[basetop]

Tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes and everything else at the behest of media companies like the atlantic.

Youtube, facebook, reddit, google search, etc have all been targeted by the atlantic, nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn, etc and bullied into scrubbing content and direct their users to "authoritative sources". Ironically enough, in china, russia and most countries, "authoritative sources" are state propaganda organs. But we are different or so I'm told. Our "authoritative sources" are independent news organizations who strangely enough push the same message with the same talking points. What a coincidence. For "independent" "news" organizations, they sure are united in the same message.

This censorship has been going on for at least 5 years now. Maybe the atlantic journalists should investigate their editors as to why the atlantic has supported censorship? Or maybe the atlantic journalists should start investigating nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn, etc. Why so many government/intelligence agency people are working in media. Why so many children of politicians ( Bushes, Clintons, McCains, Cuomos, etc ) have prominent positions in the media?

Or is the atlantic only interested in war crime evidence that suit their agenda ( pushing for war in syria, venezuela, etc )?

This article is so weird. It's like an arsonist setting a house on fire and telling everyone that the house is on fire.

[52-6F-62]

What exactly are you claiming is being censored?

The media regularly investigates and reports on itself.

The press is far from perfect, but you’re alleging a vast and deep conspiracy when reality is likely far simpler:

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Sales and business have little impact on editorial. Editorial flies by the whims of a wide variety of strong personalities.

Politicians and relevant players get columnist and editorial roles because of their inside status and insight (of whatever level of quality that might be).

Suggesting those outlets produce a single unified perspective or ideology is a bit much. Which would explain why you might see contradictory ideas.

I continually stress media literacy as crucial-especially these days. It’s not a mystery to be solved. Most of is pretty straight forward hum drum.

Edited to add:

The Atlantic is a very different machine from WP or NYT. It’s magazine whose content has been analysis and ideas and always has been. Their work will always have perspective woven into their articles. It’s not new to them. But it’s not a conspiracy, it’s part of their business model.

[jtr1]

These do not have to be mutually exclusive accounts. There does not have to be a secret cabal of shadowy deep state operatives pushing a unified message, there just needs to be a propensity for the rich and well-connected (by definition a small group) to find their way into positions of influence in rough proximity to major media outlets. As you've said:

Politicians and relevant players get columnist and editorial roles because of their status and insight.

It's not difficult to see that wealth, status, and connection are self-compounding. I also don't think it's unreasonable to say that many people in this group hold views that are out of step with the majority of Americans, particularly when you are talking about the pro-military intervention crowd.

[52-6F-62]

Granted, but what’s being implied and not said outright is that those people are somehow influencing entire organizations of strong-willed career professionals and not just given their own post to say what they want alongside the rest.

I’m asserting the latter is usually what’s happening.

Over the past 100 years there have been many times where North American governments have attempted to rule over the press. That never went well for them (save the inception of Fox News).

OP seemed to suggest the large number of contradictory articles was the result of a larger unified conspiracy. I’m suggesting that is highly unlikely.

For what it’s worth- people don’t get into working for the media because it pays really well. Not usually anyway. So in that way I’d rule out wealth as a primary motivating factor to sacrificing one’s principles in that business.

[leftyted]

It seems unlikely to me that there is no coordination between left wing media institutions. They say the same things at the same time using the same language. I don't read much right-wing media.

I'm not saying there's a shadowy conspiracy (though I'm not ruling out people talking about "messaging" via email). It may be that they read each other's stuff and the demands of the 24 hour news cycle dictate that there's a certain amount of cross pollination and regurgitation.

> For what it’s worth- people don’t get into working for the media because it pays really well. Not usually anyway. So in that way I’d rule out wealth as a primary motivating factor to sacrificing one’s principles in that business.

Another perspective on this, courtesy of Noam Chomsky in conversation with a journalist: "I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting here."

> Over the past 100 years there have been many times where North American governments have attempted to rule over the press. That never went well for them (save the inception of Fox News).

I think it's unknown to what degree American intelligence agencies influence the media but I'm willing to bet it's "more than not at all". It may be relatively benign stuff ("Don't use the term 'Islamic terrorism,' Al Qaeda uses that stuff to propagandize") or it may be not so benign.

I agree with the original poster. It's absurd that the left-wing media has been agitating for censorship of "hate" and then complaining when "evidence of war crimes" is deleted. There's been shockingly little mainstream questioning of just how quixotic it is to try to "remove hate".

