Yes, the comment section is useless. They don't do any real moderation, and it's filled with, well, a lot of inappropriate material. So, I don't read the comments. (They don't even show by default.)

Is this really a good reason to "cancel" the site, though? Yeah, unmoderated free speech isn't pretty, but how much do you really hate it?

I've seen it repeatedly in reddit, 4chan and others. Reddit attempts to walk the balance of site-moderation vs user-moderated and it's extremely difficult on that knife edge.

The hope with ZH that it would span the political divide and allow proper discourse and exchange of ideas from both/any side of thinking.

But without moderation, it trends towards mud-slinging, vitriol where arguments become so divided that it's no longer discourse.

I think of it as performance art of insane babble, satire, potty-humour. Should "proper discourse and exchange of ideas" be the only thing allowed to exist?

(I have no problem with advertisers pulling away from it, either.)

EDIT: Forgot the other half of the point.

It doesn’t matter if Google makes partisan choices, it’s a free market, and we’ve got choices in life. It does matter when a company makes partisan choices and tries to pass themselves off as objective. Are you objective or do you have a bias? It’s a simple question: we all have biases, they do affect our choices, so be upfront with them rather than passing yourself off as something you’re not.

Calling those standards 'biased' or 'partisan' implies that Google's business practices are somehow unfair, or targeted at a particular group. But I don't see the evidence for that here. Just having ethical standards for who you will do business with is not in itself a bad thing!

And then you will go to the legality argument: "no , because that would be against the law".

So why not give that argument directly? Because it's less noble.

Yes, of course google is partisan : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za4tsfdpeMw

I bet you don't think Philip Morris is a far-left company, right?

Ethics are often an excuse for partisanship, and claims of partisanship are often an excuse to dismiss the other side’s ethics. It’s entirely possible that I’ve fallen into that trap myself, but I’ve never viewed Google as an apolitical animal. Maybe in their earlier days, but I was a kid in their earliest days. By the time I was politically self-aware, so was Google, and they’ve made plenty of political choices that from a certain perspective, a motivated person could argue they made from an ethical perspective.

The trouble with politics is most people don’t have political beliefs that they think are wrong. They have political beliefs because that’s what they friggin’ believe, and one of the reasons we consider free speech so essential under natural law and protect it from Congress in the 1st Amendment and the States through a process of incorporating the 1st Amendment against them is because it’s not an easy distinction to make. We made that choice back when partisans were calling themselves Congregationalists and Catholics and Anglicans and whatnot instead of Democrats and Republicans because the history of the reformation was one of Protestants and Catholics trying to seize the Armies of State power and wield them against their ecclesiastical enemies, in some cases literally burning them at the stake.

It is true that private corporations don’t have the same obligations as the State to respect free speech. They’re not governed by natural law, nor restricted by the Constitution, they’re actually protected because at the end of the day, a corporation is nothing more than a group of people pooling their assets to advance their own interests. Things like Section 230 are ultimately a liability shield against their users engaging in criminal activity, not criminal speech, but activity using their platforms to do it. The only problem is Google and Twitter and Facebook aren’t any better at making the distinction than you or I or Congress. There’s less at stake if they try, they don’t have the lawful power to stop, detain, arrest, jail, try, imprison, execute and kill that the State and it’s Officers do. But they’re putting themselves in the middle of a fecal hurricane by doing so and they’re not going to come out looking like upstanding moral citizens, they’re going to come out of this looking like unreliable, well, more unreliable business partners that will terminate contracts over partisan disagreements.

Partisanship is fine, and I certainly hope Google thinks it has some ethics, and whoever pulled the trigger on this undoubtedly thought they were doing some good for the world by doing so, just like all the Protestants and Catholics thought they were doing some good for the world by killing each other in bloody conflict after bloody conflict after bloody conflict. They all thought they had morals, and the moral high ground, but they also used politics to achieve their goals.

What isn’t fine, and I would argue ethically isn’t fine, is making partisan and even ethical choices, and being less than upfront about why you did so. You shouldn’t deceive people.

