If it's a false story, say it. If it's not - what exactly are you saying with your comment?
It’s important to know who’s writing: The article is not an objective list of facts. They did not reach to the publication for comment. Some nuances might have been ironed out. This is true regardless of the political side talking.
> Newsweek reached out to the agency and to Oefelein for comment and will update this article with any response.
Instead, your comment to me sounds likme an apology to the ad hominem fallacy.
When an article about a tweet doesn't bother to embed the tweet, it's probably a good indication that the article itself doesn't really add anything to the topic. Firsthand accounts from _either_ of the parties here would've been significantly more valuable to us as readers.
Comment contradicts what is in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...
Maybe ask for sources before using some random post making unverified claims as confirmation for your own biases.
I've generally taken that not to be down to malevolence but probably just down to the fact those drawn to editing it are most likely of a similar political hue to those from academia.
Has it struck you that maybe the world is actually that way and that they prefer to be that way. Just because it isn't your way doesn't mean that you dismiss the rest of the world.
So you'll need to clarify how I'm "in the wrong lane".
> I've just personally always been surprised by how neutral Wikipedia's political articles tend to be when I've read them
My experience so far is that they manage to polarize even articles unrelated to politics, I think that it is partially caused by the toxicity of the community.
I should point out that there are plenty of editors who lean left that make genuine attempts to keep it out of their editing and are as frustrated as me about those who don't; I genuinely suspect it is an editor-demographics numbers thing that causes the imbalance as much as anything, as previously stated.
To be honest I have no idea who Newsweek were or are and if they stopped being the original group 7-8 years ago it hardly seems like you could maintain any brand loyalty if you were eroding it with wrong doing over that whole time.
These things seem germane to the discussion, though.
The organization that took over Newsweek did it with the intention to improve their own credibility by banking on the name, while removing all the people and processes that built that credibility in the first place. If it’s not an outright scam it’s certainly approaching it.
How would you assess the accuracy of that feeling without knowing or finding out about the facts being discussed? You're saying 'I know nothing about this at all but that isn't germane because the OP is giving me a disingenuous vibe'. It's a curiously strident, stridently incurious position.
The problem here is that many of you are projecting your own brand of morals on these deals, and many people may not share that perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Maybe aggregators like HN can leverage this list, like a pre-filter for the moderators.
If it's a false story, say it. If it's not - what exactly are you saying with your comment?
It seems like this should go without saying, but some news outlets have a better reputation for accuracy than others, and a story can be "true" in a technical sense while still being designed to further some agenda by omitting important context or facts.
I'd submit that understanding the biases and incentives of a publication are prerequisites to taking any of their content seriously. This is true of any outlet. This doesn't mean you discard outright their content, but you may view it through a more skeptical lens and seek out additional corroboration.
I find a warning that a single story might be false much less useful than a comment pointing out that the reputation of the source is no longer to be trusted.
Right now it's not entirely clear what all the facts are. Perhaps she really was just fired for having an account, or perhaps she posted some things that were less-than-savoury. I think the chance that a Conservative publication would do any diligence at getting at the facts of the matter is essentially zero.
A few years ago a Conservative publication had an article that they had "proof" that Conservative accounts were banned more frequently on Twitter, based on "analysis" of the data. It took me a bit of effort to find the data, and it included shining examples of Conservatism such as the American Nazi Party. Yes, literally, the American fucking Nazi Party. It included a list of a whole bunch of other similarly minded people; I wrote down a list here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette#Banning_Neo-Nazis_is...
This is a very marked example, but there have been many examples where all nuance or details were left out because it was more convenient.
This is the kind of playing field we're dealing with.
Now, I'm not saying that you should trust other publications blindly – trusting anything blindly would be foolish – but trust is not binary, and generally speaking I would trust other sources more on this topic. A Conservative publication on topics like these without details are, unfortunately, not proof of anything right now and carry very little trust.
So, do I know it's a false story? No. Do I know it's a true story? Also no. Essentially a story like this is useless outside of being a lead for further investigation.
It is the literal meaning of "virtue signalling".
Presumably the right-wing are just as capable (and historically have been the aggressor often), but the left have mastered it as a form recently.
As for providing some evidence of cancel culture and deplatforming, somebody would have to have been living on Mars (or have blinkers) to have missed the odious practices (as evidenced in the OP!) that the terms were invented for, and I'm not sure me spending my time googling and linking examples is going to help in that case.
