubt identify with the left, and I certainly don't, this "I can't handle people talking about things in places where I can't hear and record them" attitude is one of the least progressive mainstream ideas in recent memory and is not something I associate with progressives at all. Feels a lot more like small-mindedness.
What's hilarious to me re: Clubhouse getting this negative attention is that platform trends towards the very worst type of insular SV mutual pleasuring.
If groundbreaking free-speech is going on in there to drive the conversation forward, I haven't seen much of it yet.
I listened to about 40 minutes of a chat on SolarWinds from a lot heavy hitter defense<>tech people start with:
-> how do we feel about this level of compromise v. encryption access laws (not totally related but yeah good topic, let's go there!). This was asked by a pub policy devsecops rep at GitHub, so she knew her stuff.
answered first with (and I swear this is a close quote from a thought leader, startup founder and ex-Marine named "Marvin")
-> freedom of expression, leads to freedom of thought, which leads to freedom of innovation, which leads to freedom of minds, which leads to...
leading to:
-> clubhouse uses NLP, so of course if it's free you are the producing
and end somewhere far, far away from anything meaningful on SolarWinds while producing the worst type of verbal fluff from people who generally are there to self-promote their startups. I raised my hand in there to see if I could get in a question re: "hey that engineer asked a solid question 20 mins ago, I'm not sure it was ever answered." Moderators then disabled hand-raising.
Half of Clubhouse is SV founders practicing their pitches on each other, and the other half is entertaining discussions of the somewhat raunchy type, i.e. "Gain your empowerment, no more casual sex!" Additionally, although this is my take away from a casual scroll of profile pictures, clubhouse has a massive diversity footprint. Finally, we have minority techies congregating in numbers, talking about their stuff!
If tech reporters are really spending their time digging for the next GRU disinfo campaign there, then NYT needs its $70k a year back from those reporter salaries and should sub to FEYE's campaign reports instead.
When we see the rise of citizen journalism and independent media. Mainstream media is completely biased and not trustable. Matt Taibbi keeps stressing the need for a unbiased news site but if it has corporate backing, it will eventually become compromised.
I think I am with you on your first sentence being a way forward. Substack is pretty interesting in that regard.
I run into some issues with your use of Taibbi as a good anecdote though for unbiased reporting, and I won't touch your MSM comment.
I think Taibbi is a competent, honest, and candid reporter. That said, I was around during his coverage of GS in the Rolling Stone in '08-'09.
Is he good at speaking truth to power and creating compelling narratives? Yes. But he's biased in his coverage in the same way that Greenwald is. I don't necessarily agree with blurring* the line between OpEd and reporting is the direction that solves the disconnect.
Additionally, honest, citizen journalists with independent funding can misunderstand tech the same way a NYT reporter can. It's still a complex field only getting more complex.
I agree Taibbi is biased, what makes him a good example for a new model of journalism is that his bias is a) clear and b) not hegemonic. Let a thousand Taibbis bloom each with their own worldview, hangups and bugbears. That seems like a much healthier landscape than the boring, hegemonic left-y (but not Bernie lefty, because his fans are sooo mean online) milieu that we have now.
The only citizens who will be able to expend the time and resources to do more than superficial reporting will either have a Paul Bunyan-sized axe to grind or be funded by someone else. In neither case will they be unbiased.
The "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?" article doesn't actually demand (or even propose) censorship as asserted by Greenwald, as far as I can tell.
> I’m not as worried about Signal. Similar to WhatsApp, Signal set a limit so that you can forward messages to only five people at a time. So it would be time-consuming for misinformation spreaders to make a message go viral. Also, Signal limits group chats to up to 1,000 people. That’s large, but not as huge as a Telegram group chat.
It's an article about how misinformation can spread here, but probably less significantly than on other platforms.
Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?".
"Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman.
"Hot Spot". Another sensationalist phrase used to scare readers into thinking anyone that even slightly disagrees with their point is out there somewhere planning another attack.
The title also points to the continuation of painting tech as evil. As if "Private Messaging Apps" have anything to do with the primary concern, "Misinformation". It's a poorly written article with an even poorly written title. If you don't think articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices, it's going to be hard to find common ground.
At most news orgs the reporters aren't the ones writing the article titles. I agree that the headline is alarmist, but it's probably just written to be clickbait-y, as far too many headlines now are.
I disagree that "articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices." The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently, and, on balance, probably pushes back at the notion that private messaging apps are a net harm in terms of the spread of misinformation. I'm not even sure how it's possible to specifically write an article intended to inadvertently accomplish something?
> "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman.
As someone who used to work for an academic-backed non-profit that sought to understand misinformation using algorithms, I strongly disagree with this statement. I agree that many people use terms like "misinformation" in a way that isn't grounded in this kind of understanding, but people do that with all kinds of buzzwords. Without getting into solutions (even if your preferred solution is "do nothing"!), I think we can agree that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. So what's worse about using misinformation as a boogeyman, than, say AI?
It's not an excuse though? If these American journalists want to change the world and force the whole world to follow what they believe in they should deal with their problematic headline guys first.
I don't disagree that headlines matter. I don't think it's a good headline. But I was simply stating that I don't believe the headline was written in service of an alarmist agenda to use "misinformation" as boogeyman to push for moderation of private messaging platforms (as the GP stated). I believe it was just written to get more clicks. Even if the result is the same, the intent matters because we need to understand the intent in order to de-incentivize the behavior. (We also need to understand who actually writes the headlines, which the GP missed, which was my other point.)
Why would you assume the headline wasn’t written in service of pushing an agenda?
It can both be intended to get more clicks, and to push an agenda. In fact it’s reasonable to assume every headline is like this, since they must generally conform to the agendas of the publication and must be interesting.
Headlines are generally written by editors, not the authors. However at this point, why does that change anything?
These are two people working together on a single published piece.
If you goal is to de-incentivize a behavior, it seems odd to arbitrarily discount the motivation for that very behavior.
Why would you believe that? Copy editors don't spend a lot of time on each headline. Publication style guides for headlines aren't particularly ideological. Copy editors aren't like reporters, who narrowly focus on a single subject - whoever wrote this headline probably writes hundreds of headlines for articles across a vast array of subjects. To me, having worked at a newspaper (not the NYT of course) and having seen the way headlines get drafted, this is a case where the burden of proof is on you to show that whoever titled this piece wanted to imbue it with an anti-private-messaging agenda, rather than rattling off something that they thought was catchy using a few buzzwords that would draw the reader in.
> These are two people working together on a single published piece.
Copy editors (who write headlines at large news orgs) don't work with reporters on the content of the piece, only the style and grammar.
Again, that doesn't reflect my experience working at a newspaper, where many other factors play a much stronger role in headline selection. Perhaps you're right and I don't see that deep-seated bias that's informing headline selections. Happy to continue this discussion elsewhere (should be easy to find my contact details based on my username) if that's something you're interested in.
I think I disagree with the statement that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. The vast majority of misinformation does not. Saying that we faked the moon landing, or that the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil, while silly, is ultimately inconsequential and does not cause harm.
There are of course rare cases when someone acts on misinformation to do something harmful. I can easily think of several examples of bad reporting from supposedly reputable media outlets that caused a ton of damage over the last year.
Conversely, most true information does not cause harm either. But some true information does cause harm.
In that sense, I think the veracity of the information has little to do with the risk of harm, and that we should not allow this trojan horse for free speech regulation to take hold. For whatever problems free speech has, trying to stifle it is just not going to provide the benefit that people think it will.
The Iraq war was based on misinformation. It did cause perhaps the greatest harm in the last several decades. However, that was “officially sanctioned” misinformation directly from the government (whether they believed it in good faith or not). I think before doing anything to limit the flow of information, consider whether the proposed framework for suppression of misinformation have caught this. Worse, if someone knew that the WMDs were not there, and could have corrected that disaster, would they have been considered misinformation?
We have already seen this in action with the tech companies giving very loose directives to their content moderators to remove certain types of misinformation. A popular youtuber was censored for telling people that masks are a good idea back in March. The official information at the time was that they do not help. The truth was that they obviously do, and now you get censored for saying that they don’t help. If someone asks honestly about something suspicious related to the election, or believes a voting rule change was procedurally unfair, without paying any mind to the weird conspiracy theories, they get moderated. Because it sounds like “claims of election fraud” and the 3 seconds that the moderator spends on it don’t allow for nuance. Or the hunter biden “misinformation” that wasn’t. That basically means that the word of the US Government (particularly the Democrats) is the “true information” and anything else in conflict with that is misinformation. And that’s a pretty bad place to be. In practice, this just doesn’t seem to work, and does more harm than good.
I appreciate your reasoned response. But the misinformation that we tend to focus on isn't "we faked the moon landing" or "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil." It's anti-muslim riots in Sri Lanka[1] or the fact that a large percentage of the US electorate believes that the 2020 election was fraudulent. These are clearly cases of "real and demonstrable harm," even if you believe that other things also sometimes cause harm (even if you believe other things cause more harm!).
Edit: I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Those of us who have studied misinformation have actually spent a lot of time documenting how misinformation has appropriated the trappings of malinformation in order to become more convincing. Furthermore, most of the misinformation being shared by volume on social media isn't of the "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil" variety.
> I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation."
Wow, that is such an Orwellian thing to say.
The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information.
Yes, this factual information is upsetting, but we need to let Facebook cover our eyes and decide how outraged we are allowed to be. Otherwise we might hurt ourselves or others.
I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?
Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it. If the truth is upsetting, then try to solve the problem, not people talking about it.
---
Then again, perhaps good malinformation policies could have averted rioting last summer, and we could have censored the initial George Floyd video that made it look like Floyd was murdered by a cop. The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes. So, if our friends in big tech had simply censored things until the full facts came out and we could see context, it would have been more orderly and harmonious.
Isn't preventing rioting and civil unrest one of their goals? Too bad we couldn't have blunted the outrage.
> Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it.
I don't see that the second half of that is inherent to the concept of "malinformation". There are situations where unabashed, unfiltered truth can be damaging or problematic. Defining that concept with a term is not in any way attempting to solve that concept. It doesn't presume that something has to be "done" about malinformation, but it can provide additional perspective on ways that misinformation can spread.
I don't see any benefit to having this terminology, other than as a pretext for censorship. Calling it "mal" information implies that truthful information can be bad. Calling it something more neutral like "unfiltered" or "unabashed" would be more accurate.
> The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information.
Do you not agree that truthful information can sometimes cause harm? What if I, say, reveal the identities of all CIA agents operating in China?
> I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?
Misinformation and malinformation are two different terms that mean different things: misinformation is never true, and malinformation is always true.
If you read my posts, I've been pretty careful to say that I don't necessarily have all the answers to the way different types of information spread across the internet. I just wanted to give some more context to the way researchers discuss these subjects.
> The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes
Haha, you went there. Brave! But some good points. But how do you determine when all the facts are out and it’s appropriate? When circumstances do not favor the deciders as a class or their allies, the facts will probably tend to take far longer to come out. When they are favorable, they would likely determine that all facts are known immediately.
> Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?".
How about this one:
"The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"
Opinion vs News. Greenwald is clearly expressing his personal opinion on his personal blog/page/substack.
Newspapers generally mark Opinion columns as Opinion. In the case of the NYT article, it's not marked Opinion, but you could reasonably infer it as opinion because it's written as a dialog between two people. However, it's not explicitly marked as opinion, which it should be in order to make it clear that this is just the reporters' opinions.
The NYT headline may be loaded and headlines fitting Betteridge's law may be facile, but there's nothing inherently "Opinion" about it (though the subheading saying "Our tech columnists discuss..." makes it pretty clear what you're about to read).
Meanwhile Greenwald states his Substack is where he's publishing as an independent journalist, so unless you want to start referring to him as an independent pundit (or entertainer, in the style of Fox News primetime), calls for journalistic integrity should absolutely apply equally there.
Absolutely. But Greenwald is writing as a private individual journalist, clearly his own opinions. There's no journalistic integrity rule that says an opinion column cannot be sensationalist, overblown, or even downright wrong.
Also, accusing a man like Greenwald (who resigned from the media organisation that he founded because he disagreed with the direction it was taking) of poor integrity? That's a bit off-base.
To be clear, journalists approximately never get to pick the title. Editors do that. Who should also have integrity, of course, but the clickbait incentives are very strong...
Unfortunately, it's a long-standing practice in the news industry that journalists don't get a say in the title of their article. The NYT in particular has explained their headline writing process in the past (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-ne...): headlines are written by copyeditors, with explicit goals to "[create] a mystery that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw in as many people as possible".
The authors of that article pulled off a motte and bailey fallacy[1]. The motte is "There should be message forwarding limits and group size limits on encrypted messaging platforms".
> It’s interesting to note that WhatsApp has restricted message forwarding for exactly this reason [preventing false information spreading like on social networks]
We can all agree message forwarding limits are a good idea - no one like spam. The bailey is implied to be that we should keep tabs on identified extremists even in encrypted platforms.
> I share your worry about the encrypted apps becoming, essentially, huge shadow social networks.
> there’s now this debate about whether it’s good that all these unsavory characters from the dregs of the internet are disappearing from big social platforms, or whether it’s dangerous to have them congregating in spaces where researchers, journalists and law enforcement can’t keep tabs on them as easily.
The authors (or speakers, as this article is a dialog) never make the bailey argument. Instead they make arguments that would naturally lead to the bailey, if taken seriously. Private messengers could become "shadow social networks"? Well if they do, they must be policed like social networks.
Also note in the second quote how the speaker distances them self from the argument with "there's this debate". They don't mention the alternative to the current situation, so it is left to the imagination of the reader - should we allow "unsavory characters" back on social media platforms? Or is the alternative that we continue keeping tabs on them on the encrypted messaging apps?
> "While I am concerned about Telegram in general, it’s important to note that group chats there are not end-to-end encrypted. Neither are forwarded messages. So if Telegram or law enforcement authorities wanted to investigate the contents of a big group chat, they could do so, in theory. If Telegram does become the next misinformation hot spot, we won’t be helpless."
Notice the "we won't be helpless" - a clear inference that if information is published there that this person considers to be misinformation, they have an avenue to report it and get it censored.
And the whole tone of the article was clearly "the tech giants have agreed to censor the bad people, so now the bad people have fled to smaller apps where it's going to be harder to censor them". It's a discussion about how authorities can "stop the spread of disinformation" - you know, censor people.
