[product50]

If ever there was a one sided article, it was this. Doesn't even talk about the nuances of the problems. Journalists are like how dare tech people are criticizing us - but it is totally ok to do it the other way round. The difference now though is, because of social media, prominent tech personalities have much bigger audiences.

Sometimes I am thankful like services like Twitter and Facebook exists since these types of biases are for everyone to see and make independent calls on. Before, it would have been like whatever NYTimes said would be taken as the truth as there would have been no platform available to present your pov.

[zozbot234]

ISTM that the article is very explicitly taking sides; it doesn't even claim to be providing some neutral view of the controversy, it just advances the journalists' own point of view. A biased article will always get more clicks.

[partdavid]

Yeah, I even started reading this one with an uncritical eye but the resentment just seeps through. There's even an aside where the author just has to provide this parenthetical counterargument to the accusation that journalists seek clicks... right there in a supposed news story, a whole paragraph of editorial argument.

It really wasn't very useful even to tease out whatever issues were supposedly being discussed.

[ryanhuff]

If I took what Facebook presents to me through my feed as a news source to influence my POV, I might believe that Obama is a secret Muslim, or that Trump was done away with years ago, and is instead an alien, or that Helen Hunt, the actress, is involved in international child trafficking, or perhaps that COVID-19 was put in place to control the world's population. In my experience, all Facebook does is reveal and feed upon people's worst needs, desires, fears. I'll take the NY Times over this any day of the week.

[catalogia]

It's not like the NYTs doesn't have a history of spreading unfounded 'conspiracy theories' too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes#September...

In terms of damage done to society, I think all the examples you list combined still pale in comparison to that single example.

[ryanhuff]

Perhaps. The NYT is one source published daily. Facebook has millions of conversations happening among friends and loose connections happening daily about supposed conspiracy theories. I propose that the scale that results from the viral nature of this distribution dwarfs what the NYT could possibly do.