>Your comment makes it sound like there's an agenda in some entity consciously misrepresenting how acamedia works.

There absolutely is. Scientists and universities are constantly declaring themselves to be bastions of reason and enlightenment, and their research that they themselves know is shit to be of great significance and rigor.

I'm not even talking about the outright corruption that you mentioned - just the more mundane things like researchers publishing papers with completely useless/misleading information (e.g. testing a ML algorithm on a single dataset and declaring it as a breakthrough in neurosignal decoding) just to get those updoots from your mates.