Its a free market, they can do what they want. In a normal market

However they enjoy specific liability protections (230),unlike most market participants. So, if they exercise choice, they also forego the liability protection.

They can choose to editorialize, at a cost of losing regulatory priviledges

There’s no evidence that this was driven by advertisers, it was a unilateral decision made by Google, influenced by a taxpayer-funded British pressure group. Does that count as election meddling by a foreign power I wonder?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17424472/youtube-lgbt-demo...

On the balance, these decisions don't seem to be driven by radical policies from either side; they seem driven by Google's love of money.

businesses that pay Google to advertiser

is not a homogeneous whole.

So it seems plausible that Google could put ZeroHedge in a bucket tagged with, well, whatever seems appropriate, and let advertisers decide. If they wanted to. Which they appear to not.

And here we are.

If you can sift through the bullshit, there's a LOT of good content - especially in the finance space - that you simply cannot find anywhere else.

I have not seen a lot of content about Russia - and when it's there, it's not flattering - so I'm not sure why you think it has a specific Russia slant.

The thing with ZH is you need a good BS filter.

Independent thinking and drawing your own conclusions from lecture is too painfull for most people...

As for Russia influence ZH is very much dead set against US troops and weapons close to Russias borders (Baltic States, Central Europe). This is exactly Russian line. But perhaps ZH genuinely wish for world peace...

That content is usually not available to people unless you spend tons of money with those firms.

And yes, a BS filter definitely is needed, and I've found reading through a newsreader makes that much, much easier.

Sadly, these days that's as true with NYT, WaPo, etc. One of the reasons that sites like ZH have become more popular is that the "papers of record" have abandoned their historic standards.

Out of curiosity, is there a precedent for YouTube banning channels based on the channel comments and not the channel video? Sounds like ZH is being punished for the actions of third parties.

As someone who follows finance, I like ZH. There is a ton of noise and little signal, but when they're right, they're right. I remember ZH commenters giving away free bitcoin back in 2013 calling it the next big thing.

Sort of. They've disabled comments on whole swaths of videos, like videos featuring children. I wouldn't be surprised if they've disabled comments for other problematic channels.

I'm not aware of any specific situations where they've banned channels outright as a result of problematic comment activity, but it wouldn't surprise me if it'd happened.

I vividly remember being obsessed with the news and reading MSM articles that would basically just quote Merkel or who the fuck else saying <x>, where ZH said <x> is stupid and wrong, and sure enough a few days later even Merkel (or who the fuck else) would backtrack on or directly contradict <x>.

A while ago I checked out ZH again out of curiosity (or maybe some nostalgia because I was once again in 'read all the news' mode), and I would definitely not consider it a good source of news. And thankfully I've found better approaches to get an idea of what's going on.

But your comment reminded me of a time in my life where I started 'properly' getting interested in current affairs and politics and whatnot, and the role ZH played in all that.

So I did just then, to check. For maximum controversy sake, I chose a Pat Buchanan article and looked at the comments sorted by 'worst' first.

There's nothing there that is too outlandish or objectionable that I could see. The top rated (worst) comment was from a leftish perspective.

Shrug.

I also only checked one article (https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vote-mail), and the 'worst' comment:

> Vote by mail is the best option.

The 'best' comment:

> This November ends in civil war no matter who wins or loses. The other side wont accept the results because of vote by mail. I don't know about you, but I am glad I'm on the side with all the guns, ammo, land, tools, water, food production and tradesmen. They've got big cities and computers. Ha. Enjoy kiddos.

Given that I live in a state with an incredibly successful history of vote by mail, I tend to love that worst comment and hate that 'best' comment.

That 'best' comment is extremely pessimistic, but nothing particularly objectionable.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/steven-carrillo...

or https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/09/three-nevada-...

"We came, we saw, he died."

