By contrast my impression of Zero Hedge has been that they are constant economic contrarians. If mainstream media is touting the strong economy, Zero Hedge posters are writing about how fiat currency is unsustainable and how the long-term trend low interest rates is creating a bubble. I do agree the sources of their article range from "I think I heard somewhere" to "based on this Bloomberg data", it's all over the place. But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.
Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.
With two stopped clocks you can tell the right time!
Back in the mid-late 1990s I ran technical operations for what was then Chicago's most popular ISP (it was eventually acquired, through multiple hops, by RCN). Our arch-competitor was a very strange guy named Karl Denninger, about whom I would relate stories here but I'm pretty sure he'll have a Google search set up on his name and I'd rather not pay to have bogus lawsuits against me dismissed. Anyways: he runs one of these sites, a sort of Zero-Hedge Jr, at Market-Ticker.org.
Maybe switch to Market-Ticker. It's just as batshit as Zero Hedge, but I'm pretty sure Karl isn't trying to influence low-information American voters about Syria.
Infowars is tabloid material at best; but even they say that this is a lie. They never asserted this.
>But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.
I've found myself on zerohedge a few times through investing reasons. I've looked through their content and I'm not really seeing anything offensive really.
>Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.
Very wise move.
Worth noting, it took the NYT until March 10th [1] to finally come to the conclusion that ZH had come to on Feb 24th [2], regarding the burning of AID trucks being sent to Venezuela. ZH has an anti-establishment bend, and will take a critically hostile point of view against the main stream, it's interesting to read that perspective when most established news organization are aligned one way in their reporting.
Glenn Greenwald had a great piece on the spread of fake news surrounding the AID truck event, worth reading for anyone who is somewhat skeptical of establishment narratives. [3]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-...
[2] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-23/venezuela-border-t...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...
So like the rest of the news?
The point of news is to have a spectrum and you read them and determine the truth for yourself.
None of the points you make validate a ban.
Free speech isn’t about holding your hand and establishing a standard, it’s about laying out all the information, real or not, and letting you decide for yourself.
If you posit that censorship is an acceptable form of filtering where someone else with their own version of facts and biases does your thinking, then you are entering a very dangerous mindset.
Note that the ZH comments section, however, is a cesspit filled with all sort of -ists.
Seriously, I just looked at the stories on the front page and most are economic related.
Can you share the ones that are conspiracy related or are what you consider "insidious"? Thanks
https://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/is-the...
At least all this is happening above board. It's not like Facebook has employees running tutorials on private Slack servers teaching people how to game the harassment reporting system to spike down content involving opinions they don't like.
Facebook can do what it wants here. If you don't like it, divest.
However, it is not a violation of US law.
If that is good enough for you, then so be it.
Telling people to divest from facebook is as helpful as telling a chinese citizen to leave china if they don't like government censorship. Especially if facebook becomes entrenched and monopolistic. Also, considering facebook has more power and reach than almost every country in the world, perhaps it's time to think about censorship and corporate power.
After all, government censorship was the norm until we decided that governments have gotten too powerful to allow to exist unchecked. Perhaps it's time to think of large corporations in the same manner.
>Facebook can do what it wants here. If you don't like it, divest.
"Country X can do what it wants. If you don't like it, leave."
Which is fair enough I suppose, but at least be honest about it.
*was
> By his own account, Lokey was writing as many as fifteen posts a day, among them most of the political pieces. The gig had a certain formula, he told Bloomberg: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies.
ZH says he's a disgruntled employee, but there's at least some evidence it's more than "they hate everyone".
I mean, honestly: "The Sinister Choreography Of The MH17 Probe To Smear Russia" https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-31/sinister-choreogra...
If you want contrarian market opinion, just stick a post-it that says "the market is going to crash" to your screen and eventually it'll be right - just like ZeroHedge.
* China's belt-and-road
* Venezuela (worth noting they were an early reporter on the aid-burning)
* Anti-Tesla stuff
* Anti-SEC, pro-Elon Musk stuff
* Stop Brexit
* Boeing
* China's massive debt load
* They still like gold
Yes, it's clear they have their own set of biases, again like every other outlet. But they don't seem to be super far left or right, and certainly don't seem to be "russian propaganda".
I shudder at whatever Orwellian hellscape we've landed in when people celebrate the censorship of a differently minded news source instead of utilizing it: read both it and your mainstream sources with a filter, apply your own independent thought and judgment and arrive at your own conclusion.
Anti-Maduro rioters being responsible for the aid-truck fire was a "Russian talking point" until a few days ago when the New York Times, America's most venerable newspaper of record, finally admitted it was true.
Credit to arcseco for drawing my attention to this: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...