I wonder what Telegram and Signal are hosting on? Is it one of the big cloud providers? Could they be deplatformed for harboring "terrorists" on their platforms?
If you take John Brennan at his word, yes, it is coming. Many powerful Democrat lawmakers are working toward allowing law enforcement (FBI, etc) to have the same tools against "domestic terror" as they do again foreign terror. Greenwald himself did a great write up about it:
I'm still wondering how the incredibly large intelligence gathering apparatus in this country was unable to thwart an attack that was being planned openly on social media, in broad daylight. If you can't even stop an attack you should have known was imminent, how does giving them even MORE tools stem the massive failure that allowed the attack to happen in the first place?
Well... simply, it was allowed to happen. Specifically to build support for new draconian domestic terror laws. The government is incredibly paranoid about a domestic uprising so they collectively start drooling when an opportunity to pass laws like this presents itself.
If people actually read that Chen/Roose piece they'd see that the conversation being had was much more tempered. I saw the point as about the dangers of being in a large echo chamber.
For ex: on twitter, if a non-private account shares an article that completely misrepresents some statistc, there's a reasonable chance someone will swoop into their replies and push back on it. We see this all the time with both right leaning and left leaning pundits. Does this dynamic go away in large telegram chat rooms? My guess is it still happens in some form (give people some credit, most people are not blind fools). But then again, who really knows unless you're in the private group?
Thanks for the reminder on subscribing. I agree good journalism is extremely important, and a diverse set of sources is important as well. I've been feeling like we need alternatives to massive mainstream news media houses that increasingly seem like a battleground for ideological war in the newsroom.
Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend?
I subscribe to my local newspaper and one national one.
I also sometimes send a bunch of money to the Guardian when I read something interesting there, probably more than I feel like for just the Guardian, but there's nowhere else I can pay for stories, everyone else want me to subscribe.
What about the time he broke the story of Sergio Moro in Brazil and flipped the story of the Operation Car Wash corruption investigation (for which he was regularly threatened with bodily harm)?
I don't care if he's speaking truth to power. You just called him a Nazi. You've turned a word that meant "mass murderer and genocide sympathizer" into a meaningless low effort character attack used only when no attacks of substance exist. You've even internalized it. You've desensitized us to it, if we were to one day elect a true Nazi you'd be partly to blame.
Again, I'm not trying to attack you, but you're going to learn one day that the public is tired of constant character attacks. It looks to me like you're going to learn the hard way, when nobody pays any mind to a word you have to say one day.
Side note, that link you linked to is not "holocaust denial", and I'll prove it, I'll quote it directly for you: "Noam Chomsky famously defended a French professor against attempts to have him fired because he questioned Holocaust orthodoxies. People understand Chomsky found the ideas repulsive but academic freedom sacred. That's the noble leftist tradition I support." I don't know how you can interpret that the way you framed it when you linked to it, but I'm beginning to doubt that even you genuinely believe the arguments you're making.
Accusing Greenwald of being a Nazi is pretty uncalled for. I (a Jew) despise Nazis, but I can certainly distinguish between someone calling for the older liberal line of free speech for everyone (something Noam Chomsky has done [0]) and advocating for racial purity via ethnic cleansing. You can say that such a position might help Nazis, but to draw zero distinction is troubling.
I'm sorry but is there anything in that twitter thread that actually shows Glen Greenwald is a Nazi or is this one of those "If you defend one, you are one" cases?
He was writing essentially the same articles defending Al-Qaeda and ISIS supporters from overreaching prosecution and media histrionics. It's shocking how he has free time to report on Bolsonaro if he's simultaneously a Nazi, ISIS and Al-Qaeda guy.
> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything.
Jeez. At least give your opponents a charitable take on their argument. This stuff isn't some make-believe silencing of online Socratic circles that just happen to have "non-approved" viwes or "wrongthink". I don't think you get how scary some of these mobs are. They're online witch-hunts fueled by hate and the belief that their marks are the cause of the bad in the world. And when you add actually crazy people into the mix it bleeds over into the real world. They will doxx you, stalk you, find every public picture of you, your friends, your family online and send them to you with death threats. They will Photoshop those pictures so it looks like you're being tortured or raped and pass them around. If they find your address you'll start getting them in the mail and eventually messages with pictures of your house.
Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy. Trading other people's safety for my liberty doesn't sound quite as noble.
> Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy.
I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power?
Also remember: public groups and channels on Telegram are public. You can join them and report them if you want.
What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry.
The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities, because some well connected journalists said it was the next evil thing after Parler.
People believe this, just like they believe that MeWe is an alt-right hotspot (it is mostly ex-googleplusers discussing chili growing, general gardening, sharing landscape photos etc - unless maybe I haven't searched for the magic string that unlocks all the evil..?)
The result is that ordinary people shy away from newer, better technology and fall back to/stick with abusers line Facebook.
Yep. Facebook, the place that has hosted much more hate speech than any alternative platform I know of.
> I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power?
I'll assume you mean doesn't but that's not at all what I'm saying. It's easy to take an absolute stance as long as your blind to or don't care about the consequences of it.
> What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry.
What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces.
> The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities
Look this shit sucks. It's terrible that the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch have been flocking to different corners of the internet trying to find a place that won't kick them out to self organize. As Facebook/Twitter/Reddit have shown you don't actually have to get rid of them at large just make a good-faith attempt.
> What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces.
The places are public. The police can go there. Even Telegram itself take down public groups that incite violence.
They just don't kick people out for describing themselves as retards.
This doesn't seem to be about "the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch" anymore. Now they want to take away anything they don't feel they control thoroughly, hence the broad attacks on Telegram ans Signal.
There's a lot of people, myself included, who do approach the issue in the way you're describing. But there's also a vocal set of people who... well, it's hard to come up with a charitable view of what their position is. If Taylor Lorenz is legitimately concerned about the dangers of online witchhunts, what in the world is she doing posting names and photos of everyone who was in the room at the time of this incident?
"Doxxing" is poorly defined enough that I think it's best to just avoid the term. They have a policy against involuntary disclosure of private information (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...), but names, physical appearances, and conversations from other apps aren't considered private information.
It would be much easier to take this argument seriously if the most recent example of "deplatforming" (and the prime example in the very article we are discussing in this thread) wasn't a bunch of well funded publications coming to the defense of hedge funds and calling meme culture aware day traders evil Nazis.
Seeing as of late the only prominent examples of the terrible behavior you describe are by exactly the people trying to warn the world of these evil people and save us from them, I'm going to have to file this in "baseless scaremongering."
This is the moral panic of our day. This is our satanic panic, and the people you're defending are our Tipper Gore.
WSB wasn't all that alt-right/Nazi/whatever before the GameStop insanity, but after some clickbait articles equating them with Trump supporters, something like 6 million new people descended on them, some noticeable number of them being Trump/QAnon cultists. I suspect it was a self-fulfilling thing.
No Trumpists were spotted - people just wanted a piece of the pie and say fuck you to the criminals at Wall Street - but it seems the media did their job.
Oh, no. They were spotted. Afterwards. I am not talking about hearsay or "journalism". There was a thread with several tens of thousands of upvotes and someone innocently said to the effect of "that sounds almost like one of those worshippers of the orange god..." and another person said (paraphrasing) "it literally IS, they are an antivaxxer and EVERYTHING, just check their posting history". They were not lying.
That doesn't prove any particular percentage of the newcomers were, but when you see one like that...
But I say again, I believe this was an effect of the articles, not the cause.
You know these things are allowed to be something other than all or nothing, right? You can hold the stance that WSB fiasco is idiotic scaremongering while also acknowledging that there are other internet mobs that do real harm. Because when it comes to WSB I completely agree with you.
My point, well I have more than one really, they are 1) if these evil mobs are really any semblance of a threat, pointing at them every time a blue check decides to go after ideological opponents desensitizes us to it, and 2) the only prominent examples of what you're saying exists and is a danger are perpetrated by the people reminding us of this ever present danger.
You can't defend baseless attacks against things like WSB by reminding us that a real mob of scumbags exist and then expect others to disassociate the two. When an article is written attacking someone that is legitimately going after the evil people on the internet, your point may very well be valid, but in this case it is not. If you want these two scenarios disassociated from one another, perhaps don't associate them with one another.
No that's fine, I think we're actually in agreement. I want also want the two disassociated! It just seems like whenever deplatforming comes up like this people's gut reaction is to say that its bad in absolute terms and that getting rid of the very worst who do real harm is the same as silencing political views you don't like. I absolutely do not want to give off the impression that I approve of the WSB scaremongering. They're a vulgar bunch but it's all in good fun and self deprecation.
> You can hold the stance that WSB fiasco is idiotic scaremongering while also acknowledging that there are other internet mobs that do real harm.
You mean like that group that has torched neighborhoods, shot polive officers, shot other protesters, thrown rocks, use baseball bats on police and civilians etc etc?
Or do you mean the really really scary ones like the ones that walked into Capitol Hill and had four lunatics with strips along with them while the rest were busily taking photos?
So I don't have skin in the game here, and I'm definitely no fan of the comment you responded to (not appropriate for this forum and not conducive to real discussion) but I figured I'd point out 1 person was killed at the capitol and she was shot by DC police, another cop was thought to have been killed with a fire extinguisher but that is currently being investigated, and the rest died of heart attacks and things like that. To claim "6 people died" is at least as disingenuous as what you're accusing.
Maybe it was a little disingenuous. Of the 5 (my apologies) that died, 1 was a stroke, 1 was a heart attack, 1 was crushed by the mob, and we know what happened to the other 2.
I could be wrong, but I still don't think there was a single BLM protest this summer where 3 people were killed.
>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?”
I hope they mean “the next” after traditional media.
> 'the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram.'
and then decide this was good quality, unbiased journalism worth paying for. And then go on to post that sentence as evidence of its goodness.
I think Greenwald uses a lot of snark, and I wish he would restrain himself a bit because I think he turns a lot of people off with that approach. That said, he has a level of authenticity and honesty about his biases that is sorely lacking in many journalists these days. A lot of reporters feel as passionate about the subjects they cover as he does, but they aren't forthright about it.
Regarding journalistic value, his pieces are always loaded with links and references. I like reading his articles because I can easily read the stuff he is referencing to see if I interpret them the same way, and try to see whether I see things differently.
> A lot of reporters feel as passionate about the subjects they cover as he does, but they aren't forthright about it.
First-rate journalism highlights the subject's corruption or bad behavior with such persuasive and overwhelming evidence that the audience generally judges the person or organization under discussion to be a mendacious object of derision.
That is an accurate characterization of the journalism on the Snowden leaks that Greenwald won the Pulitzer for. E.g., the story on NSA spying on Petrobras.
Second-rate journalism simply cuts out the middle-man and casually derides the person directly for an audience that is drooling to see that person taken down a peg. E.g., "Liz Cheney is a compulsive liar who will say anything to manipulate the public, just like her father taught her to do."[1]
I have no idea why Greenwald insists on using techniques of second-rate journalism in his op-eds-- op-eds which quite obviously also include a lot of background research. But I find his consistent use of second-rate journalism steers his rhetoric in directions that directly mislead the reader.
E.g., when AOC tweeted about WSB, Greenwald alleged that she wanted to "claim these Redditors as their own," as he wrote in one of his articles. That's a mischaracterization of what she did, and apparently those Redditors agree with me:
The responses there are a lot of fun to read-- lots of riffs, some surprising agreement, some reasonable disagreement. But as far as I can tell, nearly every default-visible comment there understood that she was uttering a relevant and common refrain from her political platform, not attempting to "claim" the users of WSB as current or even future social democrats. Politicians do this all the time-- e.g., Bernie Sanders did when as a presidential candidate in 2016 he spoke to Liberty University-- communicating to people with obvious opposing viewpoints where they are (albeit in her case with a bit of obvious snark) by focusing on common ground.
That is fundamentally different than a politician claiming a constituency for themselves who is likely opposed to their views in reality. When a politician does that it's at the very least condescending, and you can probably imagine how a group of trash-talking free marketheads on Reddit would respond if AOC actually tried to do that.
Greenwald's writing is littered with enough of these little boogers that it consistently gets in the way of his larger points. And in op-eds like his, there usually isn't that much original research in the first place-- there are plenty of other authors covering this territory who don't hurl completely unnecessary insults at people.
Just look at the comment sections of his articles to get a sense of what kind of person this type of writing attracts. It's not as rabid and pretentious as a David Foster Wallace fan club, but it's close.
That's true. But it doesn't matter in this context because Greenwald's writing pattern strongly supports my argument. Look at his Pulitzer-winning stories in the Guardian, or his stories based on leaks in Brazil that revealed government corruption written at the Intercept. He didn't casually string insults throughout those stories-- he let the revelations speak for themselves.
And honestly, why would any sane investigative journalist would want to distract from a breaking story with a bunch of facile name-calling? If for some reason Greenwald wants to write like that in a future on some similarly groundbreaking exclusive as the Snowden leaks were, I guess I'll have to reassess.
It is not a requirement. It doesn't even always have to be unbiased. But it should stick to the facts, something he does if you can ignore the witty parts.
Besides, that decision was made after reading more of the post, not just that part.
I guess it depends on how you read it. I read that statement in a humorous tone as-if the author was amused by it. It didn't sound angry to me. I do appreciate the ability of an author to simultaneously inform and amuse. Many people (I'd put myself in that category) are looking for interesting news articles, that are not just a boring list of facts. I'm not a follower of the authors work, but as far as I can tell there isn't anything important thats factually incorrect in the article.
If the so-called watchmen of the “MSM” even for a second tired to meet the standards in their own writing that they hold for others, they’d be crushed. This goes triple for the biased “journalist” in the OP.
It’s so gross to see someone like this snipe and cherry pick examples from the vast,
vast media system, and then have otherwise smart people take the bait because thinking it’s some enlightened, contrarian position.
It’s just a way to sell ads to the “ackshyually...” crowd.
> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything.
If it's really possible for "some folks" to deplatform "whoever they want" "for anything", why is this power not available to me or anyone I know?
I know it's glib, but... come on folks. The anti-anti-anti-cancel-culture hyperbole is officially out of control. It should be possible to have a legitimate conversation of whether or not Lorenz is correct about Andreesen, and whether or not the accusation constitutes behavior that should be condemned, without resulting to this kind of culture war screaming.