Private publishers pushing an agenda in what they choose to relay via their resources wasn't a new concept in Orwell’s time or one be was unfamiliar with, nor was audience pressure on publishers as to how they would exercise that power. It would have surprised Orwell not at all. Which can be easily seen, because he wrote an essay in which he addressed private censorship as a then-current issue, noting, in part:

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Twitter recently reversed their de-platform move against ZeroHedge because they're about to get into deep legal shit for intentionally applying different standards to different users (ZH got nuked off of Twitter for a doxxing event (that wasn't a doxxing at all) that occurred on the ZH website, not on Twitter; but Twitter has ignored some other prominent cases of doxxing that actually happened on Twitter, including an infamous case by Spike Lee in which he publicly posted an incorrect address for George Zimmermann, which could have easily gotten someone killed). The ZeroHedge ban was a prominent and obvious instance of bias on the part of Twitter, so they had to clean it up.

So is Google.

Hard not to read this as a reaction to that.

I think the problem is that the left cancels, the right doesn't. So it's always the left attacking and it's always the right being attacked, but never attacking back. Doesn't seem stable or sustainable: this is how countries end up being taken over by communist revolutions run by extreme minorities.

Please tell me this is satire. Because I don't think being calling eachothers bullshit out on the internet is an issue. The problems begin when people take actions on it. You talk about 'attacking' but I can give you 2 examples from 2019 where right-wing extremists literally attacked. Those ideas were perpetuated in right-wing echochambers and eventually led to the deaths of many.

- Christchurch mosque shootings

- El Paso shooting

Both had right-wing extremist motivations, citing garbage such as 'the Great Replacement'.

But yeah, go ahead and crawl into the victim role because we don't want to read racist bullshit.

How many conservatives have threatened firms by mobbing their advertisers?

How many people have conservatives got fired for expressing mild left wing views?

How many statues have they torn down?

How many forums have they de-platformed?

How many of them have refused to take part in a debate because another participant disagreed with them?

This sort of thing happens all the time and it's very conspicuously always the same sort of people doing it.

But they're a mixed bag.

Downvoters are free to explain why I’m wrong instead of downvoting since they are upset with facts.

Well, based on wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture) anti-authoritarian is right rest a bit more debatable. Putting punk into box is kind of anti-punk.

I also believe that those themes you listed in your first sentence are there to imply that they are somehow inherently left-wing, which would be a partisan statement.

For example: there is certainly an authoritarian left and an authoritarian right as well as an anti-authoritarian left and an anti-authoritarian right.

But, more generally I think that "left" and "right" do more harm than good for describing political content dimensions.

The comment section used to be an equal opportunity Fight Club with omnidirectional contempt for mainstream orthodoxy regardless of source. The U.S., Chinese, and occasionally the Russian governments met with distrust and ridicule. So balanced was ZH that ZH (and HN) used to be available in China without a VPN. But now both ZH and HN are blocked there.

But, over the past two years or so, ZH content has become much more partisan and white nationalist; and the comment section has morphed from Fight Club into Racist and Anti-Semitic Sewer nonpareil.

The racism free-for-all in the comment section could be laid at the feet of non-moderation if ZH's comments section were indeed a free-fire zone. But ZH manually approves all commenter accounts and it consistently violates its stated policy on racism by refusing to remove blatantly racist comments or commenters.

> Racism, to include any religious affiliation, will not be tolerated in ANY FORM on this site, including the disparagment of people in the comments section.

> To report any form of discrimination, please right click on the comment number, copy the link to the comment, and send the comment link to abuse [at] zerohedge.com.

> Any user found to be discriminating against ANY race, religion, or affiliation, will be banned immediately, and have their comments removed from the system. https://www.zerohedge.com/help/notice-racism

Earnest Voice: > Operation Earnest Voice is an astroturfing campaign by the Federal government of the United States.[1] The aim of the initiative is to use sockpuppets to spread pro-American propaganda on social networking services based outside of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice

and

JTRIG: > The scope of the JTRIG's mission includes using "dirty tricks" to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt" enemies by "discrediting" them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

I look for balance in my news sources and since many powerful governments employ online propaganda ops, I look for signals of relative neutrality or non-bias. ZeroHedge used to have those in abundance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propa...

Really need to find that article again, it was a real eye-opener to the motives of people financing these sites.

I used to read ZH a bit during the FC, but recoiled in horror the last time I was there.