Louis Rossman - Let's discuss why journalists are afraid of Elon Musk right now - General

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYXpXdaX6vg

I'm not surprised Rossmann feels this way, tech journalism has treated him REALLY badly for quite a while now.

It's amazing how (((journalists))) get riled up because somebody suggests a website that calls out shit (((articles)))

Are journalists really afraid? Elon Musk's idea sounds just slightly more effective than telling journalists they have to put a quarter in the fake news jar every time they lie.

i dont have munch confidence in such a site, regardless of who runs it. it would be really easy to sprinkle an agenda here, an personal bias there, and bam, you're no better than the people your site criticizes

This is one of those examples where wikipedia has issues. Heated wikipedia edit wars are won by whoever's news sources are more favored by the site's admins, ultimately if these news sources are forced to do their research better less articles cited based on absurdity them would pop up on wikipedia.

This is a thing?

Thanks, now I'll use triple parenthese a lot more just to prove them wrong.

That cropping of the Musk's Twitter post was an incredibly egregious act of misinformation. I agree with Louis' comment about such anti-journalistic actions being part of the reason why people rightfully distrust modern media outlets. However, on the subject of Wikipedia - it's great for scientific and historical stuff, where these things are mostly not up for discussion and you can cite everything easily. When it comes to contemporary issues, events, organisations, individuals, etc, people's biases either intentionally or unintentionally cause them to skew the information that they put up on the site. Take, for example, the (((triple parentheses))). Or an editor's campaign against anti-war campaigners. The Wikipedia moderators who normally identify and flag biases in articles either fail to notice the sly editors, or don't do anything against biases that align with their own. Don't trust Wikipedia articles blindly - they're written by humans, after all.

All sources i can find point to this being originated on some random podcast in 2014. It seems like the media popularized it in 2016 during the election cycle by reporting that the punctiation is now an antisemetic symbol. The list of things that the media have tried to push as nazi symbols now includes this, pepe the frog, khaki pants, the OK sign (👌) and a few others im forgetting. It's getting increasingly stupid. Media pretending there are hidden symbols that mean something they don't isnt new, there have been crazes about secret satanic symbols back when the buzzword bad thing was satanism instead of nazism/altright. on "always", have we always been at war with east asia as of 2014, or am i missing something?

Did you write it or something? I correctly cited the origin and you're accusing me of not reading something i read before even watching the video i posted in the OP. Additionally, my disparagement was towards wikipedia's sources, the articles that are stupid enough to join the latest in a century long line of secret satanic/commie/nazi symbol crazes.

I wouldn't say that the media popularized it, honestly. This whole (((shit))) genuinely took off during the 2016 election- and I explicitly remember seeing it explode in popularity on 4chan during the gauntlet of dumb political threads it regularly has now. Hell, I could've sworn that I saw the /pol/ thread itself that explained as to what ((())) was supposed to indicate and directing those in the thread to follow the example and use it too. Like with pepe or 👌, their usage of it in insufferable alt-right circles spread outwards from /pol/ to other boards on 4chan, then, naturally, it got picked up by t_d, and THEN it's reported on by the media. This kinda stuff definitely ain't hidden - nor is it just made up. It's just painfully common in other, more cancerous forums on the internet.

You've missed my point, completely. A symbol only means anything if the message of it's meaning is spread. Definitions form by consensus and when the media contributes to the spread of and gives over ownership of punctuation to these definitions then that is both wrong strategically, you are supporting the original message and wrong morally, in that you're doing this for clicks and ad revenue because "hey listen to this obscure nazi symbol we've found watch out for it online!" is good clickbait. The media grasps at straws for these assignments, an obscure antisemitic 2014 podcast is a straw. There are multiple patterns of this in media, another similar pattern is the pattern of reporting surrounding school shootings. Instead of a simple, straightforward reporting of the fact, school shooters receive extensive 24 hour coverage where their lives are examined, the motiviation for this is ratings and revenue. Straightforward reporting with accurate "measure of factual importance" would exclude things like "watch out for this crazy new secret symbol nazis are using to communicate!" clickbait entirely. It is the fact that things get blown out of proportion to increase ratings that is common to every "secret nazi/commie/satanist symbol" fearmonger story and you're just caught in the cycle, again, and you're defending it, again. All saying shit like "this is the wrong hill to die on" tells me is that your ego is out of line. Consider a different point of view instead of staying an ignorant baby.

I find his comparison between this potential website and wikipedia quite weird. From the sounds of it Elon's website is going to essentially be like yelp or ratemyprofessor where pretty much everyone can post whatever and you are only barely checked if you're a bot/violating rules. While in theory anyone can edit wikipedia and bash with other randies, in practice it's very highly moderated and guided by experts who will pretty happily lock out the general public (e.g. when they locked the gamergate page.)

All we have to go on is a few tweets, it's stupid to make any assumptions about how it will actually work. A lot of things can change between having an idea, planning it properly and actually making it happen.

Yo but I didn't learn that the triple-parens were to point out jews from ~The Media~, I learned it from 4chan. Where people on /pol/ explicitly stated that it was to point out the jews, lol. This revisionism is fucking weird, as far as I've been able to tell that's what it's always been about.

The Gamergate page is a really bad example, because it was locked in a state of horrible bias and factual inaccuracy, and a quick glance shows this to still be the case.

https://zarth.xyz/s/2018/05/28/CVj9PHY.png The tweets very strongly hint towards that, but yeah, you can never know for sure what a product will be like til the minute it's live.

What really bothers me here is that it seems like its gonna be a platform for rating stuff, not commenting on it, further disqualifying wikipedia as an analogy.

The fact that he didn't see the obvious flaws feom the getgo gives me little reason to expect any radical changes.

I get what he's going for but consensus isn't truth. It's weird that he'd want to create a website where people vote on the truth for themselves. Even if he made a website where people vote on the objectivity or lean/bias of a website, you still suffer the same shit. It's like a choose-your-own-reality adventure game at this point.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now because twitter is an awful medium for getting ideas across coherently. There may be a lot more to it in his head that he hasn't crammed into a series of short tweets. I'll start to judge properly if we get a more detailed description.

Wikipedia is biased as shit, and a select group of "super editors" have way more power than they should.

We all want some marker of objectivity. Once Musk's website comes out, theres gonna be a bunch of conservative versions and liberal versions. Then in five years instead of arguing about whose news source is biased we are gonna be arguing about whose media-rating website is biased.