If you really want good journalism, do you really believe the stuff you quoted from Greenwald qualifies? "Stasi notebooks", really?
As Greenwald points out, these journalists work at major outlets and have huge followings which they can use - and have used - to shut down speech.
Cancel culture is real and we must not allow it to be tolerated. I've been told that I'm "problematic" and should reconsider blogging... because I recommended a $40 pair of hair shears.
Greenwald is being a bit melodramatic, but his substance isn't wrong. A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure - and if it wasn't for that conversation being widely heard she likely would of seriously harmed his reputation with her lie.
> A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure
That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted:
"@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything"
Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied:
"Thanks for clarifying that it was Felicia saying that word, rather than Marc as many in the room heard it. I hope you can understand how some people in the room felt hearing it"
I mean, as I (someone who reads and values Lorenz's work) read it, she was offended (more, it seems, at the casual use of "retarded" going unchallenged than at the specific speaker), and tweeted about it, but made a mistake in attribution which she recognized (while pointing out that her original offense was that the word wasn't challenged).
And Greenwald wrote like 1000 words to go after her. And his essay, not her tweet, is at the top of HN right now.
Retarded is not a slur. Never was. People keep picking arbitrary words and saying they're "offensive", but there's no reason why. I have heard kids call each other "mentally challenged" and "developmentally delayed", I kid you not. Younger kids have trouble pronouncing those, so maybe that's something? Anyway, I refuse to partake in the euphemism treadmill.
I was at some point describing a friend and used the word "gypsy". Another friend got very upset at me and went on a long rant about how the word is offensive and wrong and I should be ashamed for using it.
I used gypsy because it's the title the person I was describing used. It's how they asked to be referred to, and as it's their literal blood heritage, I'm going to refer to them however they want to be referred to.
This happens today with words like "transsexual" - there are people very offended by that phrase and there are people who self-label using that phrase and want to be called that.
If we as a species are going to continue down a path of globalization where we have a lot of different cultures and communities around us, we're going to have to understand a word is not verboten universally. There's a difference between someone not wanting to be called retarded and taking offense anytime the word itself is used - even in non-derogatory contexts.
In any case, my experience (and - probably - the context of my cultural upbringing) was that the word was used to both denigrate people with developmental disabilities and to degrade those who did not. This wasn’t calling someone a “loser”. This was using an immutable characteristic of someone’s personhood against them and attacking others by asserting a resemblance.
Wait I’m misunderstand you, right? Reading your comment it almost seems like yours saying that the r word isn’t a slur or isn’t that bad of one?! It’s a word that takes a whole class of people and uses them as an insult when talking about other people.
Are you seriously going to try to pull some narrow technical originalist definition to argue that in this specific edition of this specific dictionary it defines “slur” as being about ethnicity and thus that word can’t be a “slur” bc it effects a class of people that isn’t a specific ethnicity?
If retarded is a slur, then so is moron, idiot, imbecile, cretin and other past accepted medical terminology for the cognitively disabled that were adopted by the public as slurs. If you look up the history, "mentally retarded" was itself coined to escape the negative connotations of those previous terms. It's unfortunate but inevitable that referents to the cognitively disabled will continue to be abused, no matter what they are.
This is exactly the point I'm trying to make; thanks for articulating it well. Idiot was a clinical designation for those with IQs between 0 and 25; imbecile, 26 to 50; and moron, 51 to 70. Stupid originated to refer to retarded people, too. And yet, these words are benign enough for kids to use. Why are these somehow "less offensive" than retard? I use it the same way I would any of the former, and have ever since I was a schoolboy. It doesn't carry any more sting than those others, and is most definitely not a slur.
'mint2: I can't reply to your post, but despite the 'ThrowawayR2 account name, his account is five years old with four thousand points. Ironically, the only way in which he could pacify you is to create a new account and post from that instead.
His account is literally named throw away “r2” in a thread where people are talking about “the r word”. I made the mistake of assuming that account is a throwaway... did you notice what his account was named?
While what you say about the account is true, it’s literally called a throw away. Even with the age, it’s questionable whether it’s an alt account. But yes my bad. I was misled by the misleading name.
You could say the same for any pejorative, imagine if xyz was a treated as a slur, we’d have lost the forest for the trees.
And yes, if you said “don’t be a cripple” to your friend and a guy physical disability overheard it, how do you think that would make them feel? Why would you want to arbitrarily hurt someone, twisting a verbal knife, just to razz your friend.
I think it lessons other, more hurtful, words that are used as slurs.
Look, we should be polite and not use offensive words, but be consistent. The referenced word is rude and offensive but in no way the same room as words that have resulted in lynching, genocide, systematic oppression.
If we want to go all polite and ban all “slurs” then we’ll be getting butthurt over calling someone “stupid” or “idiot.” And of course I’ve worked with people who are upset at any foul language and even blasphemy.
Are we going to get to a point that major reporters are thinking it’s attention worthy to say someone says “Goddammit?”
Arguing over whether that’s as offensive as another word just a matter of time and we are experiencing a slippery slope.
Either we’re going to get offended by everything and live in China/Disneyworld where there’s never offense, or we’re going to stop getting hysterical over unimportant things and use that attention to fight real, difficult, systematic problems.
> Just because you’ve heard the word and are used to it, and maybe used it without your bubble caring, doesn’t mean it’s less hurtful than other words.
This is not accurate about how much I’ve heard and am familiar, or used it, or my bubble. It’s kind of astoundingly wrong to the point that it makes me wonder why you would assume that about a stranger.
Also weird how you think to know how hurtful some words are vs others like you have some clue into how to quantify the pain caused by words.
I wish I could achieve such knowledge and confidence as you express here, with some certainty that I wasn’t an idiot.
Also, I wasn’t around in the 50s so not sure how 50s white (or non-white as well I suppose) complained about not being able to say certain words. It seems to me that people in the 50s didn’t limit their speech too much and one of the improvements we’ve made is that there’s less callous and hurtful speech spoken.
> This is not accurate about how much I’ve heard and am familiar, or used it, or my bubble. It’s kind of astoundingly wrong to the point that it makes me wonder why you would assume that about a stranger.
Because your posts are saying/implying the r word is less hurtful or offensive than other now taboo words. That is the reason I infer you are more familiar and comfortable with the word than the other taboo words. Is that really a strange conclusion?
And you say “also weird how you think think you know how some words are vs others”. Isn’t that the core of your argument as well? So you get to judge whether the word is offensive, but I don’t?
And one doesn’t have to be alive during the civil rights movement to know many average Americans found it objectionable they couldn’t use whatever language they grew up using, as if that prior use made terminologies that should never have been acceptable, acceptable
Since when is retard taboo? Stupid, idiot, etc. reference the same thing and aren't taboo. Are those offensive? And if so, how does one insult others by implying that his mental faculties are lesser? I refuse to relegate my vocabulary to such a pathetic, anodyne, bowdlerized version that I cannot insult someone.
Are you dead set in your ways or are you open minded enough to be willing to research a few different perspectives. Please at least research a few more opinions on the term by both groups okay and opposed to it.
Well it’s clear whatever point you were making was completely opaque, at least to the person you posted it to. Since it’s opaque, why are you surprised I called it something different than you had in mind? instead of clarifying what I very clearly stated did not make any sense, you posted a terse reply that provided no explanation as to what you actually meant.
The original context, FWIW, is that the /r/wallstreetbets community calls themselves "retards" ironically. That is absolutely a slur; calling someone "retarded" in that sense is calling them stupid by likening them to people with developmental disabilities. And that is offensive to a lot of people in the modern world. And, to be perfectly frank, that offense is exactly the reason why the WSB community adopted it in the first place. They wanted to be edgy, if it wasn't a slur they would have chosen a different term that was.
And according to Taylor Lorenz, by using the word "retard" in your reply, you are perpetuating this slander and showing yourself to be insensitive and ableist. If your defense of Ms Lorenz upthread was at all sincere, you should apologize for your use of this word and then delete your account.
I'm being obviously sarcastic, but I'm guessing the irony will be lost on you.
But they called _themselves_ retards, they're not insulting others. It's because they're aware that most of what they do is dumb gambling (with some occasional actual research thrown in) but they do it anyway.
She was completely wrong about who used the word (their voices aren't even similar), and left out critical details about the context in which it was used (it was not used casually - the person who said it was quoting /r/wallstreetbets).
And when confronted on it, she said 'thanks for clarifying' and doubled down on the lack of context. No 'whoops, I was wrong', no apology, no retraction.
What part of that sounds like good journalism to you?
... it's a tweet. I mean, the whole thing is screaming over detail that you wanted to hear in 280 characters when she was just being pissed off about something and talking about it in public.
Isn't exactly what you're doing -- which is to say condemning something for what in normal circumstances would be a mild transgression or simple misunderstanding, and drawing wild conclusions about the speaker that don't seem to be present in the original text -- exactly what the problem with "cancel culture" is supposed to be in the first place?
I mean, if you demand that Taylor Lorenz give Marc Andreessen the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith on his part, why are you not willing to grant the same to her?
I really think you need to read the article before you comment any further.
Mr Andreesen doesn't need anyone's benefit of doubt, because he didn't say what Ms Lorenz claimed. And even if he did, the use of the word "retard" was entirely appropriate in its descriptive context in that discussion. There is no reason to assume anything besides good faith on the part of the lady who actually did use the word.
Taylor Lorenz, on the other hand, was caught in a lie. Not a little lie, mind you, but a loud, public slander. When caught, she responded not with an apology, but rather another lie, some sanctimonious excuses, and then she ran and hid. Ms. Lorenz has given us no reason to assume good faith on her part here.
> ... it's a tweet. I mean, the whole thing is screaming over detail that you wanted to hear in 280 characters when she was just being pissed off about something and talking about it in public.
This is a lax standard that might be okay to hold for a 15-year-old child, but not for an adult Times journalist.
Are you kidding? 1 public figure, a freaking journalist, reads something and immediately decides they need to do a hot-take-cancel-op on a public figure they didn't like, libeling him in the process. Greenwald takes a much more measured approach, he writes a blog, like 1000 words, explaining his thoughts. There's a non-thinking person on one side and an articulate person on the other, and you want to denounce the articulate one?
Is it articulate to immediately compare your opponents to the stasi? Not really, its pretty bland and typical for internet name calling - writing more words doesn't make something high art.
It really doesn't seem accurate to characterize this blogpost as a measured approach. A few quotes that jumped out at me from just the first section:
> the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks
> The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC — who refer to their twerpy work with the self-glorifying title of “working in the disinformation space”
> they clearly get aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations and lives
No, she didn't make a mistake. Taylor Lorenz lied in order to smear the guy, and her response to being caught was itself a lie, blaming another mysterious "male voice", when it was in fact a female.
As Greenwald pointed out, her recent reporting seems to indicate some sort of vendetta against Andreesen.
You're giving way more than the benefit of the doubt here, if I had to guess I'd say you are doing it willfully. At least you acknowledge your bias so credit where credit is due I guess.
Accusing someone of saying something they didn't say is called "libel" or "slander" depending on the medium with which it is done. To call that out, publish it, and for people to enjoy that published work, that is a far cry away from having a stated mission to go after, expose and deplatform people sharing ideas you do not like. You use the word "cancelling" much more liberally than it's contemporary definition applies, I'd say you're stretching it beyond its elasticity in order to make an argument that doesn't exist to defend an indefensible act.
Her previous tweet "Try and block me now pmarca" makes it much harder to dismiss this as just an unfortunate mistake in attribution. In context it very much appears like as if she was looking for anything she could spin to portray Marc in a negative light.
“ "Thanks for clarifying that it was Felicia saying that word, rather than Marc as many in the room heard it. I hope you can understand how some people in the room felt hearing it"
You do realize that this is not an acknowledgement of the mistake. It’s an attempt to deny the mistake and gaslight the person reporting it.
>It should be possible to have a legitimate conversation of whether or not Lorenz is correct about Andreesen, and whether or not the accusation constitutes behavior that should be condemned.
You don't give equal weight to blatant lies. There's no legitimate conversation to be had on this topic other than to point out the blatant lies, attempted character assassination based on fabrication, and complete abandonment of any shred of journalistic integrity or standards. You don't give legitimacy to clear malevolent liars by arguing their points as if they are valid.
Here it is obvious that he is using it and it resonates with many of the readers. I say he used it well.
When is hyperbole wrong? IMO most often when it isn't obvious. If a normally capable but uninformed reader actually believe it to be true word-by-word then it is missing its mark.
I might feel more strongly about this than you since a bunch of my friends has been on the receiving end of some major abuse of power by journalistic powerhouses around here.
One side of it is deplatforming, but the other side is protecting more vulnerable family and community members.
The fact is that there are pied-pipers of disinformation on these platforms leading vulnerable members of our communities down rabbit-holes to who-knows-where. Normally we would address this with in-person confrontation but I think people are struggling to find the tools to protect their friends and families.
People are being preyed upon and the victims may not be the ideal rational individuals that we aspire to.
I'm not trying to say that censorship is a good thing, just that the tools that we may have once used to protect our communities are not adapting to the new environments.
There were tabloid magazines full of "fake news" sold in supermarkets throughout my entire childhood. People would shake their heads and laugh at the silly headlines, but nobody, ever, talked seriously about censoring the tabloid newspapers just because they didn't believe what they were saying.
> "People are being preyed upon and the victims may not be the ideal rational individuals that we aspire to."
The subtext being that "we" are wiser and know better then those "people" and have the right and duty to protect "people" from themselves? I reject that; that way lies madness.
I'm not necessarily saying this point is incorrect, but the structure of the argument bears a striking similarity to the same justification for laws against heresy and blasphemy in the time of Galileo.
This. The main things we have to decide in the next decade or so is "who gets to decide what the truth is?" and "how can we allow creative dissent from that truth?"
We have to allow people to dissent, or we will have destroyed our own civilisation.
We have 13 years of compulsory education in the United States to convert children into "We the People." Your ideological opponents (whoever they are) are not victims or imbeciles.
