A comment I saw once about them was “ZH has reported five of the last three catastrophes”.
I've seen that claim too and found it questionable. Almost every major news outlet that would cover international news I found had some story about coronavirus pretty dang early. It wasn't a breathless story predicting the impact, but they covered it.
I feel like most media "media does this" or "didn't do that" is mostly just what passed in front of someone's nose.
Purely anecdotal experience of mine was a reddit story ages ago that was "The Media is too busy covering X to cover this story Y."
Purely out of curiosity I turned around and flipped on the TV and checked the news channels. The first 3 news channels, 2 were covering Y... but the claims about nobody covering it were constant.
ZH is the canonical example of a correct-twice-daily broken clock.
The question is if we want to prevent all news sources from evolving into that.
If you think China was lying about it, you should see the public statements of checks notes every head of state in the West.
There was a whole lot that people didn't know, especially early. There were quite a few failures of communication and delays.
China was certainly communicating warnings about the virus by early January.
For the very simple reason that there weren't enough masks for the people that needed them ( medical personnel), and the last thing you wants in such a scenario is for the public to freak out and fight over the already non-existing stocks.
Plenty of governments were too slow to react ( with lockdowns/limitations, or planning), but to say all Western leaders failed is simply wrong.
They’re still poorly managing it because they lack decent information. I’d argue it’s the fault of the civil service that they’ve been crippling and obvious cronyism (e.g. Dido Harding) not equipped to provide decent information that they need for decision making.
Yes, and there is a period between where they realize they are wrong, where they reformulate their message and then communicate that publicly. What we're discussing here is a similar gap of 2-4 days between evidence of person-to-person spread and communication.
Meanwhile, we have no idea when the US president even first tested positive for covid.
I don't recall many news outlets putting out official positions...
People like to write off 4Chan for all the shit posting and racism, etc. But if you can ignore all that there are truly some amazing Gems to be found.
Pretty quick, I'll give them that, but not before coverage - this is only a week or so before I became aware of the virus. Granted, I was traveling in China at the time, but it was known.
In my analysis I find these are examples of fitting events to predictions after the fact; the huge number of 'larp' threads on conspiracy forums allows for cherry-picking examples where some content later rhymed with reality.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/#q230593401
[1] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141096258/#141102703
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/4chan-user-prediction-las-...
sponsored in part by the Gates Foundation and reported by the Washington Post and others, retweeted by Joe Biden.
This was not secret insider information.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/237746333/#q237746818 (Warning, this link contains graphic hate speech like much of 4chan does and is not suitable for human consumption.)
https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...
Separately I view Twitter as breaking section 230 free speech regulatory agreements in meddling with what they 'publish'
As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions. They have a consistently bearish bias (which rarely seems to play out), and ties to the Russian state, which brings into question the motivations behind their criticisms of the US (not that I'm the biggest fan myself).
All of that said, ZH introduced me to a lot of economic literature and concepts I likely wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. They touch on niche subjects constantly, and I have to give them credit for broadening my understanding of economics in general.
Most of the corporate media are (sometimes ludicrously) optimistic, the other polarity. I read both.
Unfortunately being wrong on the internet is now becoming long-term grounds to be censored and excluded from mainstream society's systems.
Its quite sad really and I don't know what the solution is.
One thing that I DO know is that the solution isn't coming from the government. They are terrible at things. Their job should largely be relegated to protecting freedoms and security.
This 230 stuff is mostly probably going to backfire and create a less free internet. We don't need more lawyers and more government intervention to internet communication.
I do know we have many thousands of people working on solutions to things like Reddit (and Cloudflares) hyper-sensitive long-ago-crosed-the-line censorship, even if censorship is probably a poor world for it given the historical baggage.
Although this is the internet and even sights like T_D were almost entirely replaced on a site without Reddit's regulation and controls (a far worse situation in many's eyes) welll before it was banned on Reddit. It's thriving on a domain name I won't mention here.
Same with infowars and 8chan, they both quickly found new homes on new places.
But there censoring on any major platform and being related to fringe online communities being fringe DDOS protection services and aononimizers (who yes do still get heavily advertised and recruited on Reddit and redirected to these new unmoderated sites, so their censorship policies were always destined to fail).
I'm more concern about operating in the real world (VISA/Mastercard, Patreon, acess to advertising monopoly networks like adwords/adsense, etc), less so the online communities where discourse it happening. Reddit's censorship problem will eventually be solved on a wider/easier scale once the engineering work has been put into it.