At least this time it didn't take the New York Times the better part of 60 years to admit they were wrong, as it did when they were publishing Russian talking points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
What else falls in this category? Flat Earthers? Anti-vaccine advocates? Holocaust deniers?
It's clear that the majority of people have poor information literacy skills and one consequence of that poor information literacy results in measles being an actual problem in 2019.
I don't think Facebook cares if ZH has a website or people can visit. They just don't let that content on their platform.
To me that's different than the Streisand Effect. ZH i'm sure would like similar results no doubt as far as attention goes.
For comparison, InfoWars gets 4 out of 9 [2], and Breitbart gets 5 of 9 [3].
National Review, Wall Street Journal, and The Daily Signal all get full check marks [4][5][6], for examples of conservative sites with top ratings.
[1] https://api.newsguardtech.com/1B10A8FE3FE38166041EF99B6BDE6C...
[2] https://api.newsguardtech.com/86BCB950AC90212617C8328B3BDC7B...
[3] https://api.newsguardtech.com/A7F7BCBA597324801963CA38B46F4E...
[4] https://api.newsguardtech.com/5D044567246813D305EF4CFAC2D797...
[5] https://api.newsguardtech.com/BBB6E27D9A686CF806D035DCEC50B4...
[6] https://api.newsguardtech.com/DCFD64CB17AE2BBCC342F9FFD70DB8...
If anything, we need to be breaking apart these types of technological control software. I don’t want anything to do with “newsguard” and I urge others to take a critical eye on that idea as well.
Worth to look at their sources. But go look at their sources. Virtually all the links dont cover any zerohedge content.
I'm of the opinion newsguard is trash.
yikes. that's going to be a pass for me.
edit:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/
>This add-on can:
> Access your data for all websites
Edit: actually, the links aren't working for me now, either, and I DO have the extension installed.
Edit: it looks like they are time limited links. I just went to Zero Hedge again, got a NewsGuard link, and the long hex string is different. That new link works for me regardless of whether or not I am on a browser with NewsGuard, presumably until it too times out. I don't see any way to make a permanent link to their report for a site.
Like it makes sense. The cops always overreact at these douchebag open-carry people. Youtube has loads of these videos where people open carry looking to sue the cops under 1984 lawsuits if the cops take their guns.
This is a credible story.
Then I keep going down the list and they have nothing to do with zerohedge.
Sorry but you cant provide a boatload of non-zerohedge articles and assert zerohedge is illegitimate and should be banned off the internet because of not-zero hedge articles.
> Then I keep going down the list and they have nothing to do with zerohedge
The links in the source section include links to ZH stories, links to the sources ZH used, links to fact checking sites, and so on. They are references for the assertions in the text above in the corresponding section.
It's more like BoingBoing or Jezebel than it is the Wall Street Journal.
It seems like Facebook just feels threatened by everything right now, and that they recognize that they're dependent on people being on their platform to stay alive.
I would like your thoughts on this: What has to happen to get everyone to migrate to a new platform, or is that even possible?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/12/blocked-ads-pro...
I can understand the first line review flagging them via rigid application of "the rules".
What I have trouble understanding is how they apparently don't have a mechanism for handling "high risk" placements, or if they do, it missed ads from a presidential candidate known to be critical of them, exactly the sort of placement such a mechanism, you know, is for.
The right-wing folks on the otherhand stay banned.
"Donald Trump's first gift to the world will be another financial crisis." Headline in the U.K. Independent. "(He) gives every impression that he will soon be hustling America — and possibly the entire world — in the direction of another catastrophic financial crisis." Same article.
"I have no stocks. I advise people not to invest in the stock market, not now. Way too dangerous." Film maker Michael Moore, August, 2017.
"It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? A first-pass answer is never… So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight." Paul Krugman of the New York Times the day after the election.
This is just another example.
From my point of view, the left wing is calling the right wing nazis and trying to get them banned.
But if by right wing do you mean Richard Spencer, Milos Yiannopoulis, the Portland Proud Boy crowd or the people doing the torchlit march in Charlottesville who were chanting "blood and soil." If so, then yes, the right wing is a bunch of Nazis.
I cant say I've ever been on Zero Hedge that many times; just looking through their site now I'm not really seeing anything objectionable.
They do have a ton of content so perhaps I'm not seeing what you see as bad. Could you provide examples?
Their content at this point spans the gamut from needlessly contrarian to peddling propaganda. I gather ZH is doing it for the page views, because stories like that get plenty of traffic.
Even people who want someone to censor social media should be concerned about who the censor is.
How trustworthy Facebook is as far as their choices on what to filter is somewhat related to if ZH is in fact trustworthy too... same goes for other sites.
The only people who shouldn’t be reading ZH are people who believe everything they read. Those people also shouldn’t be reading MSM.
This isn't a justification for Facebook blocking them, but we sure don't need them either.