1: Really? Do you have to write "r-word" instead of "retard" when you're writing about someone saying something? What if Marc literally said "r-word" and I'm vastly underestimating how woke this reporter is? Wait, I have a solution. Use the actual word that a person said when quoting them. Just write the exact sentence where you think Marc said the word retard. Nobody should prosecute you for quoting someone without endorsing their opinion. Obfuscating your reporting to avoid a word is bad writing style.
1.5: Otherwise, the above seems to limit us to 26 taboo slurs in the English language. A-word, b-word, c-word, ... There are other rude words, but there can only be a single r-word so bad that I mustn't spell it. To prevent confusion, I have to completely spell/say the rest of the r-words. What I'm getting at is whole thing of not saying a word is silly. Everyone knows that the c-word means cunt (at least in the USA). If this wasn't common knowledge then you couldn't say c-word and have everyone know what you meant. (Who decided that cunt was a worse word than chink anyway? That's marginalizing Chinese people and totally not-woke. /s)
2. There are people that exaggerate and sensationalize something to get more views. Some people are even fine trying to ruin someone's reputation. But we are getting wise to these sorts of things. If it's an isolated event these things kind of go away. Even if Marc is on record once saying "retard" he's probably not a bad guy. Just from growing up in the 90's I've easily said it a thousand times. If I start to hear several other instances accusing Marc of using a slur and saying it in a hurtful manner then I'll revisit the issue.
There's a minor problem with your 1st item above - the quote she was (mis)attributing to Marc was actually a quote from DFV on /r/wallstreetbets. If she had use the word in her quote of his quote, it would have damaged her narrative.
The fact is that in her tweet and subsequent non-apology when corrected she went out of her way to paper over the context of this being a quote of DFV. She claimed the word was used 'casually' as if it was directed at someone or a group rather than quoting someone who was referring to himself...
> Really? Do you have to write "r-word" instead of "retard" when you're writing about someone saying something?
By the standards of the New York Times, yes.
They parted with a journalist in the past week for making this error with the n-word:
> “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent," Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn wrote to staffers Friday.
> [...]
> [The Times] also shared a note from McNeil, who explained that he had repeated a racial slur in asking a question about the use of the slur. “I should not have done that. Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended. I now realize that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful. The fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgement. For that I apologize.”
I think “r-word” is a function of stupid text analysis that scans for offensive words. So the fear is that, at some point in the near future, I’ll end up on some stupid regex/nlp-generated list of bigots because it has 100,000 names of people who match the query.
Then people freak out and say the equivalent of “look 95,000 people are terrible and the algorithm can’t be wrong” etc etc.
This is the equivalent of juries and police trusting bad facial recognition code and making my life miserable. While it’s certainly lazy, it’s the path of least resistance to avoid the word.
I believe that there are way more knee jerk, judging idiots than there are people who can code high positive predictive value bigot scanners.
He's right. When I started writing in the 90's, there was an idea of journalism as telling stories in the principled defence of minority interests and as a public check on institutional power, but it has mutated into the unhinged and corrupt prosecution of deviance from official narrative lines. Social media is just a way for neighbours to denounce one another in a new snitch culture that rivals any 20th century system. I'm usually a couple of years ahead of the curve on trends, and I even dropped Slack last year because it's not a place for real discourse.
That's funny, because what I remember about journalism in the 80s was a common sense of confusion and dismay that the job of a journalist had mutated from "reporting facts" to "telling stories" -- specifically I remember polls of graduating journalism majors; for the first time the claimed motivation for choosing the field was "changing the world."
I don't know your age, but I suspect it's more likely you're finally reaching the point of realizing how shit everyone and everything is.
My experience was stupidly believing the idealistic crap I was taught when young only to eventually be forced to realize we're not much better than the ones we villify.
I guess my point is that you should consider whether journalism has really gone to shit or if you're less idealistic than you used to be. There is hope in the thought that you're less idealistic. It means the world has always been kind of shit, yet has survived, so perhaps you're just a bit more alarmist than you should be.
The longer I live the more comfortable I am with my inevitable death.
At the very least it will mean that my disappointment in sapiens will someday have an end.
I always laugh at this. Which "official narrative lines?"
During the Trump administration, many people complained that all journalism was too anti-Trump, and anti-Trump voters (who voted in the majority in 2016). So was this "prosecution" of the views of the party in power by journalists enforcing the "official narrative," or against it? Was it defending the minority's interests or the majority's?
Somehow, everyone has it in their minds that "PC culture" is the real official line, no matter who is in power. This is how, when all the social media apps were censoring Trump, everyone just accepted the perception that it was big-government censoring the little people, even though it was literally censoring the people in power.
> has mutated into the unhinged and corrupt prosecution of deviance
You realize all those criticisms apply very well to this very piece, right? Just read it again. The hook from the lede paragraph invokes, literally, an:
"[...] unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power."
I mean, the point is well taken, but the call is coming from inside the house.
And, FWIW: the whole thing is about how Taylor Lorenz dinged Andreessen for using the word "retarded" on a call. And it turns out, I guess, that someone said it, but not Andreessen. Is that really worth this screed?
> And, FWIW: the whole thing is about how Taylor Lorenz dinged Andreessen for using the word "retarded" on a call. And it turns out, I guess, that someone said it, but not Andreessen. Is that really worth this screed?
I think this is a good microcosm of a broader trend. Is it itself indicative that the sky is falling? No, of course not. No single black man getting shot by the cops in murky circumstances is itself indicative of systemic racism. Rather, those cases, and the Lorenz case serve as useful foci for talking about what I think are real problems with society.
I do think that journalists aligning themselves against privacy and free speech in the name of fighting "misinformation" and "hate speech" is a real problem. This case is not what makes it a problem, but it is a good vignette demonstrating it.
It must surely be some Internet Law that people who spend most of their time in bubbles where they converse with the worst of their opponents make the worst arguments to people outside the bubble.
So, if you take an otherwise decent smart person and place her in a spot where all her enemies are vitriolic morons, she will start to apply vitriolic rhetoric. Bring this person out of that universe and into the normal world and she will continue to act as if she is speaking to that subset. However, the normal world now sees only her polemic, not what she is reacting to.
You can use this technique very effectively to turn normal people into weird people. Surround them temporarily with enemies who are violent-sounding morons and then return them to the general world. It's the equivalent of everyone in a parking lot parking over the lines and then forcing the last guy into a space where he has to park over the lines. Then you leave, and everyone else coming in thinks this one guy is the asshole.
Of course, reading the article he is actually absolutely correct about these Hall Monitor scarlet letter "label the witch" people.
The local media around me keep covering someone who 'may run for governor' and his ignorant antics... Sometimes it's the same 'thinking of running' story again and again. As far as I can tell he hasn't even taken step 1 to actually run, other than wrap the media around his finger to give him free attention.
Beyond that anyone else who might run, no coverage at all...
Maybe that was true years ago but I really don't know that it is today. Social media is the primary means of communication for a lot of people and in a very real sense it is real life. I'd argue the Capitol riot in January is an example of social media becoming very real. Even the topic at hand - /r/wallstreetbets and $GME - shows the same.
Greenwalds tactics aside, do we really consider someone saying the word "retard" in a private discussion newsworthy? More importantly it wasnt even reported correctly and appears to be the result of Taylor Lorenz having an axe to grind with Marc Andreessen.
I think you're asking the wrong question: I might not care if someone says the word, but if their employer, or their employees or college or investors or political party or anyone else cares then that's a problem for that person. And it keeps going: their employer might not care, but the employer needs to wonder if their clients, friends, partners, or dog cares. And whether they will care in 10 or 20 years time.
That's the reason this is so insidious. It forces people not just to comply with current social standards. But to comply with the highest possible standard that might just be applied in their lifetime.
10 years ago, it was OK to say "retard". Today we're not quite sure are we. How would you feel if you got gotcha'd in 10 years time with this comment?
Now, as everyone is racing towards to most banal and inoffensive positions, you find that today's social attitudes are changing purely out of fear of tomorrow's. People hesitate to say retard, others notice and hesitate too, as fewer people say it it becomes offensive not because it is but because no one else is saying it.
I think Greenwald leaves a lot to be desired. But I think with this issue he (and others) are well ahead of the curve: a significant minority are hell bent on dumping freedom of speech and they have the leverage to do it.
You raise some good points here, and this is a slippery slope were standing upon. I found it to be a little be gross to see the tweets where Taylor L was taunting Marc A to try and block her out of the chat since she got a burner account. Is that what we are trying to do? The press ABSOLUTELY should be able to find corruption and keep it in check, but this doesnt feel like that. It was a personal abuse of a platform by that journalist. Im familiar with Greenwald because of Snowden, but I agree that he is a bit jaded/angry now. Im not really 100% clear on why he lives abroad now, but Im sure that transition was not easy and may have something to do with it.
AS far as I can tell, it wasn’t even a news story. It was a tweet. And then later clarified after brought to her attention. I find it hard to believe that it justifies this long blog.
This is the first thing I’ve seen him wrote in years. And it is horrible.
If this had turned out to be true, it surely would have sparked several news stories. The reason that such a long post by Greenwald was warranted is that the journalist was clearly trying to create a story with the tweet.
You are correct in that, but I don't know that there is much difference any more. Tweets are in TV news/News websites all the time. The fact that it is a pretty well known journalist will likely hold much more weight with some folks.
To me, the bigger story (like the one NYT actually published) is around content moderation. Clubhouse has risen fast - in terms of users and valuation - but has done very little vis-a-vis moderation.
Every single social platform started out where they started and eventually had to moderate bad actors and bad actions.
Greenwald used to do good journalism. And now sells subscriptions to dog-whistles.
> "But this is now the prevailing ethos in corporate journalism. They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit — tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways — is all they have. It’s all they are. It’s why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them."
This should be the real concern: that journalism may be dedicated (and some would say, specifically incentivized) to performing non-valuable work, at the expense of valuable work the public needs journalists to perform. In this media landscape, everyone loses except for the people with actual power, who gain more.
Where does this lead? And how much of this nonsense is driven or encouraged by the very establishment that journalists are supposed to be keeping in check?
The irony is that this piece is, to use Glenn’s words, “penny-ante, trivial bullshit”.
Again, it’s a 3,000 word polemic rant in response to… a mistaken allegation in a tweet. It’s not speaking truth to power. It’s not shedding light on corruption. It’s just Glenn up on his high horse, spewing the same boring right-wing outragebait that he’s peddled for years.
I’m not being disingenuous, I’m simply giving Taylor Lorenz the benefit of the doubt. I would extend that courtesy to Glenn Greenwald too, had he not exhausted it writing shit like this.
Anyway, here’s the larger point: it’s absolutely ludicrous to claim that Marc Andreeson’s life and reputation would be ruined even if the allegation were true. That’s why this is such trivial bullshit to write about. Glenn is coming to defend a powerful person against an allegation that would have had literally no impact on his life or work.
> I’m simply giving Taylor Lorenz the benefit of the doubt.
I suggest you read how she reacted to being exposed.
> I would extend that courtesy to Glenn Greenwald too, had he not exhausted it writing shit like this.
Again, what "shit" are you referring to? Why are you so angry that he's reporting on this issue?
> Anyway, here’s the larger point: it’s absolutely ludicrous to claim that Marc Andreeson’s life and reputation would be ruined even if the allegation were true. That’s why this is such trivial bullshit to write about.
So you give the perpetrator a free pass because their victim in this case happens to be a high-profile person who might be able to defend themselves against the slander and all its consequences?
After a few pages the article gets past Greenwalds hatred for the NYT and eventually makes an interesting point (which I'll quote without further comment):
"Beyond all this, what if he had used the word “retarded”? What would it mean? If someone uses that term maliciously, as a slur against others to mock their intellect, it is certainly reasonable to condemn that. Used with that intent and in that context, it is unnecessarily hurtful for people who suffer diseases of cognitive impairment.
But that is not remotely what happened here. Anyone who spent any time at all on the sub-Reddit thread of r/WallStreetBets knows that “retards” was the single most common term used by those who short-squeezed the hedge funds invested in the collapse of GameStop. It is virtually impossible to discuss the ethos of that subculture without using that term. This was one of their most popular battlecries:
“We can stay retarded longer than you can stay solvent.”
And the use of that term in the sub-Reddit was not just ubiquitous but fascinating: layered with multiple levels of irony and self-deprecation. Sociologists could, and should, study how that term was deployed by those Redditors and what role it played in forming the community that enabled them to strike a blow against these hedge funds. It reflected their self-perceived place at the bottom of social hierarchies, expressed the irony that they as unsophisticated investors were defeating self-perceived financial wizards, and marked their culture and community as transgressive. Did some use it with malice? Maybe. But there was vast complexity to it."
1. Greenwald weakens his point by conflating different types of reporting as one type of "hall monitoring". First he focuses on journalists who write about disinformation. For example, he links to a piece discussing how InfoWars and similar outlets game the social media algorithms to get views and how they aren't stopped at all.
But to compare that type of journalism, against disinformation sources who have repeatedly and purposefully put out fake news that has lead to considerable harm and even death because of the number of people that believe the falsehoods, with telling on Marc Andreessen, is a strange argument.
The second part of his argument is quite strong! There is a weird obsession with finding and calling out people whose opinions and words are out of line with accepted mainstream beliefs. But I don't understand why the first part was included in this piece. It makes the whole thing come across as petty, despite the valid arguments.
2. He condescendingly uses "millennial" as a pejorative, which is unnecessary and exhausting. It's also bad writing.
3. This line, "Jezebel (which really ought to just change its name to You’re a Misogynist, since it has no other content)", is objectively hilarious, regardless of its accuracy.
I'm gonna be honest, I don't like "tattletale media" either, and I wanted to read this article, but, wow. Other comments are calling it "subtle", I'm finding it pretty hard to read:
> primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power
Primary objective is clicks/outrage, "WHO said WHAT?" is a big driver of outrage/"angry media"
> The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC — who refer to their twerpy work...
Wow... A lot of vitriol here. No attempts at nuance or any understanding of why lies and misinformation can be dangerous, or how to respond to misinformation with discussion and correction rather than censorship. Just anger.
This guilt by association is really scary (and a trial by mob). And it doesn't seem to even matter if the accusor is telling the truth - as long as they have enough Twitter followers, they can wreck someone's life.
How do we get out of this though? It seems a big return to anonymity will happen, along with decentralization.
Almost as an aside, he mentions the need for "content". The 24 hours news cycle and proliferation of Internet based news sources has created an insatiable need for content. These media personalities are so desperate for something to "report" that they will literally do anything to create it.