I'm fairly concerned about the move toward censorship by internet platforms. The only way tech companies can realistically do this is with algorithms. Lots of people seem to think it's a given that these companies can algorithmically remove "hateful things". No one seems to be saying that rules and laws need to have precedent in order to be intelligible. For example, in the US, there are incitement laws but what actually constitutes "incitement of imminent lawless action" is something that has been defined in the courtroom. You can't just say "delete hate" without precisely defining hate. It's a blank check.

I find censorship via algorithms extremely scary. There will be false positives and false negatives and there is absolutely zero recourse. Censorship by algorithms is a perfect expression of bureaucracy. In perfect bureaucracies, responsibilty is spread so thinly that it's impossible to determine who is responsible for a mistake. With algorithms, there's actually no human on the hook at all. Are you going to blame the programmers?

By all means, use machine learning to flag posts so humans can look at them. But automating the removal of content and the banning of human users is a road I strongly suspect we will regret going down. If the volume of content is sufficient so that you need to use algorithms to remove human-generated content then I'd say it's time to reconsider whether that content should be removed at all.

[phatfish]

In many cases the censorship is carried out by a 3rd party company setup in a low wage location where someone with their own biases, religious convections and influence of their own society moderates content for the west.

The tech giants don't want anything to do with it because it means employing 1000's of extra people and the costs that go with that. So it just gets contracted out to the the lowest bidder.

It can't all be automated yet, not some machine learning algorithm dreamt up be Facebook is any better of a prospect.

This is the problem with the black box of the multinational corporation deciding what is moral or acceptable with no oversight by the government.

[leftyted]

> It can't all be automated yet, not some machine learning algorithm dreamt up be Facebook is any better of a prospect.

Some of it is automated. Youtube removes/demonitizes stuff based on automated checks. I suspect other platforms do this stuff too or are headed in that direction.

[dillonmckay]

Surely they have enough income to hire thousands of US based moderators at a living wage, and moderators for other countries, too.

The relative ethics is the biggest issue, to me.

[52-6F-62]

> It seems unlikely to me that there is no coordination between left wing media institutions. They say the same things at the same time using the same language. I don't read much right-wing media.

> I'm not saying there's a shadowy conspiracy (though I'm not ruling out people talking about "messaging" via email). It may be that they read each other's stuff and the demands of the 24 hour news cycle dictate that there's a certain amount of cross pollination and regurgitation.

There is a difference between being a part of a zeitgeist, and actively conspiring to brainwash people.

The original implication was that a group behind the scenes of large organizations was coordinating them—not that journalists might communicate and share ideas.

They also do regularly read each other's work. Many articles are written in response to others. That is not a new feature in North American press.

> I think it's unknown to what degree American intelligence agencies influence the media but I'm willing to bet it's "more than not at all". It may be relatively benign stuff ("Don't use the term 'Islamic terrorism,' Al Qaeda uses that stuff to propagandize") or it may be not so benign.

That just opens the door for anyone to insert whatever they like, though. That's the sensationalist take I was trying to tone down with my post. It's coming out of thin air.

> I agree with the original poster. It's absurd that the left-wing media has been agitating for censorship of "hate" and then complaining when "evidence of war crimes" is deleted. There's been shockingly little mainstream questioning of just how quixotic it is to try to "remove hate".

Again, to this point, the media/press (and in your words specifically the "left-wing" media) is not a uniform entity and doesn't operate as one. What you're seeing are effects, not causes.

As for the rest—I'm not sure what the solution is yet. It's a tough problem, and definitely a nuanced one. I was only commenting on the conspiracy theories coming out of nowhere on a forum that usually prides itself on empiricism and facts.

[jerf]

"The original implication was that a group behind the scenes of large organizations was coordinating them—not that journalists might communicate and share ideas."

When complaining this is impossible or unlikely, you might want to google the term "Journo-list". It is a thing that is known to have happened, and the idea that one exists again today does not require too much suspension of disbelief, especially since much the same symptoms that made people suspect it at the time are fully visible in the news again. They were absolutely coordinating on stories and doing all the bad things that independent journolists aren't supposed to be doing.

[wybiral]

> It's not difficult to see that wealth, status, and connection are self-compounding. I also don't think it's unreasonable to say that many people in this group hold views that are out of step with the majority of Americans, particularly when you are talking about the pro-military intervention crowd.