But that only gets you part of the way to understanding. These arguments are & always will be abused. But: just because something is regularly abused doesn't mean there's no validity to it. And of course, pointing out that these arguments are abused is itself a kind of Quake laser cannon argument.
Ultimately, you just have to decide yourself based on context cues whether an argument is valid.
† Obviously, I am one myself
Now on pointing it out, I think a lot of people don't realize they are trying to sway the discourse thru the use of projection rather than logic and reason. I think it is one of those insidious things that just creep in and people don't realize they are doing it. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and think they want to appeal to reason (at lest in life and on HN) and I think many don't see these words work in direct contrast to that, they literally appeal to the mob. I point it out not to gain net fame or quake guns (I will take a pack-o-punch'ed gun in BO Zombies though) but rather I would hope at least one reader of this thread would have the "I never really though about it that way" moments.
Now his comments are predictably and assiduously leftist-political, and rarely on-topic to the article from what I've seen.
> The new "Newsweek" capitalizes on the brand reputation of the old one, but has no connections to it
From an external perspective it seems like the same argument could be made about the tptacek HN account. The posts from years ago which I enjoyed reading are nothing like the posts from recent history. It's like different people wrote them.
I’ve been following him on Twitter for years; and I don’t believe he had changed at all - rather HN has had more political stories as the tech sector grew.
Anyways, this is yet another reason to flag political stories on Hacker News! It blows to lose the ability to enjoy someone else's writing because you learn too much about their politics.
I found claims that IBT's other notable property, the International Business Times (which I haven't heard of), has been a content farm, but I only glossed over it.
I can't seem to find Newsweek on the Median Bias chart, but it's ranked similarly to CNN.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/newsweek-bias-and-reliability/
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Med...
My take is it's mostly accurate, but I wouldn't use it as a primary source.
The perfect example of that is Breitbart's infamous 'black crime' tag: Breitbart didn't need to invent stories, they'd just go and pick up out of the bunch of criminal prosecutions happening every single day in a country with >300 million inhabitants. But by choosing to focus on crimes committed by black people - and conveniently leaving out similar crimes committed by your average white criminal - it reaffirmed on their readers their 'intuition' that black people are clearly more inclined to commit crime.
So, you should always consider who is publishing a story and why.
"Transgender murder epidemic" is an even better example, it was completely made up by the media. Look up the numbers and compare them with the general population.
Maybe your response is ironic: I genuinely can't tell. But clearly "my every-day experience justifies my actions regardless of the facts about (my view)" is not a fair rebuttal, because anyone can make that claim about anything.
[1] https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data
[2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/10/12/policing/
And [1] is in ostensibly "liberal" New York city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:IBTIMES
I have upvoted both of your posts that seem to be responding to me, because I much prefer a downvote and discourse to being down voted without comment.
It does however feel weird in the same way that "odd female something", "odd muslim something", "odd socialist something", "odd atheist something".
Leaving out details that are not relevant is IMO smart because it helps the reader to avoid prematurely making up their mind because of irrelevant details.
So my take is tptacek should be allowed to write it and we should be allowed to point it out.
And one more thing: my respect for tptacek has been growing even if we clash from time to time in various settings.
The word I was originally going to use was the one articles about the new "Newsweek" use: "cult". But that didn't seem quite right either.
Cite?
EDIT:
Seems like this comment is false if wikipedia is to believed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...
> The Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek's headquarters in Lower Manhattan on January 18, 2018, and seized 18 computer servers as part of an investigation related to the company's finances.[64] IBT, which owned Newsweek, had been under scrutiny for its ties to David Jang,[64] a South Korean pastor and the leader of a Christian sect called "the Community".[65]
Would not be surprising really, given what the comment is intended to do.
Waiting for that citation.
> The Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek's headquarters in Lower Manhattan on January 18, 2018, and seized 18 computer servers as part of an investigation related to the company's finances.[64] IBT, which owned Newsweek, had been under scrutiny for its ties to David Jang,[64] a South Korean pastor and the leader of a Christian sect called "the Community".[65]
At no point does it say IBT is an "odd Christian sect". At no point does it say they were purchased by an "odd Christian sect". Having ties to != owned by. But you know this.