The derogatory use of terms meant to slur a person with limited mental capacity is obviously poor taste and maybe offensive, but is it news? Is that what a "reporter" with a national audience should be focusing on? The news business is in desperate need of constriction.
News for the most part is a scam. Yes, I'm using the word "scam" in its loosest sense but, depending on the news outlet, the intention is to commit a borderline scam. Just live a month never reading or watching the news and you'll realize how worthless most news actually is. The scam is to churn out tons of content so that more ads are seen, and the "news" has to actively convince its readers to take poorly-developed news items very seriously so they keep coming back. Focusing on petty drivel like something offensive someone said achieves this end very easily, as was demonstrated by Facebook's own A/B tests. In essence, the news must incorporate exaggerations and misrepresentations in order to make the kind of profits they want to see. That's only the layer we can see. What we can't see are the incentives that entertainment giants place upon their news outlets to publish the "accurate" truth.
The problem with economies that value growth over almost everything else is that the constriction you refer to is much less likely to happen. When currency is flying, insolvent or barely solvent businesses such as the news industry can continue to plug along seemingly indefinitely. That notwithstanding, the news is a loss leader for much more powerful entities that need to shape the hearts and minds of the public to their benefit. I don't see much constriction happening any time soon beyond some companies being sold to others.
From the outside, if a society fires their best reporters because they use a "forbidden word" it is already over the edge. Everything else that will probably follow (reeducation camps, etc.) is barely driven by momentum. In the end, there will be a revolution. Given the fervor of the zealots, it will probably be a violent one.
> I really admire his restraint with what he’s trying to convey here despite how many people will miss reading between the lines.
It wasn't that subtle, to be honest, given the author even says "Stasi-like citizen surveillance" (and in general references Stasi multiple times throughout the article), clearly alluding to what you think he is alluding. But I agree with you, I believe even something not-so-subtle like this will be missed by the overwhelming majority.
Really well-written and well-sourced article. Glad to see someone managing to write something that is pleasant and fun to read, while, at the same time, cutting straight through all the bs with no debris of fluff to just pad up the article.
EDIT: found an even better/more illustrative quote in the article -
"The participants in Clubhouse have tried to block these tattletale reporters from eavesdropping on their private conversations precisely because they see themselves as Stasi agents whose function is to report people for expressing prohibited ideas even in private conservations"
I don't think you are missing anything substantial. While you might have missed the actual historical names and details, you got the idea right. Stasi is just a commonly used name for the Ministry of State Security in Soviet-occupied East Germany post-WW2. Which was known for creating those kinds of systems where it would be commonplace for people to snitch on their family and friends for as much as wrongthink.
On a more fundamental/deeper level, from my understanding, he is alluding to those systems and how regular people would all tattletale on each other voluntarily and out of some misguided conviction and belief in the system (except instead of getting canceled on twitter, they would get gulag'd instead). Without realizing that the system was not their friend and that they themselves were extremely likely to end up next on the chopping block the day after.
On twitter, Taylor Lorenz accused Marc Andreessen of using the "R-slur" in a Clubhouse discussion. In fact, some one else said the word in the context of some /r/wallstreetbets folks calling themselves "retards" in a self deprecating manner.
Taylor Lorenz's issue is that she is blocked by Marc Andreessen and several others on Clubhouse. So she is blocked from entering many key rooms (i.e. the one where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were on)
Not even just that. After being confronted about the fact that Marc never said it, Lorenz didn't apologize at all and said "it was just another male voice that sounded similar". Turns out, in the end, it wasn't even a "male voice", it was Felicia Horowitz. And the context in which that word was said was fully appropriate too, regardless of who said it. If you show what Felicia said to any reasonable person, I don't think they would be able to argue that there was anything "problematic" about it. Relevant quote from the article:
>The moderator of the discussion, Nait Jones, said that “Marc never used that word.” What actually happened was that Felicia Horowitz, a different participant in the discussion, had “explained that the Redditors call themselves ‘retard revolution’” and that was the only mention of that word.
And of course, after all this overwhelming proof that this was all just falsehoods and lies, there was no apology, no retraction, and the "journalist" just decided to play the victim as if she was the one who was wronged.
That's the first time the word "restraint" have appeared near Greenwald's name in a long, long time. Given that he's accusing NYT reporters of being the Stasi, I don't think that "restraint" is the word I'd use to describe him.
I didn't get the impression that he was trying to subtly accuse any reporters of being directly involved in anything like that, but if the incentives of modern journalism align to create the same outcome where inconvenient status-quo-doubters are silenced, why does it matter how we got there?
Reporters like Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins were writing about the threats extremists were making before Jan 6th. That's not "junior high hall-monitor tattling"; that's reportage that I wish more people would have taken seriously.
If NYT or any big dinosaur media company has any shred of integrity left they'll fire and blacklist every single so called journalist engaging in this sort of behavior. They represent your brand, their behavior is your behavior. It reflects on every other employee you have, including any presumably honest ones. If you're an honest journalist and you work for one of these companies, know that their behavior makes me and millions of others distrust you, they're making the most important company on your resume into a hindrance, you need to demand that these people be fired, if not for any reason than to save your own reputation.
A person with a blue checkmark on Twitter verifies themselves to give themselves professional legitimacy. Especially considering that in the example we are discussing, the person's profession is to reach people and share words, associating their publicly shared words with their professional life is not beyond the pail. They've associated their name with their job, not me.
The HN hive mind appears to believe that if all the HN readers in the world refuse to work for companies that they don't like, then a new age of love, peace and libertarianism will dawn across the world.
It's interesting how polemic Greenwald has become, bringing with it the same magnitude of reality denial as the actors he is going after.
A title like "The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows" coming from an investigative journalist like himself really sounds like a sore loser's version of "investigative journalism needs to die if it doesn't share my narrative and political opinion."
I used to be a free speech absolutist myself back in Snowden times, but having seeing the flip side of anonymous, unverified, amplified and maliciously orchestrated communication of lies by unknown actors myself over the past few years, his ad-hominem attacks and inexact comparisons surely lack the subtleness this topic demands.
>I used to be a free speech absolutist myself back in Snowden times
FWIW, there is no reason you shouldn't still be a Free Speech absolutist (I still am) so long as you don't fall for the disinformation that Free Speech means freedom from social consequences. When individuals or other fully private entities decide they don't like someone's speech and choose to not associate or support that person/entity any longer, that's not censorship, that's Free Speech too! Freedom of association, the freedom not just to say things but not to say things is integral to the entire concept. The whole point of Free Speech is to allow arguments/counter arguments and social repercussions and so forth to go round and round to try to inch towards truth without the boot of physical force freezing it all. That doesn't mean anyone is owed others private property.
Greenwald in this piece is, plain and simple, actively opposed to Free Speech. He's dishonestly equating social criticism and Freedom of Association with censorship, which is unsurprisingly a frequent logical fallacy (false equivalency) employed by actual authoritarian regimes. "Sure Russia/China/whever may actively poison, shoot, beat, imprison, and otherwise suppress dissidents, but meanwhile in America Twitter bans people or the NY Times refuses to publish literally anything anyone sends so they're censoring too!"
> but meanwhile in America Twitter bans people or the NY Times refuses to publish literally anything anyone sends so they're censoring too!"
more realistically, a Twitter mob harasses your employer until you are fired, unemployable in your industry, and lose all of your friends.
> so long as you don't fall for the disinformation that Free Speech means freedom from social consequences.
There are consequences, like correcting someone or mild social opprobrium, and then there is the current endeavor of removing people from society for saying the wrong thing. I'd argue the later is almost always completely disproportionate to the offense. The accused have no recourse - they are judged by a jury of the most outraged people on the Internet and then destroyed for sport. No, Twitter does not literally shoot or beat would be dissidents, but it is routinely and purposefully weaponized to merely ruin peoples lives. That's certainly better than China... but regardless of the definition of Free Speech, lets not do that?
You touch on a good point. The irony here is that "cancel culture" only works because labor's power is poor.
If it is expensive (e.g Joe Rogan - Spotify deal) or difficult (e.g Steven Pinker - tenured) to fire people it seems much more difficult to cancel someone.
Except that the general public seems to care much less about the outrage than these businesses do. They're behaving like socially insecure teenagers, trying to prove to the bullies that they're cool. My theory is that it's an extension of the problems of online advertising--companies know there's a lot of money at stake, but still aren't good at measuring it.
Greenwald's argument is that the repercussions being discussed are not the result of genuine freedom of association. He thinks that there exists a powerful ideological movement in the media that is using its power to get people fired (or banned but at least punished) for reasons that are 1. unreasonable 2. have nothing to do with anything the general public cares about.
You seem to not understand (or not care) about that latter point and, as a result, I find your worldview shockingly amoral. To you, apparently the whole point of discourse is to destroy your ideological opponent in whatever ways are available. The only restrictions are legal. To regular people, it's simply below the belt to try to get someone fired because they said the word "retard". You might decline a dinner invitation over something like that but not e-mail the offender's boss.
> The whole point of Free Speech is to allow arguments/counter arguments and social repercussions and so forth to go round and round to try to inch towards truth without the boot of physical force freezing it all.
"Social repercussions" is doing a lot of work here. Is it just a coincidence that the "social repercussions" under discussion so often involve the targeted parties being less able to express their views? Also, your creepy use of "social repercussions" is certainly not any part of any defense of Free Speech I've ever heard.
So let's get down to brass tacks here: do you want to have people shot for thoughts you don't like? Because that's what it means to make something illegal. That's what's ultimately at the root of "law", cold hard power. It can have more or fewer layers of padding around the hard fist, but the fist is always there at the end. Freedom of Speech is about not having hard power directly or indirectly control speech in general unless there is an extreme overriding need and the use is as limited and transient as possible. How the people choose to exercise their speech is up to the private sphere, which can shift and reconsider over time. Because there is nothing better. There is no oracle we can consult. And when force comes into the equation, it's always ended up getting abused. Like democracy itself, "the worst system, except for all the others".
>Greenwald's argument is that the repercussions being discussed are not the result of genuine freedom of association.
Which is complete bullshit unless someone is getting forced. There is nothing "ungenuine" about it, he just doesn't like their choice. Which is his right, but denying their agency is him being an asshole anyway.
>He thinks that there exists a powerful ideological movement in the media that is using its power to get people fired (or banned but at least punished) for reasons that are 1. unreasonable 2. have nothing to do with anything the general public cares about.
Hah, "the general public doesn't care" and yet somehow all the social repercussions depend entirely on the general public caring. How very convenient! And we're supposed to what, just accept Greenwald's definition of what's "unreasonable"? Who made him king?
>You seem to not understand (or not care) about that latter point and, as a result, I find your worldview shockingly amoral.
And you seem to not understand (or not care) about people's rights to speak and associate as they please so long as it's not defamatory, as well as denial of agency. Which I find amoral, though sadly I cannot honestly say it's at all "shocking". Your view is well represented throughout human history I'm afraid.
>To you, apparently the whole point of discourse is to destroy your ideological opponent in whatever ways are available. The only restrictions are legal.
See, this is literally the opposite of everything I've said! The restrictions aren't legal, I've direct argued against legal restrictions! The restrictions are social, and speech.
>You might decline a dinner invitation over something like that but not e-mail the offender's boss.
Why shouldn't you email the offender's boss? I wouldn't over something like this, but there is perfectly legal speech (like glorifying slavery) that I would consider serious enough to potentially complain about. And what of the BOSS'S agency? Working at a higher level college tech position, for a medium business, a political campaign, and even front desk way way back in the day, I can remember plenty of crackpot messages that came in to me or others. We'd have a good laugh at the sillier ones and chuck 'em. If we just went along with them all that'd be on us, not the nuts who wrote in.
Fortunately, because we have Freedom of Speech, you and I can in turn be upset over a company going overboard, or someone going after someone in ways we don't approve of. We too can email, expressing support for the person who said "retard", and trying to convince others, and threatening whatever social (including economic) consequences we can muster! And at no point will any of us be shot for it, or have to ask government permission.
>"Social repercussions" is doing a lot of work here. Is it just a coincidence that the "social repercussions" under discussion so often involve the targeted parties being less able to express their views?
"Less able to express their views" is doing a lot of work here. Are you asserting that you have a right to take someone else's money or property for your own speech against their will? That they must like you and chat with you or work with you or invite you along to social gatherings or the like no matter what you say? And how would that not be restricting their freedom of speech? I'd call that pretty creepy.
>Also, your creepy use of "social repercussions" is certainly not any part of any defense of Free Speech I've ever heard.
You need to get out of your bubble and read some history if you've never so much as heard phrases like "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" before. Both parts of that are important.
What on earth are you talking about? I never said anything about solving this problem with the law.
> Hah, "the general public doesn't care" and yet somehow all the social repercussions depend entirely on the general public caring. How very convenient! And we're supposed to what, just accept Greenwald's definition of what's "unreasonable"? Who made him king?
How does people getting fired "depend entirely on the general public caring"?
> And you seem to not understand (or not care) about people's rights to speak and associate as they please so long as it's not defamatory, as well as denial of agency. Which I find amoral, though sadly I cannot honestly say it's at all "shocking". Your view is well represented throughout human history I'm afraid.
I'm unsure, in your bizarre worldview, how you'd be able to condemn McCarthyism. That was just right-wingers using their speech to convince private citizens and companies to not hire or associate with suspected communists. Just speech, right? Nothing wrong with that.
And because you've made all kinds of bizarre assumptions about my opinions -- I'm not saying, and I never said, that this problem should be solved by the law. It should be solved by socializing children not to be rats. Clearly that approach has failed but maybe we'll get it right for the next generation. Articles like this are certainly helpful when it comes to shaming rats.
Oh, and point me to where this article calls for legal restrictions on speech to solve this problem.
> See, this is literally the opposite of everything I've said! The restrictions aren't legal, I've direct argued against legal restrictions! The restrictions are social, and speech.
You completely misunderstood. I understand that you're arguing against legal restrictions, that's why I said "the only restrictions are legal". And that's also why I called you amoral. My point was that there need to be soft restrictions that aren't legal. People have to be socialized to a moral standard higher than "I didn't break the law".