It's probably one of the biggest problem of our current era for those of us who understand the importance of "outlaw thinking", free expression, and those who know the history of how these tools of control are almost always abused and riddled with false positives. The history of those who went against the grain (even if that grain is terribly wrong, wrong things have plenty of other ways to kill off than censorship).
I would be very surprised if a financial news outlet choosing the Fight Club quote did so at random and not specifically because of its predecessor.
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
- Ecclesiastes, 300 B.C.E.
No question ZeroHedge is excessively pessimistic, but that saying is silly. The US has been having recessions almost like clockwork once every 10 years since 1950 [0].
Saying "a recession is incoming!" is pretty much trivially true. It is always very likely there will be a recession in the next 10 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Your standards for "clockwork" regularity seem to be quite low. Your own source offered to support that claim shows almost double that frequency from 1950-1990, and a maximum interval of 10 years, 8 months over the whole period. So it is neither "like clockwork" over that period (the frequency has on average dropped over the period, but the intervals are highly variable from one to the next), and not averaging anything like 10 years.
If you are planning your investments around not having a recession about once a decade, I'm unconvinced it will end well for you.
Anyway, the point stands - regularly predicting recessions is a sensible approach, and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong. The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent. Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
No, its not, because recessions do not occur on a regular pattern. And even if they did, its still possible to predict them much more frequently than they do occur.
> and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong.
Just doing a quick search, ZeroHedge seems to have predicted a recession, counting only predictions with a one year or shorter forward window, literally every year since the end of the of the Great Recession. In many of those years, they made at least one prediction where the window was effectively negative, as they claimed that the US was already in a recession that just wasn't yet recognized.
So, yes, ZeroHedge significantly overpredicts recessions, as they have predicted not less than 11 of the last 1 recessions.
> The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent.
That's a non-sequitur, in any case.
> Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
Sure, but if ZeroHedge was consistently predicting a recession within 5 years, they'd still be overpredicting by quite a lot (not if this was 1950-1990, but it isn't), but they are much, much worse than that.
I'm quite certain if someone simulated trading based on predicted recessions on ZH, you would end up well below market returns.
I wonder if that's actually true.
> I wonder if that's actually true.
Its not, as ZH was founded during the Great Recession, and there's only been one since.
That's at least 10 less than they've predicted, though, so the quote, while not literally true, understates the degree to which ZH overpredicts recessions.
But nothing. In short, the claim of 'scarily accurate' is not true. There may be underlying reasons that their accuracy has issues, but their track record up to this point has been highly inaccurate.
Section 230 isn't an agreement, it's a section of the Communication Decency Act.[1] There is no prohibition on the publisher "meddling", or moderating. Section 230 was specifically carved out to encourage voluntary content moderation on the nascent internet.
It states that hosting or republishing someone else's speech does not make you the speaker, even if you moderate. Which is to say that just because Twitter locks down accounts or stops a link from being shared, they still are not the Speaker (legally) of anything their users post. That's it, that basically the whole thing.
Section 230 was overtly adopted so that platforms would make efforts to censor content that they found to be objectionable; there are no "free speech regulatory agreements" associated with it.
It is the only surviving part of a law whose sole and entire purpose was internet censorship, the rest of which was struck down for violating Free Speech protections.
Usually it seems to be they're really saying "this shows section 230 is a bad idea."
If we could move past the reflexive "well actually" there's a real issue people feel needs to be addressed.
Without it, there is likely no Hacker News, nor any other social media.
My believe is that if this is forced into a take it or leave it scenario, we're not going to like the outcome.
Which, come to think of it, might be a net gain to society overall. Hard to say.
I think the first priority is to ensure that the poster's misinformation (i.e., telling people that 230 says/does something it is explicitly designed not to do) does not propagate through this medium. It's a public forum, not a conversation with just the poster.
Then, if possible, you can engage with their disfunction. But given the weaponized role of misinformation today that's the first item in the checklist to be addressed.
From my viewpoint, it's very likely Section 230 will be modified. Once that action is underway, you'll be well behind the curve if you're just starting to grasp what people want. Others will have taken that time and effort and figured out how to mold it to their own ends, and the momentum will be building.
Twitter (and FB) have crossed the rubicon in editorializing other people's posts with 'fact checks' (sic), shadow bans and public bans.
Practically the opposite of the free speech maxim 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' and alarmingly close to totalitarian use of their publishing power.
>This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.
Caesar has crossed this Rubicon so many times there's a 4-lane highway with a Waffle House at the rest stop. Forum moderators have been exercising their right of free association for a long time.
Why would Twitter (and FB) agree to be regulated as common carrier, with limited ability to discriminate in its service to the general public? What should it/they get in exchange?
'Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish'.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
With that it seems reasonable to read Section 230 as "you don't have to proactively moderate, and any good faith moderation you do doesn't break that protection".
Regardless of whether or not this is the right thing for society, it seems that Facebook and Twitter are well within the bounds of section 230 to do some moderation without losing the protection of section 230.
Example for Twitter editorializing and cancelling https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1804a02d-a015...
Ammending S230 Bezos/WashPo
'...new legislation would target Section 230, a decades-old portion of law that spares social media sites from being held liable for the posts, photos and videos uploaded to their sites by their users. The proposal would pave the way for steep sanctions on major online platforms if they don’t act to remove a range of illicit content, from child exploitation to terrorism, according to Justice Department officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Wednesday.
The agency also seeks to force tech giants to be more transparent about their content-moderation decisions and more consistent in their enforcement of them, according to a report the department released Wednesday. The move might offer the U.S. government a new avenue to probe and punish companies over allegations of political bias'.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/17/doj-bar...
The slightly less cynical way I think of this is that finance will directly be impacted vs non-finance so news targetted at them is more helpful, or at least not actively harming.
In the financial independence community most articles on mainstream sites are considered jokes or to have insufficient detail to actually improve your finances
A good non-money example: If you get a chronic disease, reading blogs and forums by people who have the disease is going to me more helpful than whatever a staff writer can do in 2 hours of research
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/youll-bury-everyone-invo...
It may be incorrect &/or partisan but you are likely to read these sort of revelations on ZH first for better or worse.
If the social platforms were just imposing costs on being wrong that would almost be a service, but I get the impression from all the ban stories that they're staffed mostly by people who aren't equipped to be that judicious. The platforms have thrown down their cards and are all in on this election cycle, and by showing what appears to be partisan recklessness, it's going to cost them moral high ground they might have had before all this.
The good news is the people reading this forum can build a platform killer in 6-8months, and there's going to be a bunch of balance sheet cash on the sidelines looking for startups to fund. These social platform companies are all just another Friendster waiting to happen.
The latter sounds like an "intent" argument, that imposing the costs has a quality factor that I'd say just doesn't (or doesn't have to) exist.
I am curious why this is so valuable to you. In my personal life a delay of hours in the news cycle would have no effect. How does it generate value for you?
Anyway I mention that because during that time I remember always leaning on weird ZeroHedge articles to prove things in dumb arguments. I don’t remember the specifics but it stuck with me enough to completely blacklist ZH when I realised how dumb I was being.
It sounds like I probably should take a look at it from a fresh perspective and without that baggage, because it’s obviously not what I remember based on these comments.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/jhksrq/do_not...
It seems to check out: https://old.reddit.com/domain/zerohedge.com/new/
Check the second link -- there hasn't been a submission from zerohedge on any subreddit in over 48 hours.
There's your problem.
It's one thing to want the raw data out there if you want it, and more importantly, for others who are smarter than you to analyze it. Same principle with publishing methods and analysis of a scientific paper, or publishing source code you'll never look at to github: The fact that others can see it is important in itself.
That said, your comment borders too close to the Trumpian "experts know nothing, we can't trust the fourth estate" mentality. Actually, Trumpians don't know the term 'fourth estate'. Anyway. There is value in having institutions of trust investigate events and curate the story.
It's definitely got some Russian backing, but there are occasionally some quite good finance-related articles on it too. Just avoid the comment section!
Mainstream US media are not trustworthy, period. Repeated cases of going beyond bias and into simply parroting government or political party claims with no evidentiary basis, merely for influencing public opinion one way or another. Often, one would guess, while fully knowing the claims are baseless. The omission of coverage of various issues also contributes to the 'trust-unworthiness'.
Interesting... after reading this, I immediately thought: same as Zero Hedge (also often criticised). But then again, that shouldn't be a surprise - basically a lower bar (on accuracy) should result both in lower reaction time, and in more false positives.
A comment to a sibling comment: I personally find lower time-to-publish immensely valuable - I prefer to assess the accuracy of news stories myself (usually considering the original source and how aligned their interests are with the published information), and I find almost no value in the supposedly "trustworthy" media because they're not actually trustworthy to me (besides the obvious political bias, there's also plenty of high-profile non-culture-wars fake news, e.g. Iraqi WMD, Bloomberg's China spying debacle, the current (non-)coverage of Assange, ...). If there's anything I've learned in the past 10 or so years, is that the "experts" are barely any better than myself at discerning what's true or not, and much less trustworthy.