Yes, the wealthy certainly rig the system to stay wealthy and get more wealth. That's an easy thing to assert. But to then make vague connections to intelligence and relatives of presidents as though they posed some unseen censorship apparatus on media with some specific goals is where it gets into conspiracy theory zone.

[billfruit]

Journalists and the press has their self interest to protect too. That is why it is hard to take criticism of Facebook, Google, etc from them, because their criticism is tainted by conflict of interest. One does not go to the Pope to get an impartial view about atheism. I do not say that what Atlantic/NY times/etc says on this topic is without value. Only that what they say should not be regarded as final or defenitive word, rather only as claims in argument.

[52-6F-62]

> Only that what they say should not be regarded as final or defenitive word, rather only as claims in argument.

I'd agree with that.

It's the claim that they're in on a massive conspiracy because of a select set of articles on the subject is the line I've taken to issue.

[brightball]

Stuff like this is why I still see value in own encyclopedias, history books, etc. I simply don't trust resources that can be edited/deleted at any time.

[dorfsmay]

This is exactly why archive.org was created. They actually referenced Orwell's 1984 changing history theme when they created it.

Note that archive.org is run on donation, and people often overlooked it's importance and need for funds.

[candiodari]

> Tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes and everything else at the behest of media companies like the atlantic.

Don't underestimate governments forcing these companies to hide evidence of their own misdeeds.

Even governments that you wouldn't traditionally think of as abusive. Take for yourself what a realistic number is for police abuse and then how much gets filmed and uploaded. Then search on Youtube. Clearly, someone's asking for removals in the US. Same for Europe. I doubt very much it's the Atlantic doing that.

[unethical_ban]

This is entirely in your mind until you put some evidence to it, you know, like journalists tend to do.

[sbenitoj]

Great post, I think you’d get a lot out of reading this old blog post on Unqualified Reservations — Is journalism official?

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/is-journali...

[losteric]

I was curious who could write so well with such poor reasoning... unsurprisingly, it's a world-famous mental gymnast:

> Yarvin, attacking the accepted "World War II mythology" in a speech to the 2012 BIL Conference, claimed that Hitler’s invasions were forgivable acts of self-defense, and that this historical fact was suppressed by America’s ruling communists, who invented political correctness as an "extremely elaborate mechanism for persecuting racists and fascists." "If Americans want to change their government," he said, "they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia." > > Yarvin's opinions have been described as racist, with his writings interpreted as supportive of slavery, including the belief that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons. Yarvin himself maintains that he is a racist because he doubts that "all races are equally smart," and supports the notion "that people who score higher on IQ tests are in some sense superior human beings". He also describes himself as being an "outspoken advocate for slavery", and has argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others.

[sbenitoj]

All I can suggest is to think for yourself, read his long format writings and make up your own mind. Don’t just read what people write about him.

[navigatesol]

>Or is the atlantic only interested in war crime evidence that suit their agenda ( pushing for war in syria, venezuela, etc )?

I'm with you 90% of the way, but I don't understand this argument.

It's like Hilary's emails or WikiLeaks; "But it came from hackers!" Who cares, if it reveals legitimate criminal activity. There's no equivalency.

[SkyBelow]

It's like trusting all the evidence presented by the prosecutor during a court case. Yes, likely none of that is faked or outright lies, but until you give the defense a chance to respond it shouldn't be trusted as accurate representation.

If we wouldn't trust the evidence from a prosecutor by itself, why would we trust evidence from an entity fulfilling the same role in the court of public opinion?

[dillonmckay]

The rules of evidence are different for the court of public opinion.

Take the OJ Simpson criminal trial, for instance.

...or the Lori Loughlin college bribery and money-laundering scandal.

...or the Aaron Swartz travesty.

[Nasrudith]

It is the selective condemnation that makes it highly suspicious and contextual matters. It isn't like hacking where if someone surfaces evidence of say fraud they are automatically guilty regardless of others.

War crimes for one can be far more "transactional" and horrific with two sides. Side A is shooting surrendering soldiers! Now censor the false surrender killings of side B that prompted this.

Or Side C arming child soldiers and teaching them to shoot invaders until they stop moving - except it happened after Side D started waging no holds barred genocide and horrifically arming children was /the right thing to do/ lacking other alternatives. Censor Side D's atrocities as "inappropriate" content and Side C trying to survive now looks villainous instead of the desperate and unseemly but technically moral move it is.