> Why shouldn't you email the offender's boss? I wouldn't over something like this, but there is perfectly legal speech (like glorifying slavery) that I would consider serious enough to potentially complain about. And what of the BOSS'S agency? Working at a higher level college tech position, for a medium business, a political campaign, and even front desk way way back in the day, I can remember plenty of crackpot messages that came in to me or others. We'd have a good laugh at the sillier ones and chuck 'em. If we just went along with them all that'd be on us, not the nuts who wrote in.
Because emailing someone's boss because you want to get them fired for disagreeing over politics is beneath contempt, it's dishonorable, it's behaving like a rat.
> "Less able to express their views" is doing a lot of work here. Are you asserting that you have a right to take someone else's money or property for your own speech against their will? That they must like you and chat with you or work with you or invite you along to social gatherings or the like no matter what you say? And how would that not be restricting their freedom of speech? I'd call that pretty creepy.
I was asserting that it's ironic to call yourself a free speech absolutist while happily going along with "deplatforming". I was further asserting that "social repercussions" do cover "not being your friend" or "not returning your calls" but don't cover "trying to get you fired from your job".
> You need to get out of your bubble and read some history if you've never so much as heard phrases like "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" before. Both parts of that are important.
I wouldn't even call your terrarium a bubble since you're the only inhabitant. Your social-darwinist interpretation of free speech is foreign to virtually all humans. Oh, and I must be unfamiliar with the second part of that quote that you omitted for some reason: "I disapprove of what you say, and I will attempt to get you fired and ruin your life, but it's okay because you can do the same thing to me, isn't free speech wonderful?"
>there is no reason you shouldn't still be a Free Speech absolutist (I still am) so long as you don't fall for the disinformation that Free Speech means freedom from social consequences.
That's your definition of free speech and censorship. Others use those terms in a more broad sense. But even if you don't like that they do that, you should invoke the principle of charity and actually argue the point that is being made ... Namely, malevolent self-serving actors, sometimes represented by major journalistic institutions, are whipping up the social media mob, during the time of mass hysteria, to destroy the lives of political and cultural opponents, as well as anyone that gets caught up in that drag net.
Is that a problem? Are we OK with that? Do we have permission from you to talk about this as a problem?
The article in question demonstrates examples of this.
"Just take a second to ponder how infantile and despotic, in equal parts, all of this is. This NYT reporter used her platform to virtually jump out of her desk to run to the teacher and exclaim: he used the r word! This is what she tried for months to accomplish: to catch people in private communications using words that are prohibited or ideas that are banned to tell on them to the public"
We know why she did that and what her aims were. Is that OK for a NY Times reporter to do? Is that something to highlight as an issue? Or are you still stuck arguing semantics and definitions of words while missing the entire point.
>That's your definition of free speech and censorship.
It's both the US legal definition and the correct definition, because anything else becomes self-contradicting. Forcing someone to say or support another person's speech is never Free Speech. And that's what denying them the right to not speak, not help, and not associate with someone else means.
>Namely, malevolent self-serving actors, sometimes represented by major journalistic institutions, are whipping up the social media mob, during the time of mass hysteria, to destroy the lives of political and cultural opponents, as well as anyone that gets caught up in that drag net.
What a load of hooey. This is just you having a pathetic meltdown over other people's exercise of their freedom to not like people being gigantic assholes.
>Is that a problem? Are we OK with that? Do we have permission from you to talk about this as a problem?
Of course you don't need my permission to be a snowflake and spout garbage, that's your Freedom of Speech after all. And in nobody needs yours to call you out on it, dislike it, refuse to support you, refuse to have anything to do with you, and encourage others to do the same. And you can do the same, and try to rally others to your point. And they can counter. And around and around it goes, that's the point.
>We know why she did that and what her aims were.
Do we now? Do we know about Greenwalds anti-speech agenda too?
>Is that OK for a NY Times reporter to do? Is that something to highlight as an issue?
It's her freedom of speech to do so, so long as it's actually true as opposed to defamation. It's ours to criticize should we wish it, to shame the reporter, to refuse to further support the NYT, or of course merely to dismiss it as silly. Or for that matter some people may honesty think the reporter has a point. But to believe in Free Speech is believe this is all a process that should play out without anyone being shot.
>Or are you still stuck arguing semantics and definitions of words while missing the entire point.
I think that's your projection. This is a matter of fundamental principle and the application or not of hard power, not semantics. It is you who are running away from that.
This is not a free speech issue under your (one true and only correct) definition of free speech.
Imagine a bully goes up to a citizen and tells them to be quiet about, say, potholes on their street because if they don't "it would be unfortunate should you and your spouse lose your jobs and your professional reputations destroyed".
In this analogy, there is no threat of violence. Nothing the bully said was illegal as far as I can tell. But when a bystander looks at this and says it's wrong and unethical for a bully to do that, guys like you crawl out of the woodwork and start yelling about Free Speech rights of the bully. But we're not talking about Free Speech rights. We're talking about the ethics of mobilizing the social media mob to destroy people's lives, frequently over nothing other than vague innuendo. As far as I know in any of these situations, no laws are broken, and yet, there is something deeply wrong here.
Here's another example: Because we are living through a kind of a mass hysteria moment, the similarity to 'Salem witch trials' is quite striking. In that case, teenage girls accused hundreds of people of witchcraft and consequently those people would be ostracized and their lives destroyed (for the sake of argument, let's ignore the small number of people who were put to death because we would both agree that is wrong on another level). If someone highlights this as a major issue, do you go out, frothing at the mouth, and yell about free speech rights of the teenage girls? Isn't that missing the entire point?
>It's her freedom of speech to do so, so long as it's actually true as opposed to defamation.
The irony in all this is you didn't even bother reading the article ... or the HN headline. She did defame Andreessen because she maliciously and malevolently asserted something that he said, that he didn't say (when called out about it she fell back on 'well, it was male voice' which was another lie).
But even if he said this 'r-word' in context of explaining the WSB phenomena, this malevolent 'reporter' is doing the same thing as the Salem teenage girls did when they accused others of witchcraft. In this case, she's accusing Andreessen of blaspheming against holy tenants of wokeism in order to paint him as a bigot so the mob will do the rest. Why? So that his public image and professional reputation would be destroyed and maybe she gets a higher profile and a raise. When people point out this is wrong, you yell about Free Speech.
>WIW, there is no reason you shouldn't still be a Free Speech absolutist (I still am) so long as you don't fall for the disinformation that Free Speech means freedom from social consequences.
These days I see less and less (speaking in terms of justifications and arguments) going for the idea that free speech is an unfettered good in itself - especiall when it very clearly runs up against the principle of liberal egalitarian philosophy. I find it very hard - if not impossible - to be a liberal egalitarian in the context where hate speech and inegalitarian pornography (yes, we can talk about what those terms mean) are allowed free reign in the public discourse.
While I agree, I think it's possible for those entities to become so massive that they become de facto public entities and ought to be regulated as such. The prominent example being social media: such a tiny handful of companies are responsible for such an enormous portion of our collective speech that they are de facto public squares. In such cases, these technically-private entities should be broken up or regulated appropriately. This social media example is particularly relevant since since it's often the subject of "freedom of association for private institution" arguments.
>While I agree, I think it's possible for those entities to become so massive that they become de facto public entities and ought to be regulated as such.
FWIW I said "fully private" specifically with organization "quasi-government power" in mind since there is none of that involved here and I didn't think it worth getting into there. That said, I disagree with you that mere size at all makes a company quasi-governmental, and in particular disagree with your chosen example of social media. That's actually a really weird one to choose compared to classic natural monopolies like physical utilities, particularly when they are in fact directly leaning on government power (like wireless telecoms that have a government force backed monopoly on sections of the limited useful electromagnetic spectrum).
>such a tiny handful of companies are responsible for such an enormous portion of our collective speech
"Responsible"? Every single method of speech we had in 1791, 1891, or 1991 is still with us, far easier and cheaper than ever, along with a host more. I don't agree that expanding the venues of speech in a positive-sum way somehow turns a place into a public square at all. The TOS limits are very, very loose, but even if they weren't why should that be a matter for government to step in? Why should people not have to put a few bucks where their mouths are if they want to break other people's rules on other people's property?
I do think that quasi-government power is a thing, and agree with some of the older SCOTUS cases vs their more recent pruning back. But my concern would be more at the level of physical fiber connections or access to payment systems. With skill, effort and money people should be able to get put up their message without threat of violence, but I'm not at all convinced that needs to be in any specific private venue (disclaimer, I don't actually have a twitter, facebook, or any other such service account at all, never did, which may bias my view on how necessary they are).
> I disagree with you that mere size at all makes a company quasi-governmental and in particular disagree with your chosen example of social media.
It's not size, but power. Twitter's curation algorithms have massive unilateral influence on public opinion (reaching far beyond its own user-base) probably including the ability to sway national presidential elections. I'm not aware of any utility companies with such power.
> "Responsible"? Every single method of speech we had in 1791, 1891, or 1991 is still with us, far easier and cheaper than ever, along with a host more.
What proportion of your speech is by telegraph these days? I'm guessing it's a lot less than it would have been in 1891. For much of America, much of our speech especially our political speech takes place on social media, and thus "traditional" channels enjoy a much smaller proportion.
Moreover, social media introduces an entirely new dimension: it's multicast. Your telegraph or phone call conveyed information to 1 other party at a time. A Tweet can be seen by millions or more. The volume of communication on social media dwarfs that of other channels.
> It's not size, but power. Twitter's curation algorithms have massive unilateral influence on public opinion (reaching far beyond its own user-base) probably including the ability to sway national presidential elections. I'm not aware of any utility companies with such power.
And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.
> Moreover, social media introduces an entirely new dimension: it's multicast. Your telegraph or phone call conveyed information to 1 other party at a time. A Tweet can be seen by millions or more. The volume of communication on social media dwarfs that of other channels.
And that's what's dangerous about them: the filter got removed from broadcasting. People like to talk about filters like they're bad things, but that's not true. They're in fact a vitally necessary function to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (for instance: what is peer review? Answer: a filter). when you don't have filters, ideas spread in proportion to how quickly they can multiply, which isn't a good thing, because a lot of fast-spreading ideas are akin to cancer, and do nothing except weaken or kill the host.
If Twitter's to avoid killing its host, it needs an immune system to filter out those cancerous ideas.
> And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.
Why on earth would you suspect that the handful of incidents that they advertise are a remotely representative sample? Of course the highest profile censorship is going to be agreeable, but we have no idea what lurks below the surface because we have no transparency.
> And that's what's dangerous about them: the filter got removed from broadcasting. People like to talk about filters like they're bad things, but that's not true. They're in fact a vitally necessary function to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (for instance: what is peer review? Answer: a filter). when you don't have filters, ideas spread in proportion to how quickly they can multiply, which isn't a good thing, because a lot of fast-spreading ideas are akin to cancer, and do nothing except weaken or kill the host.
I certainly don't dispute that filters can be good things. I have an issue with such an important filter being operated by a single entity (or a small handful of entities with aligned interests and who act in concert, for those inclined toward pedantry) who is not beholden to the public. Note that "peer review" isn't one guy determining what is going to be considered "science" this year; rather, it's distributed by its very nature. We should strive for social filters that are similarly robust, and distributing the curation among many smaller parties is the most obvious way to go.
> If Twitter's to avoid killing its host, it needs an immune system to filter out those cancerous ideas.
Or we kill Twitter. :) I say this half in-jest, but some people who are positively terrified about the collapse of democracy seem to take it as an article of faith that Twitter deserves to exist. I think there's some happy medium but if we fail to find it dispatching Twitter seems better than where we're heading.
>> And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.
> Why on earth would you suspect that the handful of incidents that they advertise are a remotely representative sample? Of course the highest profile censorship is going to be agreeable, but we have no idea what lurks below the surface because we have no transparency.
I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets.
> Or we kill Twitter. :) I say this half in-jest, but some people who are positively terrified about the collapse of democracy seem to take it as an article of faith that Twitter deserves to exist. I think there's some happy medium but if we fail to find it dispatching Twitter seems better than where we're heading.
I agree with this. Social media may be a technology that society should chose to abandon, Amish-style.
> I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets.
There's no reason to believe that this is going to do any good with respect to reducing far-right speech or preventing far-right violence; to the contrary it's going to push them out of public view into increasingly difficult-to-monitor places and fuel a persecution narrative. But much worse than that, we're embracing a precedent that it's okay for a corporation to hold dominion over a significant volume of our collective speech, unregulated. If you would have told me ten years ago that this would be a popular progressive opinion I would have laughed.
>It's not size, but power. Twitter's curation algorithms have massive unilateral influence on public opinion (reaching far beyond its own user-base) probably including the ability to sway national presidential elections.
Yes, and? "The ability to sway national presidential elections" (or any other elections) was of course one of the founding points of free speech in America. You just described major newspapers and publishers throughout the history of our nation, even before the advent of broadcast radio and television. Fox News also has massive unilateral influence on public opinion, as does CNN. That doesn't make them quasi-government at all
>I'm not aware of any utility companies with such power.
Then I must assume you aren't aware of any utility companies. It's not particularly challenging to imagine utility companies getting together and just deciding to cut off Republicans or Democrats. Like, literally just denying them any access to the electric grid, water/sewage, or data transfer beyond what they could then jury rig together themselves in regions where that's possible. You think that's less power then fucking Twitter? Are you for real?
>What proportion of your speech is by telegraph these days? I'm guessing it's a lot less than it would have been in 1891. For much of America, much of our speech especially our political speech takes place on social media, and thus "traditional" channels enjoy a much smaller proportion.
So what? It's not like we're forced to do that, and indeed I do not.
>Moreover, social media introduces an entirely new dimension: it's multicast. Your telegraph or phone call conveyed information to 1 other party at a time. A Tweet can be seen by millions or more.
I seem to vaguely recall these things, like way back in the day when we rode dinosaurs to work, called "newspapers", "books", "radio", "TV", and "web sites". All seemed somehow to have the ability to "broadcast" the ideas of individual people to large numbers of the public at a time. We seemed to do ok. And indeed that more recent one, the "web site" (I won't try to break your mind with "email", "IRC", or "newsgroups", baby steps), let you put out whatever you like to the world. It was lightweight and quite possible to host even on computing power of the level we now have in cereal box gadgets. It could All seemed to predate social media by a bit.
Oh wait we've still those? You can still use them? Oh.
