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On August 16 2016 01:33 farvacola wrote: Trump's daughter is vacationing with Putin's current girlfriend lol
I'm not going to say this means anything at all, but from a media blahblah perspective, how is this not the dumbest thing ever? What a fascinating election this has been.
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What a stunning display of self awareness. I really like that dude
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I have to give credit for StealthB and Nevuk for posting the two most well timed and themed tweets of this morning.
I have my problems with modern news media, but that man is correct that the conservatives did this to themselves. They told everyone not to trust the main stream media, which was the group that could have convinced primary voters that Trump was a bad plan. They called Nate Silver biased, when he told them Romney was going to get crushed. And at some point they left themselves at the mercy of the conspiracy theorist and trash publications like Infowars and Breitbart.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Nate Silver was interesting to listen to, but he definitely did sound biased as of 2012. To his credit he was right, but even he admitted that if things had gone a bit differently he would have looked like an ass.
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Yeah, that is because the election is the super bowl for news networks. And like the Super Bowl, no one likes or stays tuned into a blow out. They love this super PAC money and people tuning in nightly to see who is up in that specific news network's polls.
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United States42655 Posts
Used to be that we all had pretty much the same national newspapers and tv channels and that radio was about the only place that you could tailor your sources to match your interests. Fox saw a niche to make an entire channel of, effectively, conservative talk radio which was pretty big in terms of creating a second version of reality that you could choose if the first one wasn't to your liking. However the way that the internet has followed that trend has taken it to a whole new level. I can't speak for everyone but I know that I get the vast, vast majority of my news through the internet, and that's without even subscribing to a hundred different facebook groups that all send out their daily reports of impending doom. We've gotten more and more power to personalize our experience of the world to our own preferences, right down to facebook performing experiments on people by manipulating their news feeds to see if it impacts their mood. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html What it comes down to is that technology has progressively enabled people to select their own reality that conforms more closely to what they want to hear about. The same AI that allows amazon to recommend you shit that you needed and Netflix to reliably show you things that you actually want to watch will also pick the news it thinks you would like to consume. This is how we get to a place where Newt Gingrich is stating that people don't feel like they're safer as if that matters, a large portion of the American public simply doesn't operate in the same reality as the rest of us.
Obviously it works on everyone who wants to let it work, right or left. If you subscribe to a BLM outrage facebook page then they will reliably supply you with a new outrage daily (or lose your subscription to another source that better meets your need to be upset about something). Most of the way that we experience the world now is through a screen and it's very problematic to allow the reality in the screen to be shaped according to our own preferences.
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The irony about Breitbart.com is that they funded a "unbiased" poll on the state of the election. Clinton came out ahead 6 points I think.
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There was a discussion on NPR about Facebook needing to get an editorial staff and stop the ongoing lie that they are totally unbiased in what they show. This myth of neutralist that the tech companies has created about social media and link sharing sites isn’t going to last. Especially for a site like facebook.
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The thing about social media is that it is unbiased as a machine, but it reflects the operator's bias by nature. When a platform is designed to show each user the things they specifically tailor their accounts to see, it should not be surprising that they only see the things they want to see.
There is nothing that Facebook or Twitter or all their predecessors or successors can do to change this. If they make some effort to create content that is less "biased", the users will simply ignore it and curate it out.
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The bias isn’t really the problem right now, its outright fiction. Breitbart has been caught numerous times writing straight up false articles, stealing photos that have nothing to do with the thing they are reporting on and being an unethical trash heap. That isn't bias.
It’s the problem with tech. They used to say their software or products were “disruptive” entrenched industries. But what that really meant was they went around the standard processes used to filter and regulate whatever they made the software for. And if the case of facebook, they got what they wanted. News media is going through them to get eyeballs on their articles. And Facebook is now in the position where they are in many ways, a news site.
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On August 16 2016 02:58 Plansix wrote: The bias isn’t really the problem right now, its outright fiction. Breitbart has been caught numerous times writing straight up false articles, stealing photos that have nothing to do with the thing they are reporting on and being an unethical trash heap. That isn't bias.
It’s the problem with tech. They used to say their software or products were “disruptive” entrenched industries. But what that really meant was they went around the standard processes used to filter and regulate whatever they made the software for. And if the case of facebook, they got what they wanted. News media is going through them to get eyeballs on their articles. And Facebook is now in the position where they are in many ways, a news site.
Sure, a large amount of people get their news from Facebook. But this has very little to do with software or technology, and everything to do with people.
Socal media isn't even really built for news or political discussion, it's a terrible platform for both. But people don't want discourse or discussion, they want confirmation of their own preconceived views. And as long as people want to create an insular space for themselves, then Facebook or their ilk trying to force content on users doesn't fix problems, it just forces a migration of users to the next site.
Also doesn't help that news sites are absolutely terrible, like a remnant of the early 2000's where flashing banners and autoplay ruled the internet, and they have done a horrible job curating any kind of community.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Most news sites either disallow commentary, or have a lot of paid shills who poison the discussion. A site like this has a far more interesting news discussing community than just about any actual news outlet.
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Yeah, the Dems should take up some kind of law, that allows commercial sites that advertise themselves as news to be held accountable to demonstrably false claims to their platform. Obviously with providing some wiggle room for the occasional honest mistake. What are the obvious problems with this that I am not seeing?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On August 16 2016 03:19 Evotroid wrote: Yeah, the Dems should take up some kind of law, that allows commercial sites that advertise themselves as news to be held accountable to demonstrably false claims to their platform. Obviously with providing some wiggle room for the occasional honest mistake. What are the obvious problems with this that I am not seeing? Well there are already laws against straight up fabrication, but severe spin is still fair game.
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United States42655 Posts
On August 16 2016 03:19 Evotroid wrote: Yeah, the Dems should take up some kind of law, that allows commercial sites that advertise themselves as news to be held accountable to demonstrably false claims to their platform. Obviously with providing some wiggle room for the occasional honest mistake. What are the obvious problems with this that I am not seeing? First amendment would be the one. It's a problem without any good solution because of the lack of faith in the country that already exists. There isn't much of a middle ground to build on.
Y'all needed a BBC about 50 years ago to grow up trusting as a reliable source of truth that was independent of both corporate influences and state interference. That said we needed our BBC to not protect child rapists so there are negatives to that too.
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I personally believe that if you want high quality unbiased news they must not be monetized. No lobbyists, no advertisements, no donations, no trying to maximize numbers or shares or anything. Of course, that doesnt work very well in real life. People need to be paid, they wont work for free. The only viable solution is the state paying for the news but then how can they be unbiased?
Perhaps if free unbiased news were declared a basic right which the state has to provide and the current government and law-makers have no chance of changing its rules easily. But thats very likely to ever happen now, is it?
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On August 16 2016 03:25 RoomOfMush wrote: I personally believe that if you want high quality unbiased news they must not be monetized. No lobbyists, no advertisements, no donations, no trying to maximize numbers or shares or anything. Of course, that doesnt work very well in real life. People need to be paid, they wont work for free. The only viable solution is the state paying for the news but then how can they be unbiased?
Perhaps if free unbiased news were declared a basic right which the state has to provide and the current government and law-makers have no chance of changing its rules easily. But thats very likely to ever happen now, is it?
Closest that I can think of is NPR and PBS, and those get accused of being liberal
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