I think I was perfectly clear, and yet you still seemed to miss each and every one of my points and by a large margin. I’m not sure if you’re being willfully obtuse or not, but in either case I don’t see anything good coming from further discussion.
> I used to be a free speech absolutist myself back in Snowden times, but having seeing the flip side of anonymous, unverified, amplified and maliciously orchestrated communication of lies by unknown actors myself over the past few years
This is a strange lesson to take away, not least of all because we've seen a lot of egregious, potent, and dangerous lies from credible, verified institutions including the former POTUS, prominent newspapers, and other important cultural institutions. Further, it seems strange to suggest that "anonymous lies" are somehow more dangerous than lies by verified parties--pretty much by definition this is incorrect since a lie by some credible institution does more damage than a lie by someone with no credibility at all.
I don't know how someone can look at American politics and politicians (never mind cultural institutions) over the last ~decade and conclude that these people are fit to regulate Americans' speech. Indeed, how can anyone praise democracy without also valuing its prerequisite: free speech. I suspect people don't want a democracy, they want their own candidate to be elected--hardly a noble or democratic sentiment.
I think this is missing the point of the no-longer-free-speach-absolutist sentiment (henceforth NLFSA). You note, correctly I think, that
> we've seen a lot of egregious, potent, and dangerous lies from credible, verified institutions including the former POTUS, prominent newspapers, and other important cultural institutions.
The NLFSA notes that we've been seeing a new attack on free speech and free thought emerge, namely Steven Bannon 'flood the zone with shit' approach.
The classical free speech position is to fight bad ideas with better ideas, fight bad speech with good. We're running into largely unprecedented problems (in the anglosphere, at least) where bad speech is drowning out the good. There are many things we can point as possible causes (say the internet changing communication patterns, information siloing, propaganda, etc.) and there aren't clear solutions.
Conventional free speech absolutism prevents you from being muzzled -- but that's it. Acknowledging you can be silenced by a chorus of people shouting over you requires a new position.
> I don't know how someone can look at American politics and politicians (never mind cultural institutions) over the last ~decade and conclude that these people are fit to regulate Americans' speech.
The NLFSA doesn't necessarily want speech regulated, or regulated by the government, or by corporations. They may not have any particular solution in mind (though some might think they have one). The NLFSA sees a problem without necessarily seeing a solution.
I think it's reasonable to see all this, and despite our problems double down on convention free speech absolutism -- that being muzzled is the most dangerous form of intervention, that better speech will ultimately win out over bad ideas. But I don't fault someone for changing their mind to try to combat rampant conspiracy theories.
> The NLFSA doesn't necessarily want speech regulated, or regulated by the government, or by corporations. They may not have any particular solution in mind (though some might think they have one). The NLFSA sees a problem without necessarily seeing a solution.
It seems like the appropriate posture is being positively in favor of the best thing we've got (free speech) while acknowledging the limitations. Which is a long way of saying the appropriate posture is that of a free speech proponent. After all, free speech proponents aren't arguing that free speech completely solves the speech quality problem--only that the best we can do is allow debate to select for the best speech.
Note also that the soft restrictions and political tests we've put in place in our epistemological institutions have predictably degraded public trust in those institutions and the void is being exploited by different and often worse authoritarians.
Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).
Instead, we're building a system that regards all right-wing positions (and a fair number of moderate liberal positions) as uniformly "far-right" such that there are fewer incentives to hold a respectable position and instead we get dishonest extremists on either side. It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.
I largely agree with you and think that my views fall closer to yours than the GPs. I'd endorse free speech absolutism as probably the best system in the vein of "Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others". That being said
> Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).
I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.
I acknowledge the context of this article is bad behavior by censorious figures, I'll admit it is a serious free speech problem, but unfortunately I must dispute that it is the most important.
I think the mirror of this on the left manifests as performative wokeness, e.g. using whatever leftist language is at hand as a cudgel to settle political scores.
> It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.
I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions. What we had was something like the pretense of objectivity, which was probably good enough for what we needed. I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.
> I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.
I think we're saying something very similar here? This is what I meant when I said "you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas".
To be clear, I think the "conservatives being driven out of epistemological institutions" (not "centrist spaces") and "the rise of anti-intellectualism in rightwing spaces" are two symptoms of the same phenomena (so while I might agree that one symptom is worse than the other, the cure is the same). Notably, when we regard everything right of far-left as "uniformly evil" then you erase any incentive that would otherwise cause respectable rightwing ideas to rise above unsavory rightwing ideas.
> I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions.
Objectivity and neutrality were ideals that we held much like equality, but to your point we never perfected them (I never meant to imply otherwise).
> I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.
Yes, to be quite clear, we have failed at various points in history to perfectly uphold our ideals. The whole deal with "progress" is that we want to advance toward our ideals, and if we're really progressing, the past ought to be less moral than the present. There's merit in pointing out failures to prioritize identity over objectivity, but the left errs on the remedy: in response to prioritizing a white identity politics over objectivity they respond by prioritizing an anti-white identity politics over objectivity. The correct response is to prioritize objectivity over identity politics altogether, at least assuming we want to live in a world that is prosperous, just, harmonious, etc.
To paraphrase C. S. Lewis: They say that unregulated speech is destructive. I do not contradict them. But I oppose speech regulation because I see nobody fit to be trusted with regulating it.
He has absolutely always been like this. His rambling screeds used to be posted to reddit pretty constantly long before he published Snowden. This NYT reporter made a mistake and posted an incorrect accusation on her twitter, that she later corrected. Big mistake, but she owned it. And here he is calling the situation "Stasi-like".
A NYT reporter posted an ostensibly private conversation of absolutely no newsworthy value for the sole purpose of ruining some peoples' lifes, got the facts completely wrong, posted a non-apology, and then played the victim. At best, this is bad tabloid journalism.
> And here he is calling the situation "Stasi-like".
He is calling it stasi like because people routinely get blacklisted when this happens to them - they lose their job, their friends, and become unemployable. In fact, blacklisting is the exact point of this behavior!
Doesn't seem the conversation was private at all. Nor did the Stasi traffic in ruining reputations for perceived bad behavior. They arrested political dissenters by the thousands. Andreesen is a billionaire who would, at worst, have to apologize on twitter and continue his life of total freedom. Did anyone consider Donald Sterling to be a victim?
The "Stasi-like" remark was "Stasi-like citizen surveillance". The latter was conveniently omitted upthread. No one is arguing that this is Stasi-like in that the outcome was arrest.
> They arrested political dissenters by the thousands. Andreesen is a billionaire who would, at worst, have to apologize on twitter and continue his life of total freedom.
These kinds of arguments would crop up in the cancel culture debates, and the same rebuttal applies: that a billionaire is able to survive some particular injustice doesn't lessen the injustice. Notably, the overwhelming majority of people who are cancelled are not famous billionaires (and thus you don't hear about them and there is probably no outcry to right the wrong, although there are exceptions).
Come on. You don't use a loaded phrase like "Stasi-like" unless you're implying something nefarious. It seems monumentally hypocritical for a guy who's entire career is based on having access to other people's private communications. Lorenz's beat is heavily based on following social media trends including stuff like wallstreetbets which was the topic of the clubhouse chat. Greenwald is ascribing a lot of intent that he can't back up.
> You don't use a loaded phrase like "Stasi-like" unless you're implying something nefarious.
To be perfectly clear, he was using it to refer to citizen-surveillance which is patently nefarious.
> Greenwald is ascribing a lot of intent that he can't back up.
Those of us who suffered her social media account while it was public have the context to know that his characterization isn't far off. More importantly though, this isn't about her, but rather about the broader trend of policing ideological transgressions and passing it off as "journalism".
She had a Clubhouse invite and reported on what (she thought) she heard. That's not surveillance any more than watching TV is surveillance. Would Greenwald appreciate his methods being referred to as KGB-like espionage? Because working a source to reveal classified material is how they would do it.
And it's seriously rich of him to accuse another journalist of pursuing an agenda.
Neither is listening in on Clubhouse. That convo was invite-only, but not private. And to my other point, what about Donald Sterling? He had a one-on-one private phone call leaked by his mistress that resulted in him being banned for life from the NBA for expressing his personal opinions. Consider that the apotheosis of "Cancel Culture". Now ask yourself if, knowing what we know about his true feelings, if we should respect his privacy and not complain about him owning an NBA franchise. Or if he is the true victim here. Or if it's just irrelevant that he's a billionaire and owned a fan-supported sports team.
Again, I think you're misunderstanding "citizen surveillance". It refers to peers policing each other for ideological transgressions, not the surveillance of citizens.
> And to my other point, what about Donald Sterling? He had a one-on-one private phone call leaked by his mistress that resulted in him being banned for life from the NBA for expressing his personal opinions. Consider that the apotheosis of "Cancel Culture".
Broken clocks are right twice a day, but that's hardly a reason to prefer them.
"Stasi-like" is an extremely hyperbolic way to describe the situation. However, I think "big mistake, but she owned it" is far too forgiving a response.
She is a NYT reporter - a profession which trades on trust - and clearly uses her Twitter profile as an extension of her profession. She used that platform to make a false accusation regarding a member of an event of little-to-no public interest using details taken entirely out of context. That speaks volumes about her intent. Instead of retracting it, she posted a "clarification" and in the same post continued to grandstand about how the imagined infraction was wrong and talk down to the accused.
A post where she "owned it" would look something like this: "Earlier I said ___. I have since discovered that I was incorrect. What actually happened was ___. I'm sorry for my mistake and I will make an effort to do better going forward." What actually happened was worlds apart.
Additionally, this is perhaps the most overt or high-profile example of her untrustworthiness, but there's a long tail of slightly subtler and lower-profile incidents that undoubtedly factored into her termination. It's not like this was a one-off, out-of-character incident.
> And here he is calling the situation "Stasi-like".
The original quote was "Stasi-like citizen-surveillance", which is important additional context. It's "Stasi-like" in that he's remarking on an industry of people who are policing the speech of their fellow citizens for ideological transgressions. Of course you can dispute this characterization, but let's be clear about what is actually up for dispute.
Just a tonal note. Saying 'Big mistake' implies to me that it's meant sarcastically in the sense of 'Big deal' or 'Big whoop', which I gather from the rest of your sentence is not what you intended. I would not have read it this way from the phrase 'A big mistake, but she owned it.'
It's hard to trust a reporter when they behave abhorrently on Twitter, especially when their Twitter persona is based on their occupation as a journalist.
I find it impossible to believe that it's a simple coincidence that a professional journalist mistakenly accused Andreesen of using a slur (couldn't be bothered to do the most basic fact checking?) to her 200K followers after she ranted on Twitter for months about him blocking her. I think you're missing a lot of context with respect to her behavior on Twitter prior to her making her account private.
It fascinates me how we've gone from the web as a tool for resisting censorship to the point where we recognize the need for guardrails because of how dangerous information tools can be made in the wrong hands.
So, an NYT reporter snooping on a Clubhouse conversation got her facts wrong (although she later corrected them), and the entire thing seemed relatively trivial to start with. And... this is exhibit A for the prosecution about how no one is doing real journalism anymore, they're just playing hall monitor. Or turning into the modern Stasi. Sure, those two things don't seem very similar, but we always forget how the SS started out as elementary school crossing guards, don't we.
Okay, Glenn, we get it. You don't like -- say it with me in your spookiest voice, everyone! -- CAAAAAAAANCELLLL CUUUUUUUUUUULTURRRRRE. I mean, sure, it was fine when they were cancelling Bari Weiss, because he was on board with that, but then they came for him! (And by "they," I mean fact-checkers, or as I believe Greenwald refers to them, Paramilitary Death Squads.)
I'm just saying, maybe we should stop treating "but he's the guy that Edward Snowden worked with!" as some kind of Get Out of Making Sensible Arguments Free card.
> So, an NYT reporter snooping on a Clubhouse conversation got her facts wrong (although she later corrected them), and the entire thing seemed relatively trivial to start with. And... this is exhibit A for the prosecution about how no one is doing real journalism anymore, they're just playing hall monitor. Or turning into the modern Stasi. Sure, those two things don't seem very similar, but we always forget how the SS started out as elementary school crossing guards, don't we.
Taylor Lorenz is apparently so focused on Marc Andreesen blocking her on Clubhouse that she admitted (in another since-deleted tweet)[1] that she had created a "burner" account, a violation of Clubhouse rules ("We [Clubhouse] prohibit the creation of duplicate or multiple accounts by one individual, whether representing themselves or another entity")[2]. She has a long history of tweeting at Andreesen on Twitter about her block. An argument that she's simply a neutral reporter soberly seeking out "abuse" and "harassment" strains credibility (especially given that her behavior toward Andreesen on Twitter is actually harassment).
How would you characterize an organization that sends its agents out to harass and stalk perceived enemies, trying to catch them in any act that can be portrayed as wrongdoing or wrongthink, and even going so far as to spread demonstrable lies about them? Stasi seems only mildly hyperbolic.
Okay, let's grant for the sake of argument that Taylor Lorenz is overly focused on Andreessen blocking her on Clubhouse.
(1) You leapt from "Taylor Lorenz did this" to "The New York Times sends out agents to harass and stalk perceived enemies"; those two things are not the same, and I suspect if we were talking about entities you had more positive feelings about, you wouldn't conflate the two. (This is not to say that what an NYT reporter does on their own time can't reflect on the Times, but that the NYT is not automatically responsible for it.)
(2) "Going so far as to spread demonstrable lies about them" is... not how I would be comfortable describing what happened in this case. Again, Taylor Lorenz's Twitter account is not the same as a bylined article in the NYT, and you seem to be conflating them. Furthermore, there's no compelling evidence that her original accusation about Andreessen was made in bad faith. "She tried real hard to get into those private chats" may be a demonstration of nosiness, but not automatically one of ill intent.
(3) "Stasi seems only mildly hyperbolic": Sorry, but I'm going to insist that comparing four decades of what's widely considered to be one of the most oppressive state security agencies that ever existed and a reporter falsely tweeting "Marc Andreessen called somebody a retard in a private chat" is more than mildly hyperbolic.
> there's no compelling evidence that her original accusation about Andreessen was made in bad faith.
Yes there is. According to others on the call, the word "retard" was uttered by a woman, and in a completely appropriate manner given the context. Taylor claimed Mr. Andreesen said it, and that he said it in a manner that warranted calling out. When her "mistake" was revealed, she responded not with an apology, but another lie to divert blame. Her claims had no apparent relation with reality, and her recent antagonism of Mr. Andreesen gives us no reason to assume this was all a big misunderstanding.
re: 3 -- Do you believe that her intent in tweeting that was simply to report a fact? Or do you think there might have been other motives given her demonstrated pattern of behavior?
> I mean, sure, it was fine when they were cancelling Bari Weiss, because he was on board with that
He literally calls out Kyle Chayka for trying to shame Substack for hosting Weiss in this very article. Greenwald was no fan of Weiss but I've seen no evidence that he was in favour of her cancelling.
Interestingly, China blocked access to Clubhouse today [0]. Even though our censors are annoying, at least they're less effective.
Actually, they appear less effective, but could it be that they're better because they're more subtle? Are we absolutely sure that the media elite doesn't ever conspire with those in the government towards particular goals?
Not shocking, there was a big twitter thread yesterday talking about a conversation between Mainland Han Chinese, Uighurs and Taiwanese all on the same call talking about various things.
One of the best Swedish journalists I know is not on Twitter. I found it annoying at first as I wanted to follow him, interact with him and so on. But I now think it adds a lot to his credibility. It seems however quite rare. Every journalist seems to build a personal brand and gather a following that follows them to wherever they write.
In the same vein, I really appreciate The Economist for it's unsigned articles. Basically, I trust journalism more when the journalist does not put themselves between me and the subject of their writings.
It seems counter-productive to me for journalists to call for spaces like this to be taken down.
Far more valuable to them should be to leave them up, set up their own account, and lurk. Online fora where people believe they are chatting privately or psudonymously are the ultimate honeypot for teasing out things they would never say in public. I recall the time Mitt Romney was outed by an anonymous recorder who divulged several things he said during a high-ticket fundraiser that did poorly for his messaging on the campaign trail in 2012 (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/top-13-quotes-mitt-romn...).
Is Substack a good option for the amateur writer trying to make a email list for free while creating valuable content ; or is it better suited for someone with a large fan following like Greenwald?
Interning at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting in my youth was worthwhile. Mis/disinformation, mass media, and the power/biases of tech corporations to manipulate is a problem. But this case isn't "journalism" anymore than tabloid garbage. I also expected more from a Berkman Klein affiliate.
But also, isn't criticizing him an example of latent homophobia? Is this a medical condition we can get people labeled with so they can be involuntarily committed for expressing views we don't agree with?
The NYT is hardly beyond criticism. But Greenwald's whole schtick these past few years has been little more than a more articulate Trumpian "the press is the enemy of the people" anti-intellectual nonsense.
I don't think Greenwald is a Russian agent. But it's hard to imagine a Russian agent behaving a whole lot differently, if their motive was to sow discord and distrust in our most historically credible institutions.
I would argue that the examples of "journalism" critiqued in that article are more in line with what an enemy would act like. Pretending otherwise feels like blaming Snowden for exposing certain unlawful things that NSA has been doing.
Except with Snowden, there is at least a non-zero-value argument against him when it comes to exposing secrets related to national security (even though I, along with many other people, don't see him as the real bad guy in that whole story). While those "journalists", like Taylor Lorenz, don't have even that excuse on their side.
> if their motive was to sow discord and distrust in our most historically credible institutions.
Those very institutions are doing exactly that to themselves. It's easy to ignore if they mostly comport with your own worldview. But to anyone who goes against the grain at all, it's starkly obvious that these institutions have become little more than propaganda machines for the dominant narrative.
Seeing the same people who go on and on about [mildly conservative channel] fake news and laughing at the idiots who watch it while also being completely oblivious to the exact same bs they're lapping up day after day has been outright depressing.
The tone of this article is atrocious, if Glenn had a point it was completely lost when he peppered this article with snark and derision.
He clearly holds disgust for his subject, which ruins his ability to speak impartially about this topic. This is an attempted hit piece and he's not subtle about it, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised, he's never been very adept at objectivity or impartiality.
I'm honestly surprised more folks haven't seen through his shtick yet, as they saw through Taibbi's.
A classic strategy is to attack the messenger instead of the message. You are doing this. There isn’t one fact in your statement. Pure opinion and feeling. Greenwald peppers his article with disgust but he also backs it up with facts.
I'm not sure why this comment is getting downvoted and flagged. The point is valid. This is an ad hominem attack with non sequiturs too like "He clearly holds disgust for his subject, which ruins his ability to speak"
It's contentless and cheap. I'd like to hear some counterarguments to Glen's points instead.
Greenwald calls the targets of his ire "Stasi agents".
This is completely unhelpful hyperbole. Where are the political prisoners? The concentration camps? I'm not sure how much good faith should be extended to somebody who isn't arguing in good faith to begin with.
It's only an ad hominem if I say he's wrong because of who he is. This can't be an ad hominem if I don't actually address the argument he puts forward, which I did not do (for better or for worse).
The content I've added is, "This article is hard for me to read because of its tone." Agree or disagree, I found it difficult to get through, and hard to see what Glenn was trying to point out as a result of the tone he chose.
> he's never been very adept at objectivity or impartiality.
> I'm honestly surprised more folks haven't seen through his shtick yet
In these you attack the author rather his points.
Being hard to read for you doesn't discredit the article's arguments either.
I'd rather hear what you dislike about the points being made rather than how they read, because the former is more important to having an actual conversation.
If nothing else, it shows the value of having an actual editor. I'm assuming Glenn's writing has always been this ridiculous, but that decent editors were preventing his worst instincts and tendencies from actually making it into the published version.
He literally quit The Intercept because he was furious that someone tried to give him edits. He said that he founded the site with the explicit agreement that no one would be allowed to edit his words.
>You can click through and the article in question was Greenwald attempting to give oxygen to GOP propaganda about Hunter Biden.
Photos of drug fueled sex romps with prostitutes by the president's son are newsworthy. Same goes for his investments and work in foreign countries. The lack of investigative journalism into Hunter Biden is the product of something far worse than what Greenwald is covering. This has zero to do with the false Democrat/Republican dichotomy - this is powerful people that are doing things that the proles cannot, while being shielded by the same people tasked with holding them accountable.
The argument was never about whether a story like that was news worthy or not. The argument was - if your article is saying/implying that the then former VP was complicit in a financial scheme to benefit him after publicly saying he wasn't, then you should show proof and not innuendos (leave innuendos to tabloids). Or if you are saying journalists are choosing to ignore the story, then show how
>The argument was never about whether a story like that was news worthy or not.
That's an interesting take. Articles and mentions were suppressed near IMMEDIATELY on Facebook and Twitter followed by waves of accounts bannings. Mandarins of the US security apparatus (some of which who draw compensation from media companies) were waltzed out to claim it was Russian disinformation (lol).
That is false. The suppression on Twitter was based on the argument that the data was allegedly hacked, was not verified and they were being cautious. You are also ignoring the fact that even conservative leanings sites like Wall Street journal passed on the story.
Finally, Greenwald published his resignation letter. Intercept also published their letter to him. It was never about news worthiness. It was a debate on ‘what’ the content was as I mentioned in my earlier response
>That is false. The suppression on Twitter was based on the argument that the data was allegedly hacked, was not verified and they were being cautious. You are also ignoring the fact that even conservative leanings sites like Wall Street journal passed on the story.
So the "Collateral Murder" video, by that standard, would be suppressed too? And any mentions of it, even in private messages, would also be suppressed?
And then comes the double standards - "allegedly hacked" - Trump's tax returns and his wife's phone conversations were published and not suppressed shortly before the story on HB broke. And to be clear, because I'm sure your programmed knee-jerk reaction here will be to default to team politics, Trump's tax returns absolutely deserved to be published.
Whatever your stripe of politics, you're eventually (and painfully) going to realize that you're being systematically fed a wave of lies. WMDs (no one jailed), GFC (no recovery, no one jailed), Guantanamo (still open), drone strikes in 75+ countries (still going), NSA spying (still going), Snowden (still innocent, still a political refugee), Epstein (didn't kill himself). Crickets from the media, zero accountability. Wake up.
>>because I'm sure your programmed knee-jerk reaction<<<
You don't have to be rude. I have engaged in a polite conversation with you.
>>And then comes the double standards <<<
Yes, you can argue that Twitter exhibits double standards in some instances. But it has nothing to do with the original debate you and I were having which is - what was the reason Greenwald's article was not published.
Also, Trump's tax returns were not hacked. They were provided (though without his knowledge) by someone who had legal access to it (like Mary Trump and she did say she provided it) but again you can argue a double standard.
His wife's phone conversations were not hacked. One of the participants in the call recorded it and released it (and the state she was in allows one participant to record a call)
>Yes, you can argue that Twitter exhibits double standards in some instances. But it has nothing to do with the original debate you and I were having which is - what was the reason Greenwald's article was not published.
It absolutely is relevant. There is clear coordination between these organizations to suppress information. You can't look at the bannings occurring across multiple media platforms simultaneously (multiple instances) and not draw this conclusion. Further, there's a revolving door between government agencies and media companies - this industry is carrying water for the powers that be.
>Also, Trump's tax returns were not hacked
What is social engineering? You're arguing in trivial semantics and missing the forest for the trees.
Hacked was never a legitimate threshold for suppressing information before someone in power was threatened.
Everything about that story smelled like an OP. That's irrelevant though. If Russian intelligence planted the story in the media but it was substantiated, it would still be newsworthy. As it stands, the story is completely unsubstantiated. So Greenwald trying to treat a fact-free rumor as critical to his reporting is pretty shitty journalism and he really didn't appreciate being called out on it.
>He clearly holds disgust for his subject, which ruins his ability to speak impartially about this topic
I wonder if you share the same disdain for these very same behaviors within modern "journalism" that Glenn discusses in the article, as they are increasingly ubiquitous.
But what if the subject deserves snark and derision? I don't like to 'both sides' it and claim neutrality/impartiality when one side is wrong, or "more wronger" than the other. I didn't find anything atrocious or objectionable in the article myself, but I'm probably an oddity. 25+ years of online discourse has jaded me. :)
Being “right” but unconvincing because of abrasiveness is just screaming into the void, or worse, into an echo chamber. If he can’t create an article that wins people over with reason then why write the article at all?
I’m sympathetic to some of his points but this article by itself is not convincing.
>Being “right” but unconvincing because of abrasiveness is just screaming into the void, or worse, into an echo chamber. If he can’t create an article that wins people over with reason then why write the article at all?
Good question. Perhaps the answer is that we're beyond convincing at this point. A product of dispersion. We Americans all drifting apart economically, politically, and in how we perceive reality. As to where that leads us - likely chaos.
The point of the article is that journalists telling tales on dubious things semi-public figures wrote on social media is bad, particularly when they make evidence-free claims about their motives for doing it and appear to mostly be trying to encourage an enraged mob to pile on. In isolation, this might be considered a reasonable point to make.
To prove his point the author, a journalist, spends most of his article telling us a tale about a dubious thing a semi-public figure wrote on social media, claims she is "malicious, disgusting and sociopathic", suggests the only possible motivation for journalists like her investigating things which semi public figures say off the record is "to control, to coerce, to dominate, to repress"[1] and says his followers should feel "a particular obligation" to heap scorn on her and other targets of his ire.
My irony meter exploded.
[1]yes, this is the founder of The Intercept and prominent Wikileaks advocate Glenn Greenwald suggesting there's something wrong with "eavesdropping on private conversations" of influential billionaires by getting invited to their chatroom.
I don't understand? The difference between author and NYT reporter is one reported a lie, and the other reported based off of facts (though will a lot of emotion/ tone).
Sure, the journalist's tweet was incorrect, but in Glenn's own words "that she got it all wrong is arguably the least humiliating and pathetic aspect of all of this".. His entire schtick is that "tattletale" hanging out in forums naming and shaming of people for comments they made is bad, and he does so in an article consisting entirely of naming and shaming people, ending by saying that people should feel obligation to scorn them
A freelancer tweets a banal point that Substack's level of direct support for its writers means that - unlike Patreon - at some stage they're going to have to consider perceived editorial slant if they end up promoting a lot of high profile contratrians, and receives a whole 17 likes for doing so. Several months later Greenwald accuses him of the thoughtcrime of "shaming Substack" and includes him on his list of people to heap scorn on. And Glenn wants you to believe it's other journalists that have developed an unhealthy obsession with hanging out on social media looking for targets...
This is his substack, and honestly I think he's entirely justified going for the hit. If this was in a publication, I'd have higher standards.
Having said that, the NYT and their writers have gone too far too many times for instances like this to go unnoticed. I think it's entirely justified to start fighting fire with fire and calling for the cancelation of the cancelers.
This sounds similar to the subreddit whose members post "CP" to subreddits they do not like in order to get them taken down. We should be talking about the false accusation and false accusations in general, but it is probably easier to talk about the messenger.
And ironically, Greenwald stoops low on their level to fight in the mud with pigs instead of focusing on more relevant things.
The internet and Twitter have amplification feedback loops which means that the best way to handle this stuff is to not interact and promote it by giving it more eyes.
Ever since a feminist gamer started pointing out sexist oddities from video games and my fellow video game enthusiasts got their panties in a bunch and started a hate machine against her, I've seen this pattern repeat itself again and again.
Stop giving them the notoriety and eyes and they would have disappeared 5 years ago.
God I love the "R" word. It has just the right amount of edge that people's ears perk up just a little bit when you say it and then they start paying attention.
He criticizes other journalists for being singularly focused on calling out “bad behaviour”, but has anyone made a bigger career out of doing exactly that than Greenwald?
It’s hypocritical. I’m not even saying he’s factually wrong (I don’t have the interest in fact checking him). I’m just saying that every time he writes anything, he can’t help but draw comparisons to fascism.
Yes, it’s helpful to reference fascism when witnessing truly fascist things. I, too, am opposed to fascism. But that’s hardly an interesting or controversial position.
Yet everything Glenn doesn’t like seems to be a part of either a grand conspiracy or a symptom of said conspiracy.
I'm already hearing this in local debates. It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything.
(PS: Open groups and channels are not encrypted on Telegram servers and can be reported. It is just that Telegram doesn't have a history of letting other abuse it.)
Edit: I've been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now.
Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done.
Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing.