A nonprofit that investigates Genetically Modified Organisms and the origins of Covid-19 is the latest to see its traffic plunge after a search engine update
Anyone who cannot acknowledge that shutting down public discourse damages us all has my pity. You are correct, this isn't a left-right issue, it's an authoritarian-liberty issue. And probably the most significant issue of the past hundred years.
I am not persuaded. Pubic disclosure becomes a threat to Democracy when Misinformation goes too far. The Mueller report is an example on the left and attacks on the capital building are an attack is the example on the right.
Both sides have gone too far and the RESULT will either be we lose our Democracy or we reduce public discourse in the name of reducing Misinformation.
Misinformation (the attack on the capital) or Democracy. You can have one or the other you can't have both. I vote to "hold our democracy"
"Misinformation (the attack on the capital) or Democracy. You can have one or the other you can't have both. I vote to "hold our democracy"
Most people saw through both the Russia, Russia Russia scam and the Qanon and stop the steal bullshit. Hence the Democrats failed to remove a duly elected president from office on bullshit charges and a small, loud minority of Republicans failed to keep another duly elected president from being sworn in. We don't need to limit free speech and we certainly don't need to put corporate assholes in charge of information.
You are right there is misinformation on both sides. Mueller's report was NOT misinformation. The way the MSM covered it was distraction from the issues that the DNC did not want discussed in the media, specifically M4A. Did you read HateInc?
Trump's LIE, that he won the election was Misinformation that right wing media VALIDATED with Trumps base.
The issue is what people do with the Misinformation. Do the ignore candidates that are running on issues they support because they are distracted with hype and exaggeration or do they attack the CAPITAL based on a lie repeated and exaggerated by the media.
My point stands. The Misinformation has gone too far. At this point we either allow it to go on and lose our democracy or we reduce and keep our democracy.. We can't have both
"My point stands. The Misinformation has gone too far. At this point we either allow it to go on and lose our democracy or we reduce and keep our democracy.. We can't have both"
But look at how the misinformation is being battled: the party in power enlists powerful, monopolistic corporate interests to do its dirty work. I would argue that this will accomplish the opposite of preserving democracy. For one thing, what information do voters wind up with at the end of such a process?
We agree that both of these parties engage in misinformation. The Democrats spam us with Trumpalooza and Wokealooza 24/7 to distract us from seeing they have no intention of really changing the money and power dynamics in this country. The Republicans have for decades been the masters of stirring up culture war outrage to distract from their agenda of turning 80% of the country into peasants, if not serfs. Each will take power in turn, and each will censor the bits they don't like. What are the people left with? If democracy depends on an informed public, then ideally the public needs access to the broadest range of information sources. They're already not getting that from a tightly-controlled corporate media. What then are they left with in a future in which the screws are tightened even further in the name of stamping out misinformation -- all on behalf of conniving misinformers?
I hear you. I am not saying i have the answers to this other than that we cannot allow massive amounts of the voting public to have this level of misinformation swimming through their minds and driving them to personal and public destruction of the nation.
I will be listening to what Wu says and does and hope that this subject is robustly debated and acted on.... If it is not then we wont survive...
And yes, the Republicans Agenda is turning Americans, its supporters in particular, into surfs. That alone should be a reason to change the first amendment
Russiagate:”Mueller was almost held in Criminal Contempt of court for saying there was a connection between the Russian Government and election tampering. They had NO EVIDENCE and had to drop the charges : A HOAX!
U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Robert Mueller III violated court rules in public statements (Mueller Report) about a Russian firm accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, a federal judge in Washington has ruled, while stopping short of disciplining either Justice Department leader.
United States District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich’s presiding Judge in Russian Interference,
"Mueller did not establish a Kremlin connection to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which the report claimed was the Kremlin’s tool social media campaigns seeking to influence the 2016 election”.
IOW, the Mueller Report only represented the interests of the center-right corporate "intelligence" community leaders of the DNC and their leading politicians. That's not the left going too far, man. That's the establishment, which is now conservative (hence zero high speed rail, no M4A, banker control of all economic activity), but now identify as "centrist" Demo-rats.
Check all that shit out and tell me which "side" is winning if in fact we can classify our bullshit system into real sides when one "side" believes the Russians stole the election in 2016 and the other "side" believes that Venezuela, Iran and corrupt establishment Republicans STOLE the vote from Trump.
The Mueller Report was TOTALLY LEFT misinformation. Russiagate:”Mueller was almost held in Criminal Contempt of court for saying there was a connection between the Russian Government and election tampering. They had NO EVIDENCE and had to drop the charges : A HOAX!
U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Robert Mueller III violated court rules in public statements about a Russian firm accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, a federal judge in Washington has ruled, while stopping short of disciplining either Justice Department leader.
Concord Management LLC, 12 Trolls v USA
United States District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich’s presiding Judge in Russian Interference,
"Mueller did not establish a Kremlin connection to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which the report claimed was the Kremlin’s tool social media campaigns seeking to influence the 2016 election”.
No, I didn't. It was so obviously a diversion from Hillary's and the establishment's embarrassing loss to Trump, plus a diversion from Podesta's leaked emails. I also read Consortium News which called it out as not fact based from the get go.
About hacking DNC. How come you worry more about hacking DNC then about the dirt on Hilary that it revealed ? It most likely was inside job but if not, well I am a registered Democrat and I expect to get the dirt on a politician from CNN, NY times NPR. If the only one that will inform me is Russian spies then I want Putin to get Pulitcer Price.
There were far more likely explanations ready at-hand. Did any Trump people ever meet with any Russians? Probably. Trump's campaign was amateurish and not in compliance with the accepted sophisticated ways of conducting skulduggery, such as use of cut-outs. Was there collusion? If there was any - and there might have been - it would have been because the campaign foolishly saw other campaigns past and present colluding with foreign powers, and failed to recognize that they did so only when obeying irrelevant rules such as "Only after Simon Says."
As for the Russians hacking the DNC, I didn't find that relevant. They didn't plant the e-mails, the DNC did that all on its own. Interfere with the election? They tried to influence voters, just as Canada, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Israel and most other major nations did. If they hadn't tried to influence US voters, they were incompetent.
You missed the point. He wasn't questioning whether the report was "misinformation." He was pointing out that it came from corporate Dem interests, not the actual political "left," which is outside of power in the duopoly.
He said the Mueller Report was totally left misinformation. It wasn’t left misinformation. It was Democratic Party misinformation. The Dems are not the left. Read it again.
I was agreeing with you, peacelady thought I was disagreeing with you. I don’t know how much more clear I can make it. I was saying the Mueller report was centrist Dem misinformation not “left” misinformation. I was disagreeing with Piketty and postimpressionist.
So you never believed that the Russians influenced the 2016 election nor did they hack the DNC server?
You never believed the DOSSIER and you never believed Trump conspired with the Russians?
The Right is always responsible for their "Trouble Making Outliers" and the Left isn't because they are not CORPORATE? Corporate is where the LEFT money comes from.
Sorry but you are one in the same because that's who you voted for:
LOL are you serious? Or are you being sarcastic? Of course the "dossier" was bullshit. Of course Trump never colluded with the Russians. Of course the Russians didn't hack any servers.
You're so far off the mark. There was nothing "left" about the Mueller Report which sought to unseat a sitting president that was viewed as not controllable ENOUGH by the establishment center-right, some of whom masquerade as leftists in the Demo-rat party. Please. The Republicans share the private finance view of Russia, China and any other country including Venezuela and Iran who won't open their economies and utilities and education, healthcare systems and agriculture to the western private finance rentiers who have financialized our economy and destroyed manufacturing and small farms.
The Republicans don't need to masquerade in the Democratic party. They're going down all by themselves.
"Private Finance" you mean "Capitalism". In that case they used to be Capitalistic till they went Communistic/Socialistic, that's their downfall. They simply ran out of money! Humans are very expensive to keep when all they have to contribute is more humans. And Biden likes it that way!
This is a "Who will watch the watchers?" problem. Someone has to establish what misinformation is in order for anything to go "too far." That requires a Ministry of Truth, something completely incompatible with freedom of expression. Even if we are able to define misinformation (it cannot simply be information that is inaccurate, because something can easily be approximately right even if it is precisely wrong), we're still left with the problem of selective truth-telling. Big Tech did not deny the Hunter Biden laptop story, it merely blockaded it. In my view, lying about its veracity would have been less misleading than simply prohibiting raising the topic.
Good point. But doing NOTHING is not an option. I think there are lots of good alternatives and people that try to dismiss the issue all together with phrases like Ministry of Truth are either disingenuous or fools
I would argue, and have argued, that Huxley was closer to the truth. I think Brave New World Revisited is one of the most prescient political books of the 20th century. That aside, you were the one who wrote that people using phrases like “Ministry of Truth” are “disingenuous or fools.” Hence my comment.
But the corporate media, along with big tech information manipulators, has become the ministry of truth. Any attempt to limit misinformation must start there. CNN & MSNBC et al have abandoned journalism in favor of political activism
If the "corporate media" is the ministry of truth then why do so many Americans have so many different truths on issues as one sided as Who won the 2019 Presidential Election.
The REALITY is that the media is paid by advertisers who wont sponsor reporting, even if it is true, on issues that hurt their business interests.
If we want a more informed electorate we are going to have start changing the business model for most media and either BREAKING up or REGULATING the big platforms
Regulatory CAPTURE is considered by most Economists the biggest problem with our economy. So it is no wonder that Facebook is BEGGING congress to Regulate them. That way they can then CAPTURE the people that write the laws and the people that enforce them.
In the eyes of the people running FB and GOOGLE breaking them up is worse than Regulation (they dont fear regulation when they know they can CAPTURE the Regulators). But they do fear COMPETITION what comes with breaking them up
Doing nothing is indeed an option, and is so in all cases. Often, getting out of the way of truth is all that's necessary. When people were allowed to know about the Hunter Biden laptop story, they were able to make up their own minds. Which resulted in eight percent of Joe Biden's voters asking if they could change their votes. Which was more than enough to reverse the results of the election.
We've had genius Presidents apply the finest minds in the world to managing our economy - Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover come to mind. None did good and the final two really fouled things up. The three regular guys with the sense to do nothing about the economy, and just get out of its way - Reagan, Clinton and Trump - produced the best results for the country.
Doing nothing, is not only an option, it is often the best option.
The reason why Reagan and Clinton presided over good economies is that both were elected after a problematic economic period and proceeded to deregulate markets - which causes an immediate bump but also causes bubbles. Both Carter and Bush Sr were incumbents who struggled making effective policy to combat inflation and or the consequences of Reaganism.
Bill, Reagan ushered in the period of large national debts, massive defense spending, and neoliberal monetary/de-regulatory policies which led to the S&L Crisis directly and eventually into the bloat of the federal spending (all while saying we could not afford social spending and that Americans who had relied upon the social contract -- were about to get cut off).
What makes this remarkable is that we now know that debts and deficits are not that problematic since we have the world's reserve currency - this means we could pay off our debt at any time ($28 Trillion at the moment) with a government issued coin if we wanted to.
However, the central issue is that we can spend money on most anything we decide (whether it is 800 US military bases around the world or healthcare or replenishing social security). Its a shell game and Reagan started this manipulation, not being honest about taking us from the greatest creditor in the world to the greatest debtor (all while High Finance rose to eventually be 40% of GDP and the poor fell into their sacrifice zone communities -- often labeled as lazy, poor and needing to pull themselves up by the bootstraps --- loosely translated this meant the US would allow minorities to benefit if they towed the empire line by spewing neoliberal propaganda.
Clinton is by far and away the worst. First, he and his administration were responsible for the financial crisis in 2008 by allowing the final cuts to Glass Steagall (which was an Act which provided a firewall between commercial and investment banking). They created a culture referred to as a Gresham's dynamic where bad actors drove out good standing people in business (Rating agencies, insurance, real estate appraisers, and small/local commercial banks). There are some other gems in terms of policy I will not bore you with as well (Telecom, Leverage, CFTC)...
Second, he rode the wave of financial consolidation. Prior to Clinton the banking industry was in its second or third wave of consolidation -- Clinton (Rubin & Summers) accelerated this process along with the rise of technology companies, "internet mania" (companies that would eventually be monopolies). Clinton deserves no credit for the economy in any analysis, as the main factor of the decade was the DJIA went from 2000 to 10000 by 1999 money doubled 2.5 times in the decade (this was due to the internet bull market, indebted consumer spending, and the rise of financialized institutions creating profits but not productive capital). This was an unprecedented period -- one in which I am particularly attuned to since I was a financial advisor for the entire decade at a TBTF investment firm. Clinton is a figurehead, and to your point had little to do with fixing problems --- which were apparent and needed and discussed at the time. Doing nothing to stop the Financiers of the boom and bust cycle created massive problems for us later on.
He sold out his own party and took the remaining people on drive to the right side of his party --- staking out a political position but tailoring the future of the DNC to be the courtiers of Wall Street (Hillary becoming senator in NY) and tech/pharma billionaires.
While I agree with your premise, about doing nothing until the opportunity presents itself to act, these examples totally whitewashes the final vestiges of the loss of the social safety and new deal policies ushered in by neoliberals from both parties. Reagan and Clinton have to be two of the worst Presidents in our nations history largely for the same reasons - highly militaristic, de-regulated and privatized markets, and screwed over the middle and lower classes in terms of policing social cuts, and culture wars.
Bill Heath - If you have the patience to read what McelroyJ wrote you can start learning about what has TRUTHFULLY happened to our economy over the past 40yrs. You notice he hangs the blame squarly on both Democratic and Republican Presidents. This is not some partisan narrative
The Empirical evidence on things like deficits vs growth and shifting of GDP from the poor and middle class to top 1% is now irrefutable.
Losing reserve currency status will bring this nation down, not borrowing more money at 0% interest.
What really matters is HOW we spend the money. At the end of WW2 the US was in debt this much and proceeded to have the fastest wealth creation in the history of man kind.
In 2021 it is ALL ABOUT pushing higher consumption (wages, infrastructure, health care, quality education, skills training etc...) to the poor and middle class. Accomplishing that will return this nation to rapid growth by way of growth in our middle class. The 40yrs of policy changes that need to be reversed will include things that both the GOP and Most in the Dem party oppose because it is easier for them to still think like you or because it makes their donor happy... The FIGHT for this country's economy is going to start from the bottom and it is going to be waged against the billionaires. Either you are in this with us or you are against us. But the battle has started
I would suggest you read a book on economics written after 2008. Today we have the Empirical Evidence to refute pretty much everythig you just uttered.
l would pick off your mistakes but i am fairly certain you don't let TRUTH get in the way when you have formed an opinion.
Lets just say you are making the CASE for why a MISINFORMED public will ultimately be our downfall before the surveillance state or platforms companies ruin us... God bless the simple minded
I am inclined to agree with many of your comments, but how was the Mueller Report and all the bullshit Rachel Maddow/CNN pumped up garbage in any way the left going too far? That was the establishment center and "intelligence" community seeking to depose a president that they - on the ground level - didn't like (while on the top levels of both the DNC and corporate media they knew that he'd never be impeached) and ratings would continue to boom. See Matt's piece on CNN's Zucker talking about how much he loved trump or CBS' Moonves, etc.
I think you are still missing the point. Zucker was paid to make money and Trump made his network more profitable. But whether it was Mueller or Evangelicals organizing to ban abortion CNN's sponsors were not going to advertise if the Network did serious reporting on Campaign Issues like M4A or Lobbyists or Regulatory Capture or Bailing out Banks and not Home Owners in 2009.
Zucker runs CNN because he knows not to harm his revenue base and make more money for also increasing ratings.
The DEEP state did not do in Trump. Trump did in Trump and MSM distracted us all with idiotic and wild exaggeration
So you’re essentially arguing that whichever party is in control should decide what constitutes misinformation and ban it (who else has the power to do so?)
By that logic, if Trump returns to office in 2024, you’d be totally cool with him deciding what you can or cannot say, yes?
Power is concentrated in too few companies and spheres of influence. This means misinformation and information dissemination is in the hands of too few people. This also means that the establishment powers of media are just as responsible for their actions as consumers. Russiagate hysteria, censoring unpopular speech, and the history of the intelligence community with Operation Mockingbird should help you understand the problems with your post.
Hate Inc. is about NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox changing their formatting from fact-driven more neutral stance (even though that can be debated) to having a real point of view now and projecting it to divide people versus informing them.
Historically, US Media has been successful in dividing people, but now their business model is to keep people emotionally addicted to that point of view, "a side" often by attacking an opponent and "creating" disinformation or allowing it on their air waves via intelligence officials or one-sided experts from academe who covet careerism. Misinformation? Who decides what the facts are now? Trust has been lost and for good reason.
Lastly, we have not been a democracy in OUR country from a long time --- you should know this already Mr. Piketty (if this is really you, the famed French economist) as Gilens and Page in 2014 did a study on Oligarchy here in the US and the public's ability to shape policy. There are places one could look if they were interested.
The battle between capital and labor in this country was lost by the end of the Clinton administration, and has led to such massive consolidation of the rich (socializing losses on the public dime, and privatizing gains for wealthy via tax policy, economic bubbles, education/healthcare inflation embedded in the data, and massive wealth extractions after major market crashes.)
Democracy, at this point, is a fiction -- with a thin veneer allowing people to go about their business in fantasyland while the oligarchy consumes more and more people. See CoVid responses, Hurricane Katrina and other climate catastrophes as well as the fact we live on Bullshit mountain where the stock market (an indicator of rich people's feelings - Krystal Ball, 2020) has been an inflatable doll of whoredom during the pandemic being fellated by executive buyback programs, CARES Act money, and the Federal Reserves long policy of ZIRP. We have been on this anti-democracy path for decades - which is the intentional design of neoliberalism (the co-opting of the state to elevate the private business interest to a position of monopoly power).
Mcelroyj - All very well said. No, of course i am not Thomas...
As you I am sure know Gilens and Page's core thesis from 2014 has come under fair scrutiny and the election of Trump in 2016 further validated that the RICH do not control the Republican voters who in electing Trump as their candidate showed the Middle Class still have power, if only when they unite at the ballot box.
The electoral success of Sanders and others, subsequent to the 2014 publishing of their work also shed just criticism on it as has the growing acceptance that things like deficits don't actually cause inflation (they can but it is not a guarantee) and that higher wages for poor and middle class Americans is actually good for the economy all bode well for POLICY changes that the 2014 elites may have opposed but the 2021 elites are increasingly starting to accept.
In other words, all is not lost we can still fight, organize and win...
Don't fall for the pessimism that causes one to give up hope and stop voting. As Rickety points out in Capital and Ideology the declining rates of voters actually voting from the poor and middle class give power to the rich as they do VOTE.
That said, you did not refute my core point.
Misinformation is at the heart of swaying public opinion, whether it is used to divid us or to get us to literally attack the capital. Modern platforms have reduced the cost of being told what you want to hear and filtering out the other side thus materially increasing the power of misinformation.
Neal Postman's insight on TV News, that it allows us to medicate ourselves into bliss thereby sacrificing our rights, can be updated for 2021 and show that today we can believe what ever we want to believe and find others that will validate our FEELINGS including attacking the Capitol thinking the US population is cheering you as you pillage Nancy Pelosi's office and spit on AOC's door.
It is 2021 and we have the internet, big data and AI and personalization and targeting.
No, the TRUTH police is not what we need to fix the problem. But we do need to fix the problem because we have seen nations from Germany to Ukraine fall in large part due to misinformation.
Doing nothing should not be an option. I am going to listen to Wu with an open mind. How about you?
First, Gilens and Page 2014 concluding America an oligopoly is a remarkable finding, in that, there are about a hundred different indicators for this in the economy (and I'd be willing to list many of them if this conversation sticks on this "scrutiny" defense that things appear better than they are you present) but an infinitesimal number of scholars in the PMC are willing to say this out loud let alone make it a career trajectory. Class politics and democracy-building are anathema to the monied elite. So, for this to be in the public's consciousness along with another 100 different data points is remarkable and must be paid attention to, when we discuss the future.
Nonetheless, I think the narrowness of squeezing out a few 'hopeful' scenarios diminishes what is happening locally, regionally and statewide. This country has been co-opted a long time ago, and the people who have power now are: Financial companies, Big Pharma, Intelligence communities, war contractors, lobbyists, neoliberal globalist academics (Yale, Harvard, Stanford etc.), Neoliberal thinktanks, NGO's, and billionaires. These institutions affect more than just Presidential politics or who the face of empire is --- they create the mechanisms by which (rent seeking, artificially inflating real estate and stock markets, front-running, and federal monetary policy, and allowing for "a Greshman's dynamic" with stock buybacks (see William Lazonick's work) and chasing the ever-rising mantra of "growth".
Additionally, the elites are quite sweet pappy happy to let us talk about one aspect of the political theatre (Presidential politics and Congress) while they divide and conquer in other areas all across the globe -- it has worked with American public at least since 1970. Hope is a false narrative, it is better to be factual and accurate than to help people, feel good for a moment.
The real question is -- does pessimism accelerate the fight? I am a contrarian who thinks that pessimism and anger are cousins, and the American public's history of being mollified by propaganda, consumerism, careerism, keeping up with the jones, and sanctimonious sloth mean we need more people with less hope and more anger. More action. We need to be reminded that we are consistently losing, and will continue to lose until we make changes to our own individual and collective behaviors. Some may not be able to tolerate the journey nor the fight, addicted to the effects of Neoliberal capitalism, elevating things, money and ego above the public's ongoing fight for democracy.
How does this relate to your post? Well, all of us need a better understanding of what we are up against (not painting it as some redeemable project where democracy is waiting for the best salesperson who ultimately wins out because "it is a good idea". The people running the show, eat people like that for breakfast.
1. We need responses to the surveillance state.
2. We need a response to Pharma jacking up prices/private patents
3. We need to solve soon how much shit we consume (climate/health)
4. We need to confront power directly, loudly, and consistently
As far as the "open mind" thing, I think it swings too far, aligning with power. Most Americans have either a poor memory or a poor understanding of economic history and policy in this country. They do not understand, that we have world's reserve currency, which means that are country does not run like a household, that we can run deficits and even do most anything we want to do --- the CARES Act showed this bluntly. Open to power?
I think we have enough evidence for many of our leaders to make judgments. For Wu to think we need to reduce the importance of the 1st amendment, and then to broadcast that idea in way to persuade me, he's going to have offer substance (real substance) and not try to institute an authoritarian style policy without regard for how it may be used in the future --- precedent is huge. Open mind?
I'd rather have my mind, synthesizing the historical implications and real meanings of policy agendas versus cheerleading neoliberal influencers who are going through a transformation in their careers trying to align with power.
We need institutional analysis - this means anti-trust reform, repealing Citizen's United (money speech issues), and prevent politicians from becoming political ATMs.
Red, in the Shawshank Redemption, said "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and is reminded by his friend in the movie Andy Dufresne that "no good thing ever dies". Well, I love the movie and its a nice sentiment between male friends and all --- but American empire has killing people off one way or another for hundreds of years --- Hope?
People need to read their William Blum before they watch Shawshank -- but that has not happened in this country.
Again well said, strongly rationalized and rich with convincing evidence. None the less the nihilism is ultimately misplaced in my view...
Perhaps the violent protestor in the street who was not mollified by propaganda, consumerism and careerism ads something of value to the revolution but organizers and thoughtful followers who cross class lines as well as picket lines add far more value to the revolution than the angry nihilist happy to crack skulls and throw bricks through windows.
Perhaps we need both?
Gompers and MLK were not pessimists and they were not mollified with middle class comforts. And their power came as much from the upper middleclass as from the angry lower classes.
Any movement needs momentum and just like getting a project moving in the right direction it almost always starts with small wins not long shot reform... (In basket ball you hit a few lay ups and then start bombing from the outside)
M4A has a leader in Sanders, 100 votes (and growing) in Congress and support (and growing) from the majority of Americans. Insurance companies keep throwing money/ lobbyists and propaganda at the problem and keep losing the battle, though they are still winning the war.
When we get a Bernie Sanders and 100 votes in congress and the majority of citizens oppose the growing surveillance state then let me know... I'm right there with you.
But in 2021 M4A has the momentum to win in my lifetime and your's (I hope) and that should be the opening of the flood gates because like with Republicans and Trump winning in 2016 once there is blood in the water the sharks are on their way. Trump was by all measures a failed leader but retains fervent popularity with his base of Misinformed voters because he fought the enemy. And they got him there with their VOTES.
He proved VOTERS still have the power (poorly used though it may be thanks to misinformation).
I think your view on Wu is open minded and fair.
The policy ideas you call for, though i agree with them, would require an authoritarianism that would almost certainly result in outcomes different than you would want...
The nation has lasted 250yrs, Civil Wars, poverty and plague and it has done it with incremental change because getting CITIZENS support does not happen with LOGIC and Data it comes one step at a time and by proving itself out with the most simple minded of us to the most intellectual of us.
Sorry, not a huge movie buff so the Red reference goes over my head...
But hope is critical. However hope alone does not prevail. Grit, organizing and action lead to one success and then one more and then one more.
Rather than cinema i will look to history. The Robber Barrons of the Gilded age wielded just as much power as the Billionaire class in 2021... We did not defeat them by lopping off their head like in the French Revolution, which led to long term decline, instead we simply put them under duress and then cut a deal with them...
It can be done today and in my view that starts with M4A...
I am gonna let this sift in for a little while before I respond mostly.
Only two things for now after a brief read. First, I do not consider myself a nihilist or someone who views change needs to be violent. I think it is important to have resistance in all the various places under siege - and we do not have enough in any one single area nor do we have enough overall. This is a losing position. So, the question is how do we want to lose (short term)? We have to be honest about this, not sugarcoat with the Obama rhetoric.
Two, I think Trump's win in 2016 proved a different phenomena. His election confirmed what should have been the end of Neoliberal post financial crisis - with the left looking shattered, embarrassed and desperate to shift the attention to Russia. In concert, we see this in the number of people who did not vote in 2016 or 2020.
Capturing this population, the people who lost faith in our democracy (and rightly so) is the single biggest political issue not being discussed in our so-called democracy. A majority of people did not vote in 2016 - which brought up Trump.
So, while I admire your position of using hope to create change, I think it is a worn adage, easily manipulated by both party apparatuses with their neoliberal playbooks. We need different tactics for different times. I am not saying it shouldn't be a part of our toolbox at some point --- but at the present - no. We need the crucible of no hope for real change to challenge power. And best efforts must be made to keep people aboard - still fighting without using a slogan -- instead we need to say "this is what an opposition does".... We may never get M4A, but we keep fighting.
Which does not fit the nihilistic or violent playbook.
Looks like this guy has no one else who will listen to his pontifications of the obvious. God bless anyone who has time to read this irrelevant drivel.
This may seem like an immoderately idealistic comment, but it could be the case that "Democracy" has never existed. What happened on Jan 6 likely had an Intelligence Agency backbone that was well-disguised by a "misinformed" mob of Wal-Mart shoppers. The backlash has certainly played well into the hands of the Security State and its Big Media cheerleaders, so if the shoe fits...Do you believe the USA is in fact a "Democracy"? Aspirationally, I would say indeed it is; existentially, I think that we're not even close. I'm not sure how this thread thing works, so if you deem these comments reply-able, I can be reached at bartlebydick@yahoo.com. Thank you.
Sarcasm duely noted. I would start by breaking up the platforms so no one platform can "control" the message...
Fact Checking is not a Ministry of Truth.... It is just FACT CHECKING and every university in the top 100 could do that if paid properly and given a standard methodology
I understand your points and I think we would value the same outcome though i disagree to great extent. It's a larger discussion but IMO: Free expression puts the onus on THE PEOPLE to do the work to identify what each individual believes. The whole purpose of journalists was to inform as 1A was written at a time when most of the citizenry was uneducated. I would argue that the citizenry has become LESS educated. For all of the available sources of information we are collectively more ignorant than at any time in our history as a nation, arguably as a species.
I would also argue that it is no longer possible (if ever it was) to gain anything close to consensus of what is best for the nation. 350mil (that we know of), open borders, culture wars and a centralized media make it impossible.
There have always been gatekeepers to information but a local press reflected the views and ideals of people who were largely like minded and therefore a mandate for the elected. It's why representative government USED TO work (for the most part).
To me it seems the issue is NOT disclosure but the control of WHAT is exposed by those with the most access to and power over disclosure. IT's not the individual who posts on one of the social media 'rags' that the entire 'deadly pandemic' is a hoax created as one element of a conspiracy "hypothesis" (not a theory). It's not the individual expert in philosophy or history. It's the spoon feeding of opinions by clicks and algorithms created by mass media corporations for the purpose of getting everyone into lock step and silencing dissent OF ANY KIND whether opinion or 'misinformation' or even 'dis-information," ( lack of information masquerading as information).
My hypothesis? It's part of the move toward creating the Corporate States of North America (for starters). Government of, by and for the people is and will continue to be replaced by the combined synchronized efforts of the powerful who will benefit from that outcome.
This says it's a reply to me, but I didn't say anything about misinformation. Granted this Substack comment system really sucks, but you're replying to the wrong person.
I used to work at Google, albeit not on web search. I wish people wouldn't use the word censored to talk about search rankings, it dilutes the term and makes it less useful for actual censorship.
Firstly, there is no real investigation or fact checking going on in this piece, Matt is just repeating the non-profit's claims. As noted by others the screenshot doesn't seem to actually show search traffic (you can't know impressions for that) but rather an ad campaign which could be affected by many things, most obviously budget reductions or competitor budget increases. The story is just not credible and could have used some double-checking.
Second, rankings whether for ads or organic results are a zero sum game. Someone's loss is someone else's gain. To show this is "censorship" by Google you'd have to find the queries where they lost traffic and go look at what's being returned for them now. For all you know there is an even bigger, better left wing charity making exactly the same claims but more effectively and they are now out-ranking RTK, which would cause the same effects on RTK but render claims of censorship totally meaningless.
Thirdly, yes the ranking algorithms are opaque. They have to be, because there's a whole planet of people trying to game them to get to the top. This is not nefarious or evil behaviour by Google. Literally no search engine publishes their ranking algorithms in full. Google DID do this in the very early days because it came out of a PhD project so the PageRank algorithm was described in a published paper. It resulted in SEO spammers gaming the algorithm as hard as possible in all kinds of creative and destructive ways. There are way more factors now and they aren't widely known even inside the company to stop this happening again.
Now all that said, there IS a real story here, but it's a more general one and much harder to write than just finding some old-school left-wingers who think they're being censored by a search engine ranking update. The firm's ever increasing emphasis on E-A-T content (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) assumes a dystopian and highly hierarchical society in which only "experts" should be allowed to receive attention about any given topic. This is inherently a dead end because academia produces an infinite stream of institutionally approved "experts" who have no actual expertise in their area. The decay inside academia, Google's inability to see it (due partly to their heavy reliance on hiring from top universities), and the leftist focus on rule-by-publicly-funded-expert will inevitably lead to endless situations in which Google genuinely *does* censor people who are correct but arguing with academics. However, this situation is most easily observed today at the periphery of the company in places like YouTube or the Play Store, not core web search which at least for now appears to be the least corrupted part (I'm not saying it's uncorrupted, just that it's not as open and obvious as in those other sites).
Finally, I really skeptical this left/right balance is going to work out. The reality is the left is the group doing the censoring today and trying to paint it as a bipartisan "people against the corporations" issue probably won't work as a consequence. To the extent corporations are censoring, it seems to invariably be with the goal of boosting social justice theory and academic pronouncements. The right will be the victim 9 times out of 10 and trying to present it differently will lead to a succession of weak stories like this one.
Yeah sure, got a program that can calculate the odds of all those alternative explanations happening in conjunction with a seldom implemented update to the search algorithm?
You're missing the point. This article is of such poor quality that it's not even clear what USRTK is complaining about. Did they get bumped off of the first page for organic search? If so, for what terms specifically (if you google "usrtk", you get their page as the first result)? What results are being returned organically now? Did they lose placement for their ads? Is somebody paying more? Are they paying less? Again, for what search terms specifically? What results have taken their place?
I think you’re missing the point. The article indicates there is no way to get Google to provide the details to be able to discern what happened.
They weren’t tracking their traffic and didn’t notice the change, but obviously a change was implemented, their traffic plummeted and most of us don’t need to imagine a genius Dr No that implemented their own changes in conjunction with Google’s seldom performed update in order to camouflage the likely cause.
Google changed their algorithm. Their traffic plummeted it should be Google you demand these answers from, not USRTK.
But was the change explicitly against them or was it spread over multiple sites that had the same type of research? The only way to find that answer is to do a broad based study of all the sites that could be considered to have content relative to this one site. And Matt isn’t in a position to do that kind of extensive study. Without knowing how other sites were harmed or helped, this is an article that doesn’t inform, so, on a much smaller scale than the awful stories Matt has highlighted before, it is it’s own form of misinformation.
Google and others provide many tools for web masters that can be used to explain exactly that! This is why some of us are calling foul - RTK could easily find out what happened in far greater detail than they have provided here, nothing is being withheld from them, but they appear to have provided a misleading screenshot as "evidence" which actually isn't.
Look, fundamentally, if they care about their Google traffic so little they can't even be bothered to install Analytics and look at how people are finding them, they just aren't in any position to squeak about censorship. Finding out the answers to the questions posed by this story is *easy* as long as you own the website in question, and yet they claim there's some nefarious conspiracy that stops them installing Analytics or setting up Webmaster Tools and finding out where their traffic was coming from? They didn't care enough a few months ago to spend half a day on this stuff and now it's a scandal? It's just not something that rises the same level as the other stuff that's going on.
Why demand Google explain a normal process? Again, we don’t know if the update effected just this one site or all sites that could be similar to this site. I’m willing to say the site did see a drop in search traffic. But assigning the cause of the drop to nefarious deeds doesn’t naturally follow. More research should be done before implying Google acted in bad faith. And this is coming from someone that doesn’t think Google is anyone’s friend.
USRTK is not simply entitled to traffic from google.
Where was this traffic (traffic they "weren't" monitoring) coming from? Google doesn't simply generate traffic to the website that it can take away. Google drives traffic to sites based on people clicking on ads and organic search results. If you search for "usrtk" using google today, you get usrtk.org as the first result. So, the question is where was the traffic they lost coming from? What ads or search terms were people using? What is being returned for those search terms now?
Answers to these questions will help to better understand the problem. Otherwise it's not at all clear what USRTK is talking about.
Without the details I'm asking about, we have to accept the possibility that USRTK had a heavily search optimized page that was highly ranked for search terms where they were not relevant to the people doing the searching. Or that USRTK cut their advertising budget which lead to their ads not being shown as often or in worse placements. Or that some other site increased their budget. Or that some other site has always had more relevant information for specific search terms and the updated algorithm now identifies them as such.
Implementing EAT requires making value judgements around what aglo's to train and how to train them.
As you said, web traffic is generally zero sum so Matt provides a data point that Google massively values another news source more than RTK on some set of keywords. Given Google's de facto search monopoly, this becomes a censorship story.
I guess I just don't expect that level of somewhat technical detail in a news article. Maybe write Matt and ask to show the SEO analysis work. I can understand why RTK wouldn't want that level of detail shared broadly.
I can understand glossing over technical details where they are not relevant to the point being made, but in this case pertinent information is just missing. We still get something that looks like technical details in the form of an ad campaign graph, but that only adds to the confusion since the article is written in a way that suggests the problem is with organic search results.
What lack of detail. The graph shown is from Google search console showing overall impressions and clicks from all search traffic to the site. It drops precipitously overnight after the algorithm update. Or do you think it more likely that the masses of users typing search into Google decided to change their behavior overnight and stay that way. Do you understand how statistics work? Seems your comment is "poorly researched".
At the very least, i want to see it broken down by keywords/queries. I want to see which specific queries are contributing to the drop. It's not "usrtk" or "usrtk monstanto papers" for example, because for those I'm seeing usrtk.org as the first result. For those queries that are contributing significantly to the drop I want to see what results are being returned after the update.
Right. But how many people are typing in "ustrk" If people are already typing in your name, they know who you are. Overnight their traffic dropped off based on "ALL" search terms. The day before there were lots of random things people typed in the generated an impression which had the potential to generate clicks, and the next day that plummeted. All of those random things that were generating impressions before now get nothing. That's a change in the algorithm, not an overnight change in behavior of millions of Google users.
Even just “Monsanto papers” returns usrtk.org as the first result. Knowing what queries are responsible for the drop would allow us to see what is being returned today. That would go a long way to establishing if this is censorship or something else (improvement in relevant results maybe)
You write that the real story here is harder to write than just "finding some old-school left-wingers who think they're being censored by a search engine ranking update." You must have read the entire article because the one I read quoted the director of USRTK as saying, "I can't say this is censorship, because I don't have the faintest idea." In other words, your comment was simply a biased rant, not an informed opinion on the subject. You then go on to bash the left generally, revealing the ax you have to grind against them. It's your credibility, not Matt's or the USRTK's that's lacking.
The new HB544 in NH to prohibit government contractors from race-training in their own companies strikes me as censorship. I'm no fan of CRT, and am fine with banning it from government workplaces and schools. But the government shouldn't tell other people what to think. I guess there are laws about not having a hostile workplace, but if CRT is like religion, they get to believe what they want.
It would strike me as censorship as well, were I not aware of the amount of compelled speech required by governments at all levels of its contractors. It's nothing new. CRT is a religion and may believe what it wishes. An employer requiring her employees to receive religious instruction is popping red flags all over the place for me.
I want you to be right. Other things that are broadly popular don't make any difference, such as voter ID, election integrity, support to police, opening schools. Republicans have come out in favor of all of these, and the accusations are "You're a racist." Math is racist, trees are racist, and opposition to CRT will immediately be branded racist.
I suspect D's are digging their own political grave with widespread race training. Let them dig deeper. Those who agree with it are already firmly in the D camp. Many others will be reevaluating whether Biden's crowd is really the lesser of two evils.
I don't really know about EEO rules and all the ways people can say things that make others unhappy, or to what degree America's past racial misdeeds should affect the present.
(a) All state contracts entered into on or after the effective date of this chapter shall include the following provision:
"During the performance of this contract, the contractor agrees as follows:
The contractor shall not use any workplace training that inculcates in its employees any form of race or sex stereotyping or any form of race or sex scapegoating, including the concepts that: (a) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (b) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (c) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (d) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; (e) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (f) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (g) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (h) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race. The term “race or sex stereotyping” means ascribing character traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of his or her race or sex, and the term “race or sex scapegoating” means assigning fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex.”
Oh also, more than 30 years. For some groups it was never a democracy until the late 60s and starting in the 70s - moreso during Reagan's terms - it became an inverted totalitarian plutocracy. None of the major Democrats have resisted this, in fact Delaware Corporation Uncle Joe is the perfect continuation of it.
When was it ever a democracy? Not being snarky. Obviously, it's constitutionally limited republic but what is the inflection point for you? Slavery? War of 1812? Civil War? Women's suffrage? Prohibition? The destruction of the native tribes? WW 1? WW2? Vietnam? Patriot Act? ...
Chris Hedges writes about this all the time - the rise of neoliberal capitalism started with the Powell Memo in 1970 and really progressed for 20 years with different institutions that used to provide a counterbalance to corporatism being co-opted. We see this in academia, labor leadership, healthcare monopolies formed and invited Pharma to the party, financialization in the investment/business communities, and the rise of the World Bank and the IMF as the loan shark of the world (800 military bases in 80 countries across the world 2020) - the US has built up these bases over time with the Greater Middle East experiencing the largest post-cold war build with bases in just about every country except Iran. We have seen the Supreme Court move to the right and our legal system imprison thousands of people who turn out to be innocent after the fact, and the war on drugs brought to us by the Reagan administration, forgot to mention that the US is one of the big dealers in the drug trade to fund their dirty war operations (see Alfred McCoy's work)... And then we have the Clinton administration rising from an historically democratic party and morphing to republican lite in most of his policy choices --- leading us to the precipice deregulated, market crashes and pretending he was some great savior to the democratic party by tacking right (still calling him a progressive, but no progressive policy to hang his hat on).
Maybe a better way to put it, with the very clear and sensible colonizing points you make above is that there were still people in position of power that could act to move us in a more democratic path, even in light of our history with the decimation of native people, African slave trade, War of 1812, the elite class of 1920's, and our history with interventions, coups, the Post-WWII intelligence networks allowing Nazis to be secretly relocated within the US and South America (Paperclip and Gladio), and leading up to the assassinations of Evers, JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, Fred Hampton. By Clinton and Bush jr. the game was overt, in your face and made clear --- hence the Patriot Act and Citizen's United, the fabricated Iraq war intelligence -- these opened up the spigot for more of the theatre of US political spectacle.
Thank you once again, Matt. Why do the people who define themselves as liberals not get what's going on? They're in a cult that tells them that anything giving them a different perspective is evil and must be exterminated. The only thing I can understand about this is from experience growing up among young people who acted out as liberals and leftists in CA in the 60s and 70s, and often they then joined cults that were totalitarian. They couldn't handle the freedom. It was weird for me. Suddenly, people I knew who considered themselves free were in cults where they completely obeyed some demented leader. I mean really obeyed. Cut off family, censored people who disagreed. I couldn't talk sense to them. In the 70s my brother went with a woman who joined a cult and she hid under a sheet the entire time of their relationship. Because her leader told her to. I ran into her five years later and she'd turned into a suburban mom, no memory of having been taken over by a cult mentality. So that gives me hope. Maybe this will turn. With a lot of amnesia. But I never thought the mainstream media would be the cult leaders. I find this scarier. Can democracy survive this?
The liberals don't care because they think the ends justify the means. they are on the winning side. If they were on the losing side they would be complaining. The conservatives would do the same thing. As Matt pointed out in a previous article, it used to be that wise people understood this shoe on the other foot argument. Now the schools are just producing wholesale idiots that can't understand this argument.
Whenever I hear them make their stupid cases, I say the same thing. I completely agree that some speech needs to be eliminated, as long as it is me that chooses which of the speech is eliminated. If anyone else has the right to make this decision, then I don't agree with it. The only person I trust to make this decision is me. and the first person I would eliminate would be you.
Gary - Spare me. Tumps supporters in the media are the cause of this. The media on the left and right had misinformation before Trump but it was much much more limited and as we learned in HATE INC the biggest problem was what they did NOT report.
Trump's media went too far in the misinformation area and it ended up with him LYING about winning the election and convincing his misinformed supporters to attack the capital. He and his media supporters went too far. Now we are all going to lose a larger degree of freedom of the press
Stop with your lame excuses. This one is on people like you!
How do you even respond to someone like this? I don't get it. the problem is the democrats and republican media are the problem. This person thinks their side is good but the other side is bad. Completely screwed up. They are really messed up. If you think the other side is the problem then you are completely lost. If you realize that both sides are the problem then you get it. Otherwise just shove your head up your ass because you don't get it.
You clearly suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. The media and Democrats have created an echo chamber that makes all things conservative the product of a nebulous systemic racism. They follow the leftist mantras handed down for nearly a hundred years and have made the left's "critical theory" a product on steroids: Critical Race Theory. Orange Man bad. Orange Man supporters equally bad. The patience of the leftists has finally borne fruit. Sadly, they have not been taught history. They cannot see that the elites who control them will eventually turn on them and they will suffer, too. This one is on everyone who has bought into the left's promises. We are on the brink of collapse in this country and few understand just how bad things can--and no doubt will--get in the near future. I am a combat-wounded, 100% service-connected great-grandfather. I do not worry for myself: I fear for my children, their children, and their children's children. Good luck, useful idiots. . . .
Orange Man is an irredeemable liar and created a reality distortion field that covered his MAGA mob about the election being stolen causing a crisis culminating in the insurrection. If you can't agree with that, you are the useful idiot.
What does that have to do with anything important. Also, there was no insurrection. An insurrection would have had organization and goals.
That was an ejaculation.
Hell, I've participated in administration sanctioned college occupations that more closely resembled an insurrection. At least we got to do a sleepover on carpeted floors while we held the building.
Some might call this comment misinformation. You say ‘we learned in HATE INC’ but you are clearly missing the entire point of ‘HATE INC’ and did not...learn. This one is on (stupid) people like you!
I'm not sure what you mean by "liberals" here. You do realize that Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are both left-leaning old school liberals, right? I'm a lefty and I have been following this online freedom stuff for a long time. Are you talking about people in your everyday life? Sounds like what you really mean are Democrats, lol. But I guess you're right - most of them would self-define as "liberal" even though they don't know the sociological or historical definitions of the term (there are different ways to classify "liberal" thought - it's different in EU than here, for ex.)
Regarding the cults and communes of the 60s and 70s, you'd also be surprised how many of them failed because organic structures of power, control and abuse formed and people got sick of the reality (authoritarian systems) being different than the mission (freedom). You should check out Adam Curtis' BBC documentary on it. You certainly won't see most of that information on US corporate mainstream media.
Righties are just as likely to form and join cults, however. Qanon morphed from a catch-all conspiracy theory into a full-blown cult with a hierarchy and all the rest. They have names for different 'levels' of the (loose) organization like "bakers" and such. Interestingly, in one of the Adam Curtis documentary series (he has several - I recommend them all) he discusses the origins of the modern "illuminati" conspiracy theory - it was completely fake, set up by two guys who were bored back in the 60s or 70s - and how it fed into, hell even formed the foundation for more recent ones like Pizzagate and Qanon.
You do know who is doing the censuring right? The concept of media watchdog... or giving truth to power... oh never fucking you’re a libertarian Bot devised by the ghost of Milton Freemen... I give up.
"computers don’t easily distinguish between conspiracy theory and legitimate reporting that runs counter to present accepted narratives"
All google did was plug-in "lab-leak hypothesis" into the no-no bin as soon as it became a Trumpian factoid, and voila problem solved. Except for the annoying fact that it's still extremely likely Covid came from the Wuhan Virology Lab. Combine the politization of that fact along with China extremely interested in keeping it out of bounds, and we have a recipe for some very very shady shit going down on the google
I am a Trump supporter but have always been amazed at how Trump made people lose their minds. There is PLENTY you can objectively criticize about Trump without all the lying.
Who lies about Trump.. the Truth is horrifying enough. His abuse of Misinformation is the reason Google doing this is going to continue and grow worse over time. Abuse is abuse... Freedom of publish Misinformation vs Holding on to our Democracy. I will always vote for holding our Democracy.. Trumps media supporters BLEW it for all of us... And you support him? Traitor!
Definitely keep paying Matt, but also open a new tab and head on over to CNN. They have a comments section, and you will find your people there. Go to them!
If the Democrats had a different set of lack of scruples they could've run Trump under their ticket. He's no more a conservative than Biden is a liberal. But he definitely had some back benchers with better ideas. Or at least a clue.
Even if they were a little bit wacky.
Lost those along the way. And the election because of.
Not sure how to classify Trump. Utilitarian?? If the Democrats had made the tiniest effort they could have worked with Trump on any number of issues. He likes to cut deals. They choose not to. Biden is just a mentally challenged old corrupt befuddled fool
Google has become a pawn of China. They have utilized their company to assist the CCP in hiding, misinforming and deceiving their public just so they can keep doing business in China. Time for the USA to start playing very hardball with these "publicly traded" companies. They are skewing the entire information flow within this country. Life was much better before they came along and allowed the worst creeps and political junkies a mega platform to spread their hatred, lies and insults without any identity or pushback. The internet is an open cesspool that is polluting our society much more that any smog, or factory smoke would ever be allowed by EPA. Yet this stench permeates into the very fabric or American life while Congress sucks up the campaign donations and does NOTHING. Time for individuals to run on a platform of wrecking and/or controlling these monsters.
why don't you urge people to switch to a different search engine? It takes 1 minute to switch from google search to duckduckgo search and break the googles search 'monopoly' power.
I did that for a while, but the problem is, for nonpolitical searches, duckduckgo kinda sucks. For political searches, duckduckgo is better because it returns results without apparent ideological manipulation.
you can switch back and forth pretty easily-- just type google.com or duckduckgo.com into the address window of your browser and that takes you right to a search window for that company-- that way you could avoid being manipulated by do your searches on anything remotely to do with politics or current events searching with duckduckgo, and still use google for other stuff. Although the best way to register your disapproval of google's manipulation and censorship is to cut the cord altogether-- hit them in the pocketbook.
Remember that you are the user of the search engines, not the sites indexed by them. If you dislike the way Google manipulates search results for social/political purposes, trying some alternatives seems like a pretty good idea.
You are correct DLR, the problem isn't the algorithms, the problem is that too many folks rely on Google. That is why I use Google about a 1/3 of the time, bing the other third, and duckduckgo for the last 3rd. It really isn't that hard to change it everytime you do a search. But Google may also be setting their algorithms up to feed people want they want to see. Also, there may be some rules that are not algorithmic that specifically cancel some folks web sites. You really can't tell.
Fastest way to make money in the US of A is to leverage laziness. People are busy. KISS - thus we have Microsoft (bundling of apps with windows) and google (bundling of search, email etc.) controlling desktops.
Internet search engines are primarily for shopping and institutional propaganda. If you scroll past the first page and fine-tune a search you may find something, but it's a pain. The solution isn't that difficult. Just find alternative news sources and bookmark them. Articles like this one give clues and I hate to say it but Twitter is a gold mine for finding alternative views from poster provided tweets, but Twitter search is even more of a joke than Google.
I don’t do Twitter, but, being a conservative liberal, I found twitchy. Their whole format is based on tweets. They posted so much excellent information, I had to pay, voluntarily, for their service. It’s like they were my research assistants. You are right. Twitter is a good source of information, but I’m not willing to get down into that pig sty, myself.
Thank you so much for profiling US Right To Know: real journalists doing real work reporting the real issues, true American heroes! Just checked out their latest news and HOO BOY are they not in the friend making business. Their latest series is revealing how Gates and his buddies are trying to colonize Africa's food economy, possibly as a test run for doing the same thing in the US since he's the US's biggest owner of farmland :
"the UN appears to be organizing a corporate agribusiness power play led by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Over 500 civil society groups are protesting the Summit’s direction and the appointment of Agnes Kailibata, president of Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy in charge of strategic direction. These groups want the UN to withdraw from the UN-WEF partnership they say is “helping to establishing ‘stakeholder capitalism’ as a governance model for the entire planet.” "
I subscribed to USRTK just now, as I've done with writings of various substack authors, but wonder how many other remaining bastions of free speech are being censored as I write this.
Yeah, me too. A good source of articles you wouldn't find easily elsewhere. And despite what Ena believes, class action lawsuits are often the only way to hold powerful corporations accountable for their criminal behavior, to some degree.
You live to be a pawn of careerists doing PR for class action lawyers, masquerading as public health advocates...without a single health related credentials among all collectively
You clearly can't differentiate PR by a bunch of class action lawyers from journalism...a profession tasked with informing the public, rather than carving out a cushy career for themselves by hijacking ballot initiatives to do Public Relations Campaign for greedy class action lawyers. Once the billions have been disbursed, these mediocre obscure "journalists" move on to exploit the public fighting the next BIG EVIL because they need well paying jobs where no-one is holding them accountable.
Google's search algorithm (lumping all of them into one insofar as the user sees it) is a fucking joke. The first full page of hits on any search string containing terms that may have commercial relevance is ALWAYS openly stated (sponsored) advertisements followed by advertisements written and delivered in a tricky manner to fool you into clicking on some product or service being sold. So even WITHOUT directing searches away from people or organizations, there's a lot of crap to filter through.
Duckduckgo is not as bad, and it maintains your privacy, but it's also got problems. It's my default search engine now, but their search function just doesn't work as accurately as Google's. I think I need to dig into the "bangs" feature and some of the other filtering code/flags because I may not be taking full advantage of it. But I recall several times having to try three or four different combinations of search terms, then going to Google and doing the same with much more accurate results. Maybe someone with more expertise on the matter could help me.
Also, I've switched to the Brave browser and away from Chrome. I still use Firefox occasionally, but it's slower and more of a resource hog. That has been getting better I think with many of the open source improvements over the years. Fuck Google.
Well. That was weird. My post doubled itself. I only meant to delete one. Anyway. The more people use duckduck, the more it learns and the faster it will get.
There is a side of this censorship issue that I simply don't understand: why is assumed to be automatic that readership or viewership of any given website MUST go through Google or Facebook or Twitter?
I am a TK subscriber (you're welcome) because I have been an admirer of Taibbi's writing for a long time. I have been aware of Matt through various sources, including his prior television appearances and his work for Rolling Stone. I was unaware that he had left RS until I saw one of his pieces here linked to on the site Naked Capitalism. That's what brought me to TK News. No search engine or social media involved. I've been an NC reader for years, after finding that site through seeing/hearing its founder, Yves Smith, interviewed on television and radio. I subscribe to NC's daily newsletter, which takes me directly to their site. Again, no search engine or social media involved.
We seem to be losing track of a fundamental truth about how the internet works: one site links to another. You see something that interests you, that has a link to its source, you click the link and go to that particular site. If you like what you see there, you can visit that site again in the future. You can bookmark it for quick and easy access; you don't even have to type the address. If the site lets you sign up for email alerts--I can't imagine a news site that is serious about covering topics and cultivating a readership that doesn't have that--then you can get your pipeline to that site directly delivered to your inbox. Yet again, no involvement from Facebook or Google or Twitter is necessary.
So how, then, is a lack of participation by those companies censorship?
If we're talking about a site getting shut down by government decree, so that its content is no longer available at all to internet users, that is certainly censorship.
But that does not seem to be the nature of the argument here. The sites cited above indicate that they had traffic, people who visited their sites at one point, but then there was a falloff, presumably because of changes to search engine algorithms. But why did those previous visitors not continue to exercise the (fairly minimal) effort required to visit those sites directly themselves, of their own volition, if those visitors found the content valuable to them?
There's only so much that we can do, or expect that others can do, to lead members of a society to actively engage themselves in the process of educating themselves in what they need to know. If there is only ever to be a perpetual expectation that the public can never be bothered to act in their own interest, that they can only ever expect information to be found and prechewed for them by internet giants before being vomited directly into their mewling mouths like so much pap, then it is foolish to expect there to be any difference made in society at large by the transmission of information, no matter how that information is made available to a populace that is so stupid and lazy that they can't be bothered to find anything worth knowing through their own efforts. That's the core problem--not the vagaries of Silicon Valley's devotion to the First Amendment.
God, what a pathetically arrogant comment. “... a populace that is so stupid and lazy that they can't be bothered to find anything worth knowing through their own efforts.“. Pity the poor folks who find things serendipitously or by a random process of inquiry by entering queries into a search engine rather than being lead by the nose like you appear to be. If it ain’t linked in a site you read you won’t see it. Talk about lazy. To say nothing of stupid.
I've met people many who are too busy with their lives or are otherwise indisposed to get involved in political discussions. They believe they'll get along by going along. This is where the stupidity lies.
Good point that it's unclear what actually happened, but Matt's happy to go with catty remarks that appeal to his pompous left-leaning base to cover his innuendo and assumptions.
Great comment. People got addicted to the cult of Free, and can't seem to escape it. A side benefit to all of this is that people will go back to what you describe, the www of 1999, where you 'hop on' and journey on your own, and follow the links you want. I don't like google anymore, so if I want to search, I use the Brave Browser, and the qwant search engine. Those tools and my bookmarks are enough. I suspect the wave is heading in that direction for many.
There is a real use case out there for a search engine that filters out entities that advance corporate and government narratives regularly. I'd so use that.
You go to the Olympics, win a gold medal at gymnastics, getting a 10 from every judge. Next Olympics you do same routine, with two new feats, all of which you perform perfectly. Every judge gives you 6.
You lick your wounds and resolve to do better next time. You ask the judges what was the problem.
"We're not really sure why we all gave you 6. But trust us, there's nothing underhanded going on."
"Don't be evil" was removed from Google's Corporate Code of Conduct sometime during late April 2018, so half way through Trump's first term the powers that be at Google must have changed gears and decided it's now OK to be evil.
Two years ago I switched to Brave and Duck Duck Go and am better off for it. Good riddance!
They changed the motto in 2015 when they made google a subsidiary of the new, larger Alphabet corporation, but a fair point nonetheless. They no longer strive to not be evil as a corporate policy.
Anyone who cannot acknowledge that shutting down public discourse damages us all has my pity. You are correct, this isn't a left-right issue, it's an authoritarian-liberty issue. And probably the most significant issue of the past hundred years.
I am not persuaded. Pubic disclosure becomes a threat to Democracy when Misinformation goes too far. The Mueller report is an example on the left and attacks on the capital building are an attack is the example on the right.
Both sides have gone too far and the RESULT will either be we lose our Democracy or we reduce public discourse in the name of reducing Misinformation.
Misinformation (the attack on the capital) or Democracy. You can have one or the other you can't have both. I vote to "hold our democracy"
"Misinformation (the attack on the capital) or Democracy. You can have one or the other you can't have both. I vote to "hold our democracy"
Most people saw through both the Russia, Russia Russia scam and the Qanon and stop the steal bullshit. Hence the Democrats failed to remove a duly elected president from office on bullshit charges and a small, loud minority of Republicans failed to keep another duly elected president from being sworn in. We don't need to limit free speech and we certainly don't need to put corporate assholes in charge of information.
You are right there is misinformation on both sides. Mueller's report was NOT misinformation. The way the MSM covered it was distraction from the issues that the DNC did not want discussed in the media, specifically M4A. Did you read HateInc?
Trump's LIE, that he won the election was Misinformation that right wing media VALIDATED with Trumps base.
The issue is what people do with the Misinformation. Do the ignore candidates that are running on issues they support because they are distracted with hype and exaggeration or do they attack the CAPITAL based on a lie repeated and exaggerated by the media.
My point stands. The Misinformation has gone too far. At this point we either allow it to go on and lose our democracy or we reduce and keep our democracy.. We can't have both
"My point stands. The Misinformation has gone too far. At this point we either allow it to go on and lose our democracy or we reduce and keep our democracy.. We can't have both"
But look at how the misinformation is being battled: the party in power enlists powerful, monopolistic corporate interests to do its dirty work. I would argue that this will accomplish the opposite of preserving democracy. For one thing, what information do voters wind up with at the end of such a process?
We agree that both of these parties engage in misinformation. The Democrats spam us with Trumpalooza and Wokealooza 24/7 to distract us from seeing they have no intention of really changing the money and power dynamics in this country. The Republicans have for decades been the masters of stirring up culture war outrage to distract from their agenda of turning 80% of the country into peasants, if not serfs. Each will take power in turn, and each will censor the bits they don't like. What are the people left with? If democracy depends on an informed public, then ideally the public needs access to the broadest range of information sources. They're already not getting that from a tightly-controlled corporate media. What then are they left with in a future in which the screws are tightened even further in the name of stamping out misinformation -- all on behalf of conniving misinformers?
I hear you. I am not saying i have the answers to this other than that we cannot allow massive amounts of the voting public to have this level of misinformation swimming through their minds and driving them to personal and public destruction of the nation.
I will be listening to what Wu says and does and hope that this subject is robustly debated and acted on.... If it is not then we wont survive...
And yes, the Republicans Agenda is turning Americans, its supporters in particular, into surfs. That alone should be a reason to change the first amendment
Russiagate:”Mueller was almost held in Criminal Contempt of court for saying there was a connection between the Russian Government and election tampering. They had NO EVIDENCE and had to drop the charges : A HOAX!
U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Robert Mueller III violated court rules in public statements (Mueller Report) about a Russian firm accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, a federal judge in Washington has ruled, while stopping short of disciplining either Justice Department leader.
https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/07/08/judge-warns-prosecutors-about-public-statements-in-case-against-russian-firm/?slreturn=20201020210308
Concord Management LLC, 12 Trolls v USA
United States District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich’s presiding Judge in Russian Interference,
"Mueller did not establish a Kremlin connection to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which the report claimed was the Kremlin’s tool social media campaigns seeking to influence the 2016 election”.
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-chides-us-over-statements-tied-to-mueller-prosecution/
IOW, the Mueller Report only represented the interests of the center-right corporate "intelligence" community leaders of the DNC and their leading politicians. That's not the left going too far, man. That's the establishment, which is now conservative (hence zero high speed rail, no M4A, banker control of all economic activity), but now identify as "centrist" Demo-rats.
This is highly recommended reading:
https://yasha.substack.com/p/i-will-not-flinch-fromwar/comments
https://michael-hudson.com/2021/03/what-flavour-oligarchy/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210407001427/https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/03/the-origins-of-a-distinguished-diplomatic-career-and-the-u-s-china-fight-for-primacy-bpr-interviews-ambassador-chas-freeman/
Check all that shit out and tell me which "side" is winning if in fact we can classify our bullshit system into real sides when one "side" believes the Russians stole the election in 2016 and the other "side" believes that Venezuela, Iran and corrupt establishment Republicans STOLE the vote from Trump.
The Mueller Report was TOTALLY LEFT misinformation. Russiagate:”Mueller was almost held in Criminal Contempt of court for saying there was a connection between the Russian Government and election tampering. They had NO EVIDENCE and had to drop the charges : A HOAX!
U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Robert Mueller III violated court rules in public statements about a Russian firm accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, a federal judge in Washington has ruled, while stopping short of disciplining either Justice Department leader.
Concord Management LLC, 12 Trolls v USA
United States District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich’s presiding Judge in Russian Interference,
"Mueller did not establish a Kremlin connection to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which the report claimed was the Kremlin’s tool social media campaigns seeking to influence the 2016 election”.
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-chides-us-over-statements-tied-to-mueller-prosecution/
12 Trolls were dropped
https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/07/08/judge-warns-prosecutors-about-public-statements-in-case-against-russian-firm/?slreturn=20201020210308
Please don’t conflate Democrats with the left. I resent it as someone on the left.
So you never believed the Mueller Report and you never thought the Russians hacked the DNC or interfered with the election?
No, I didn't. It was so obviously a diversion from Hillary's and the establishment's embarrassing loss to Trump, plus a diversion from Podesta's leaked emails. I also read Consortium News which called it out as not fact based from the get go.
About hacking DNC. How come you worry more about hacking DNC then about the dirt on Hilary that it revealed ? It most likely was inside job but if not, well I am a registered Democrat and I expect to get the dirt on a politician from CNN, NY times NPR. If the only one that will inform me is Russian spies then I want Putin to get Pulitcer Price.
There were far more likely explanations ready at-hand. Did any Trump people ever meet with any Russians? Probably. Trump's campaign was amateurish and not in compliance with the accepted sophisticated ways of conducting skulduggery, such as use of cut-outs. Was there collusion? If there was any - and there might have been - it would have been because the campaign foolishly saw other campaigns past and present colluding with foreign powers, and failed to recognize that they did so only when obeying irrelevant rules such as "Only after Simon Says."
As for the Russians hacking the DNC, I didn't find that relevant. They didn't plant the e-mails, the DNC did that all on its own. Interfere with the election? They tried to influence voters, just as Canada, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Israel and most other major nations did. If they hadn't tried to influence US voters, they were incompetent.
You missed the point. He wasn't questioning whether the report was "misinformation." He was pointing out that it came from corporate Dem interests, not the actual political "left," which is outside of power in the duopoly.
He said the Mueller Report was totally left misinformation. It wasn’t left misinformation. It was Democratic Party misinformation. The Dems are not the left. Read it again.
I was referring to fun police's comment, not piketty's. That is what I think caused confusion.
Yeah Peacelady is right. You actually missed the point, not me. I'm not trying to be rude here. See what Peacelady said.
I was agreeing with you, peacelady thought I was disagreeing with you. I don’t know how much more clear I can make it. I was saying the Mueller report was centrist Dem misinformation not “left” misinformation. I was disagreeing with Piketty and postimpressionist.
So you never believed that the Russians influenced the 2016 election nor did they hack the DNC server?
You never believed the DOSSIER and you never believed Trump conspired with the Russians?
The Right is always responsible for their "Trouble Making Outliers" and the Left isn't because they are not CORPORATE? Corporate is where the LEFT money comes from.
Sorry but you are one in the same because that's who you voted for:
https://howmuch.net/articles/the-30-biggest-political-donors-on-the-fortune-500
LOL are you serious? Or are you being sarcastic? Of course the "dossier" was bullshit. Of course Trump never colluded with the Russians. Of course the Russians didn't hack any servers.
No. I never believed any of that. Who do you think I voted for?
You're so far off the mark. There was nothing "left" about the Mueller Report which sought to unseat a sitting president that was viewed as not controllable ENOUGH by the establishment center-right, some of whom masquerade as leftists in the Demo-rat party. Please. The Republicans share the private finance view of Russia, China and any other country including Venezuela and Iran who won't open their economies and utilities and education, healthcare systems and agriculture to the western private finance rentiers who have financialized our economy and destroyed manufacturing and small farms.
The Republicans don't need to masquerade in the Democratic party. They're going down all by themselves.
"Private Finance" you mean "Capitalism". In that case they used to be Capitalistic till they went Communistic/Socialistic, that's their downfall. They simply ran out of money! Humans are very expensive to keep when all they have to contribute is more humans. And Biden likes it that way!
This is a "Who will watch the watchers?" problem. Someone has to establish what misinformation is in order for anything to go "too far." That requires a Ministry of Truth, something completely incompatible with freedom of expression. Even if we are able to define misinformation (it cannot simply be information that is inaccurate, because something can easily be approximately right even if it is precisely wrong), we're still left with the problem of selective truth-telling. Big Tech did not deny the Hunter Biden laptop story, it merely blockaded it. In my view, lying about its veracity would have been less misleading than simply prohibiting raising the topic.
Good point. But doing NOTHING is not an option. I think there are lots of good alternatives and people that try to dismiss the issue all together with phrases like Ministry of Truth are either disingenuous or fools
So Orwell was a fool? How about Huxley? 😆
I certainly was not!
one could argue Huxley was closer to the truth. I dont think anyone is saying Orwell was a fool.
I would argue, and have argued, that Huxley was closer to the truth. I think Brave New World Revisited is one of the most prescient political books of the 20th century. That aside, you were the one who wrote that people using phrases like “Ministry of Truth” are “disingenuous or fools.” Hence my comment.
But the corporate media, along with big tech information manipulators, has become the ministry of truth. Any attempt to limit misinformation must start there. CNN & MSNBC et al have abandoned journalism in favor of political activism
Collectively they're
PRAVDA DNC
Party narrative truth
Irate
If the "corporate media" is the ministry of truth then why do so many Americans have so many different truths on issues as one sided as Who won the 2019 Presidential Election.
The REALITY is that the media is paid by advertisers who wont sponsor reporting, even if it is true, on issues that hurt their business interests.
If we want a more informed electorate we are going to have start changing the business model for most media and either BREAKING up or REGULATING the big platforms
Regulatory CAPTURE is considered by most Economists the biggest problem with our economy. So it is no wonder that Facebook is BEGGING congress to Regulate them. That way they can then CAPTURE the people that write the laws and the people that enforce them.
In the eyes of the people running FB and GOOGLE breaking them up is worse than Regulation (they dont fear regulation when they know they can CAPTURE the Regulators). But they do fear COMPETITION what comes with breaking them up
Doing nothing is indeed an option, and is so in all cases. Often, getting out of the way of truth is all that's necessary. When people were allowed to know about the Hunter Biden laptop story, they were able to make up their own minds. Which resulted in eight percent of Joe Biden's voters asking if they could change their votes. Which was more than enough to reverse the results of the election.
We've had genius Presidents apply the finest minds in the world to managing our economy - Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover come to mind. None did good and the final two really fouled things up. The three regular guys with the sense to do nothing about the economy, and just get out of its way - Reagan, Clinton and Trump - produced the best results for the country.
Doing nothing, is not only an option, it is often the best option.
The reason why Reagan and Clinton presided over good economies is that both were elected after a problematic economic period and proceeded to deregulate markets - which causes an immediate bump but also causes bubbles. Both Carter and Bush Sr were incumbents who struggled making effective policy to combat inflation and or the consequences of Reaganism.
Bill, Reagan ushered in the period of large national debts, massive defense spending, and neoliberal monetary/de-regulatory policies which led to the S&L Crisis directly and eventually into the bloat of the federal spending (all while saying we could not afford social spending and that Americans who had relied upon the social contract -- were about to get cut off).
What makes this remarkable is that we now know that debts and deficits are not that problematic since we have the world's reserve currency - this means we could pay off our debt at any time ($28 Trillion at the moment) with a government issued coin if we wanted to.
However, the central issue is that we can spend money on most anything we decide (whether it is 800 US military bases around the world or healthcare or replenishing social security). Its a shell game and Reagan started this manipulation, not being honest about taking us from the greatest creditor in the world to the greatest debtor (all while High Finance rose to eventually be 40% of GDP and the poor fell into their sacrifice zone communities -- often labeled as lazy, poor and needing to pull themselves up by the bootstraps --- loosely translated this meant the US would allow minorities to benefit if they towed the empire line by spewing neoliberal propaganda.
Clinton is by far and away the worst. First, he and his administration were responsible for the financial crisis in 2008 by allowing the final cuts to Glass Steagall (which was an Act which provided a firewall between commercial and investment banking). They created a culture referred to as a Gresham's dynamic where bad actors drove out good standing people in business (Rating agencies, insurance, real estate appraisers, and small/local commercial banks). There are some other gems in terms of policy I will not bore you with as well (Telecom, Leverage, CFTC)...
Second, he rode the wave of financial consolidation. Prior to Clinton the banking industry was in its second or third wave of consolidation -- Clinton (Rubin & Summers) accelerated this process along with the rise of technology companies, "internet mania" (companies that would eventually be monopolies). Clinton deserves no credit for the economy in any analysis, as the main factor of the decade was the DJIA went from 2000 to 10000 by 1999 money doubled 2.5 times in the decade (this was due to the internet bull market, indebted consumer spending, and the rise of financialized institutions creating profits but not productive capital). This was an unprecedented period -- one in which I am particularly attuned to since I was a financial advisor for the entire decade at a TBTF investment firm. Clinton is a figurehead, and to your point had little to do with fixing problems --- which were apparent and needed and discussed at the time. Doing nothing to stop the Financiers of the boom and bust cycle created massive problems for us later on.
He sold out his own party and took the remaining people on drive to the right side of his party --- staking out a political position but tailoring the future of the DNC to be the courtiers of Wall Street (Hillary becoming senator in NY) and tech/pharma billionaires.
While I agree with your premise, about doing nothing until the opportunity presents itself to act, these examples totally whitewashes the final vestiges of the loss of the social safety and new deal policies ushered in by neoliberals from both parties. Reagan and Clinton have to be two of the worst Presidents in our nations history largely for the same reasons - highly militaristic, de-regulated and privatized markets, and screwed over the middle and lower classes in terms of policing social cuts, and culture wars.
Bill Heath - If you have the patience to read what McelroyJ wrote you can start learning about what has TRUTHFULLY happened to our economy over the past 40yrs. You notice he hangs the blame squarly on both Democratic and Republican Presidents. This is not some partisan narrative
The Empirical evidence on things like deficits vs growth and shifting of GDP from the poor and middle class to top 1% is now irrefutable.
Losing reserve currency status will bring this nation down, not borrowing more money at 0% interest.
What really matters is HOW we spend the money. At the end of WW2 the US was in debt this much and proceeded to have the fastest wealth creation in the history of man kind.
In 2021 it is ALL ABOUT pushing higher consumption (wages, infrastructure, health care, quality education, skills training etc...) to the poor and middle class. Accomplishing that will return this nation to rapid growth by way of growth in our middle class. The 40yrs of policy changes that need to be reversed will include things that both the GOP and Most in the Dem party oppose because it is easier for them to still think like you or because it makes their donor happy... The FIGHT for this country's economy is going to start from the bottom and it is going to be waged against the billionaires. Either you are in this with us or you are against us. But the battle has started
I would suggest you read a book on economics written after 2008. Today we have the Empirical Evidence to refute pretty much everythig you just uttered.
l would pick off your mistakes but i am fairly certain you don't let TRUTH get in the way when you have formed an opinion.
Lets just say you are making the CASE for why a MISINFORMED public will ultimately be our downfall before the surveillance state or platforms companies ruin us... God bless the simple minded
Piketty, you're free to use ad hominem attacks; please understand that they rarely contribute to credibility.
I am inclined to agree with many of your comments, but how was the Mueller Report and all the bullshit Rachel Maddow/CNN pumped up garbage in any way the left going too far? That was the establishment center and "intelligence" community seeking to depose a president that they - on the ground level - didn't like (while on the top levels of both the DNC and corporate media they knew that he'd never be impeached) and ratings would continue to boom. See Matt's piece on CNN's Zucker talking about how much he loved trump or CBS' Moonves, etc.
I think you are still missing the point. Zucker was paid to make money and Trump made his network more profitable. But whether it was Mueller or Evangelicals organizing to ban abortion CNN's sponsors were not going to advertise if the Network did serious reporting on Campaign Issues like M4A or Lobbyists or Regulatory Capture or Bailing out Banks and not Home Owners in 2009.
Zucker runs CNN because he knows not to harm his revenue base and make more money for also increasing ratings.
The DEEP state did not do in Trump. Trump did in Trump and MSM distracted us all with idiotic and wild exaggeration
So you’re essentially arguing that whichever party is in control should decide what constitutes misinformation and ban it (who else has the power to do so?)
By that logic, if Trump returns to office in 2024, you’d be totally cool with him deciding what you can or cannot say, yes?
No that is not the logic... Want to try again?
Trump was too busy saying what he was saying to decided what someone else could say.
Power is concentrated in too few companies and spheres of influence. This means misinformation and information dissemination is in the hands of too few people. This also means that the establishment powers of media are just as responsible for their actions as consumers. Russiagate hysteria, censoring unpopular speech, and the history of the intelligence community with Operation Mockingbird should help you understand the problems with your post.
Hate Inc. is about NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox changing their formatting from fact-driven more neutral stance (even though that can be debated) to having a real point of view now and projecting it to divide people versus informing them.
Historically, US Media has been successful in dividing people, but now their business model is to keep people emotionally addicted to that point of view, "a side" often by attacking an opponent and "creating" disinformation or allowing it on their air waves via intelligence officials or one-sided experts from academe who covet careerism. Misinformation? Who decides what the facts are now? Trust has been lost and for good reason.
Lastly, we have not been a democracy in OUR country from a long time --- you should know this already Mr. Piketty (if this is really you, the famed French economist) as Gilens and Page in 2014 did a study on Oligarchy here in the US and the public's ability to shape policy. There are places one could look if they were interested.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
The battle between capital and labor in this country was lost by the end of the Clinton administration, and has led to such massive consolidation of the rich (socializing losses on the public dime, and privatizing gains for wealthy via tax policy, economic bubbles, education/healthcare inflation embedded in the data, and massive wealth extractions after major market crashes.)
Democracy, at this point, is a fiction -- with a thin veneer allowing people to go about their business in fantasyland while the oligarchy consumes more and more people. See CoVid responses, Hurricane Katrina and other climate catastrophes as well as the fact we live on Bullshit mountain where the stock market (an indicator of rich people's feelings - Krystal Ball, 2020) has been an inflatable doll of whoredom during the pandemic being fellated by executive buyback programs, CARES Act money, and the Federal Reserves long policy of ZIRP. We have been on this anti-democracy path for decades - which is the intentional design of neoliberalism (the co-opting of the state to elevate the private business interest to a position of monopoly power).
Have a croissant, and a rethink here Thomas.
Mcelroyj - All very well said. No, of course i am not Thomas...
As you I am sure know Gilens and Page's core thesis from 2014 has come under fair scrutiny and the election of Trump in 2016 further validated that the RICH do not control the Republican voters who in electing Trump as their candidate showed the Middle Class still have power, if only when they unite at the ballot box.
The electoral success of Sanders and others, subsequent to the 2014 publishing of their work also shed just criticism on it as has the growing acceptance that things like deficits don't actually cause inflation (they can but it is not a guarantee) and that higher wages for poor and middle class Americans is actually good for the economy all bode well for POLICY changes that the 2014 elites may have opposed but the 2021 elites are increasingly starting to accept.
In other words, all is not lost we can still fight, organize and win...
Don't fall for the pessimism that causes one to give up hope and stop voting. As Rickety points out in Capital and Ideology the declining rates of voters actually voting from the poor and middle class give power to the rich as they do VOTE.
That said, you did not refute my core point.
Misinformation is at the heart of swaying public opinion, whether it is used to divid us or to get us to literally attack the capital. Modern platforms have reduced the cost of being told what you want to hear and filtering out the other side thus materially increasing the power of misinformation.
Neal Postman's insight on TV News, that it allows us to medicate ourselves into bliss thereby sacrificing our rights, can be updated for 2021 and show that today we can believe what ever we want to believe and find others that will validate our FEELINGS including attacking the Capitol thinking the US population is cheering you as you pillage Nancy Pelosi's office and spit on AOC's door.
It is 2021 and we have the internet, big data and AI and personalization and targeting.
No, the TRUTH police is not what we need to fix the problem. But we do need to fix the problem because we have seen nations from Germany to Ukraine fall in large part due to misinformation.
Doing nothing should not be an option. I am going to listen to Wu with an open mind. How about you?
Fair enough. A couple responses.
First, Gilens and Page 2014 concluding America an oligopoly is a remarkable finding, in that, there are about a hundred different indicators for this in the economy (and I'd be willing to list many of them if this conversation sticks on this "scrutiny" defense that things appear better than they are you present) but an infinitesimal number of scholars in the PMC are willing to say this out loud let alone make it a career trajectory. Class politics and democracy-building are anathema to the monied elite. So, for this to be in the public's consciousness along with another 100 different data points is remarkable and must be paid attention to, when we discuss the future.
Nonetheless, I think the narrowness of squeezing out a few 'hopeful' scenarios diminishes what is happening locally, regionally and statewide. This country has been co-opted a long time ago, and the people who have power now are: Financial companies, Big Pharma, Intelligence communities, war contractors, lobbyists, neoliberal globalist academics (Yale, Harvard, Stanford etc.), Neoliberal thinktanks, NGO's, and billionaires. These institutions affect more than just Presidential politics or who the face of empire is --- they create the mechanisms by which (rent seeking, artificially inflating real estate and stock markets, front-running, and federal monetary policy, and allowing for "a Greshman's dynamic" with stock buybacks (see William Lazonick's work) and chasing the ever-rising mantra of "growth".
Additionally, the elites are quite sweet pappy happy to let us talk about one aspect of the political theatre (Presidential politics and Congress) while they divide and conquer in other areas all across the globe -- it has worked with American public at least since 1970. Hope is a false narrative, it is better to be factual and accurate than to help people, feel good for a moment.
The real question is -- does pessimism accelerate the fight? I am a contrarian who thinks that pessimism and anger are cousins, and the American public's history of being mollified by propaganda, consumerism, careerism, keeping up with the jones, and sanctimonious sloth mean we need more people with less hope and more anger. More action. We need to be reminded that we are consistently losing, and will continue to lose until we make changes to our own individual and collective behaviors. Some may not be able to tolerate the journey nor the fight, addicted to the effects of Neoliberal capitalism, elevating things, money and ego above the public's ongoing fight for democracy.
How does this relate to your post? Well, all of us need a better understanding of what we are up against (not painting it as some redeemable project where democracy is waiting for the best salesperson who ultimately wins out because "it is a good idea". The people running the show, eat people like that for breakfast.
1. We need responses to the surveillance state.
2. We need a response to Pharma jacking up prices/private patents
3. We need to solve soon how much shit we consume (climate/health)
4. We need to confront power directly, loudly, and consistently
As far as the "open mind" thing, I think it swings too far, aligning with power. Most Americans have either a poor memory or a poor understanding of economic history and policy in this country. They do not understand, that we have world's reserve currency, which means that are country does not run like a household, that we can run deficits and even do most anything we want to do --- the CARES Act showed this bluntly. Open to power?
I think we have enough evidence for many of our leaders to make judgments. For Wu to think we need to reduce the importance of the 1st amendment, and then to broadcast that idea in way to persuade me, he's going to have offer substance (real substance) and not try to institute an authoritarian style policy without regard for how it may be used in the future --- precedent is huge. Open mind?
I'd rather have my mind, synthesizing the historical implications and real meanings of policy agendas versus cheerleading neoliberal influencers who are going through a transformation in their careers trying to align with power.
We need institutional analysis - this means anti-trust reform, repealing Citizen's United (money speech issues), and prevent politicians from becoming political ATMs.
Red, in the Shawshank Redemption, said "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and is reminded by his friend in the movie Andy Dufresne that "no good thing ever dies". Well, I love the movie and its a nice sentiment between male friends and all --- but American empire has killing people off one way or another for hundreds of years --- Hope?
People need to read their William Blum before they watch Shawshank -- but that has not happened in this country.
Again well said, strongly rationalized and rich with convincing evidence. None the less the nihilism is ultimately misplaced in my view...
Perhaps the violent protestor in the street who was not mollified by propaganda, consumerism and careerism ads something of value to the revolution but organizers and thoughtful followers who cross class lines as well as picket lines add far more value to the revolution than the angry nihilist happy to crack skulls and throw bricks through windows.
Perhaps we need both?
Gompers and MLK were not pessimists and they were not mollified with middle class comforts. And their power came as much from the upper middleclass as from the angry lower classes.
Any movement needs momentum and just like getting a project moving in the right direction it almost always starts with small wins not long shot reform... (In basket ball you hit a few lay ups and then start bombing from the outside)
M4A has a leader in Sanders, 100 votes (and growing) in Congress and support (and growing) from the majority of Americans. Insurance companies keep throwing money/ lobbyists and propaganda at the problem and keep losing the battle, though they are still winning the war.
When we get a Bernie Sanders and 100 votes in congress and the majority of citizens oppose the growing surveillance state then let me know... I'm right there with you.
But in 2021 M4A has the momentum to win in my lifetime and your's (I hope) and that should be the opening of the flood gates because like with Republicans and Trump winning in 2016 once there is blood in the water the sharks are on their way. Trump was by all measures a failed leader but retains fervent popularity with his base of Misinformed voters because he fought the enemy. And they got him there with their VOTES.
He proved VOTERS still have the power (poorly used though it may be thanks to misinformation).
I think your view on Wu is open minded and fair.
The policy ideas you call for, though i agree with them, would require an authoritarianism that would almost certainly result in outcomes different than you would want...
The nation has lasted 250yrs, Civil Wars, poverty and plague and it has done it with incremental change because getting CITIZENS support does not happen with LOGIC and Data it comes one step at a time and by proving itself out with the most simple minded of us to the most intellectual of us.
Sorry, not a huge movie buff so the Red reference goes over my head...
But hope is critical. However hope alone does not prevail. Grit, organizing and action lead to one success and then one more and then one more.
Rather than cinema i will look to history. The Robber Barrons of the Gilded age wielded just as much power as the Billionaire class in 2021... We did not defeat them by lopping off their head like in the French Revolution, which led to long term decline, instead we simply put them under duress and then cut a deal with them...
It can be done today and in my view that starts with M4A...
Likewise. Deep and rich content to consider.
I am gonna let this sift in for a little while before I respond mostly.
Only two things for now after a brief read. First, I do not consider myself a nihilist or someone who views change needs to be violent. I think it is important to have resistance in all the various places under siege - and we do not have enough in any one single area nor do we have enough overall. This is a losing position. So, the question is how do we want to lose (short term)? We have to be honest about this, not sugarcoat with the Obama rhetoric.
Two, I think Trump's win in 2016 proved a different phenomena. His election confirmed what should have been the end of Neoliberal post financial crisis - with the left looking shattered, embarrassed and desperate to shift the attention to Russia. In concert, we see this in the number of people who did not vote in 2016 or 2020.
Capturing this population, the people who lost faith in our democracy (and rightly so) is the single biggest political issue not being discussed in our so-called democracy. A majority of people did not vote in 2016 - which brought up Trump.
So, while I admire your position of using hope to create change, I think it is a worn adage, easily manipulated by both party apparatuses with their neoliberal playbooks. We need different tactics for different times. I am not saying it shouldn't be a part of our toolbox at some point --- but at the present - no. We need the crucible of no hope for real change to challenge power. And best efforts must be made to keep people aboard - still fighting without using a slogan -- instead we need to say "this is what an opposition does".... We may never get M4A, but we keep fighting.
Which does not fit the nihilistic or violent playbook.
Cheers Pick.
Looks like this guy has no one else who will listen to his pontifications of the obvious. God bless anyone who has time to read this irrelevant drivel.
Or its three days later and most people have read the thread.
Radrave, what an entire douche you are!
Andy said that, but I meant Red was reading it (I hate no edit function).
CNN too.
This may seem like an immoderately idealistic comment, but it could be the case that "Democracy" has never existed. What happened on Jan 6 likely had an Intelligence Agency backbone that was well-disguised by a "misinformed" mob of Wal-Mart shoppers. The backlash has certainly played well into the hands of the Security State and its Big Media cheerleaders, so if the shoe fits...Do you believe the USA is in fact a "Democracy"? Aspirationally, I would say indeed it is; existentially, I think that we're not even close. I'm not sure how this thread thing works, so if you deem these comments reply-able, I can be reached at bartlebydick@yahoo.com. Thank you.
Democracy can only be saved by The Ministry of Truth!
Sarcasm duely noted. I would start by breaking up the platforms so no one platform can "control" the message...
Fact Checking is not a Ministry of Truth.... It is just FACT CHECKING and every university in the top 100 could do that if paid properly and given a standard methodology
Fact checking isn’t always “just fact checking.” https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-83-the-unchecked-conservative-ideology-of-us-medias-fact-check-verticals-7d441f4e649b
I understand your points and I think we would value the same outcome though i disagree to great extent. It's a larger discussion but IMO: Free expression puts the onus on THE PEOPLE to do the work to identify what each individual believes. The whole purpose of journalists was to inform as 1A was written at a time when most of the citizenry was uneducated. I would argue that the citizenry has become LESS educated. For all of the available sources of information we are collectively more ignorant than at any time in our history as a nation, arguably as a species.
I would also argue that it is no longer possible (if ever it was) to gain anything close to consensus of what is best for the nation. 350mil (that we know of), open borders, culture wars and a centralized media make it impossible.
There have always been gatekeepers to information but a local press reflected the views and ideals of people who were largely like minded and therefore a mandate for the elected. It's why representative government USED TO work (for the most part).
To me it seems the issue is NOT disclosure but the control of WHAT is exposed by those with the most access to and power over disclosure. IT's not the individual who posts on one of the social media 'rags' that the entire 'deadly pandemic' is a hoax created as one element of a conspiracy "hypothesis" (not a theory). It's not the individual expert in philosophy or history. It's the spoon feeding of opinions by clicks and algorithms created by mass media corporations for the purpose of getting everyone into lock step and silencing dissent OF ANY KIND whether opinion or 'misinformation' or even 'dis-information," ( lack of information masquerading as information).
My hypothesis? It's part of the move toward creating the Corporate States of North America (for starters). Government of, by and for the people is and will continue to be replaced by the combined synchronized efforts of the powerful who will benefit from that outcome.
You are right and I volunteer to be the censor. It will be a thankless job but I will make sure that you will get the information you need.
And who decides what is "misinformation"?
If it's me, then I'm willing to go along with your plan. If not, I'm out.
This says it's a reply to me, but I didn't say anything about misinformation. Granted this Substack comment system really sucks, but you're replying to the wrong person.
I think you got a notification because you also commented to his comment. It's pretty wonky.
I used to work at Google, albeit not on web search. I wish people wouldn't use the word censored to talk about search rankings, it dilutes the term and makes it less useful for actual censorship.
Firstly, there is no real investigation or fact checking going on in this piece, Matt is just repeating the non-profit's claims. As noted by others the screenshot doesn't seem to actually show search traffic (you can't know impressions for that) but rather an ad campaign which could be affected by many things, most obviously budget reductions or competitor budget increases. The story is just not credible and could have used some double-checking.
Second, rankings whether for ads or organic results are a zero sum game. Someone's loss is someone else's gain. To show this is "censorship" by Google you'd have to find the queries where they lost traffic and go look at what's being returned for them now. For all you know there is an even bigger, better left wing charity making exactly the same claims but more effectively and they are now out-ranking RTK, which would cause the same effects on RTK but render claims of censorship totally meaningless.
Thirdly, yes the ranking algorithms are opaque. They have to be, because there's a whole planet of people trying to game them to get to the top. This is not nefarious or evil behaviour by Google. Literally no search engine publishes their ranking algorithms in full. Google DID do this in the very early days because it came out of a PhD project so the PageRank algorithm was described in a published paper. It resulted in SEO spammers gaming the algorithm as hard as possible in all kinds of creative and destructive ways. There are way more factors now and they aren't widely known even inside the company to stop this happening again.
Now all that said, there IS a real story here, but it's a more general one and much harder to write than just finding some old-school left-wingers who think they're being censored by a search engine ranking update. The firm's ever increasing emphasis on E-A-T content (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) assumes a dystopian and highly hierarchical society in which only "experts" should be allowed to receive attention about any given topic. This is inherently a dead end because academia produces an infinite stream of institutionally approved "experts" who have no actual expertise in their area. The decay inside academia, Google's inability to see it (due partly to their heavy reliance on hiring from top universities), and the leftist focus on rule-by-publicly-funded-expert will inevitably lead to endless situations in which Google genuinely *does* censor people who are correct but arguing with academics. However, this situation is most easily observed today at the periphery of the company in places like YouTube or the Play Store, not core web search which at least for now appears to be the least corrupted part (I'm not saying it's uncorrupted, just that it's not as open and obvious as in those other sites).
Finally, I really skeptical this left/right balance is going to work out. The reality is the left is the group doing the censoring today and trying to paint it as a bipartisan "people against the corporations" issue probably won't work as a consequence. To the extent corporations are censoring, it seems to invariably be with the goal of boosting social justice theory and academic pronouncements. The right will be the victim 9 times out of 10 and trying to present it differently will lead to a succession of weak stories like this one.
Excellent point about “experts” and how Google - all media in fact - defers to them and silences debate.
Yeah sure, got a program that can calculate the odds of all those alternative explanations happening in conjunction with a seldom implemented update to the search algorithm?
You're missing the point. This article is of such poor quality that it's not even clear what USRTK is complaining about. Did they get bumped off of the first page for organic search? If so, for what terms specifically (if you google "usrtk", you get their page as the first result)? What results are being returned organically now? Did they lose placement for their ads? Is somebody paying more? Are they paying less? Again, for what search terms specifically? What results have taken their place?
I think you’re missing the point. The article indicates there is no way to get Google to provide the details to be able to discern what happened.
They weren’t tracking their traffic and didn’t notice the change, but obviously a change was implemented, their traffic plummeted and most of us don’t need to imagine a genius Dr No that implemented their own changes in conjunction with Google’s seldom performed update in order to camouflage the likely cause.
Google changed their algorithm. Their traffic plummeted it should be Google you demand these answers from, not USRTK.
But was the change explicitly against them or was it spread over multiple sites that had the same type of research? The only way to find that answer is to do a broad based study of all the sites that could be considered to have content relative to this one site. And Matt isn’t in a position to do that kind of extensive study. Without knowing how other sites were harmed or helped, this is an article that doesn’t inform, so, on a much smaller scale than the awful stories Matt has highlighted before, it is it’s own form of misinformation.
Or people could be demanding Google explain it.
Google and others provide many tools for web masters that can be used to explain exactly that! This is why some of us are calling foul - RTK could easily find out what happened in far greater detail than they have provided here, nothing is being withheld from them, but they appear to have provided a misleading screenshot as "evidence" which actually isn't.
Look, fundamentally, if they care about their Google traffic so little they can't even be bothered to install Analytics and look at how people are finding them, they just aren't in any position to squeak about censorship. Finding out the answers to the questions posed by this story is *easy* as long as you own the website in question, and yet they claim there's some nefarious conspiracy that stops them installing Analytics or setting up Webmaster Tools and finding out where their traffic was coming from? They didn't care enough a few months ago to spend half a day on this stuff and now it's a scandal? It's just not something that rises the same level as the other stuff that's going on.
Why demand Google explain a normal process? Again, we don’t know if the update effected just this one site or all sites that could be similar to this site. I’m willing to say the site did see a drop in search traffic. But assigning the cause of the drop to nefarious deeds doesn’t naturally follow. More research should be done before implying Google acted in bad faith. And this is coming from someone that doesn’t think Google is anyone’s friend.
USRTK is not simply entitled to traffic from google.
Where was this traffic (traffic they "weren't" monitoring) coming from? Google doesn't simply generate traffic to the website that it can take away. Google drives traffic to sites based on people clicking on ads and organic search results. If you search for "usrtk" using google today, you get usrtk.org as the first result. So, the question is where was the traffic they lost coming from? What ads or search terms were people using? What is being returned for those search terms now?
Answers to these questions will help to better understand the problem. Otherwise it's not at all clear what USRTK is talking about.
Google changed their algorithm. USRTK’s traffic plummeted.
Google is the only possible source for your answers. A demand the user explain what was done to them is a deflection as they can’t possibly know.
In what context is USRTK "the user"?
Without the details I'm asking about, we have to accept the possibility that USRTK had a heavily search optimized page that was highly ranked for search terms where they were not relevant to the people doing the searching. Or that USRTK cut their advertising budget which lead to their ads not being shown as often or in worse placements. Or that some other site increased their budget. Or that some other site has always had more relevant information for specific search terms and the updated algorithm now identifies them as such.
Agree. Seems pretty straight forward.
Thanks for this thoughtful and well informed comment, Mike. Really helped to advance the conversation.
Implementing EAT requires making value judgements around what aglo's to train and how to train them.
As you said, web traffic is generally zero sum so Matt provides a data point that Google massively values another news source more than RTK on some set of keywords. Given Google's de facto search monopoly, this becomes a censorship story.
The lack of details (keywords, organic or ads, higher ranked results) provided in the article makes this a poorly researched data point.
I guess I just don't expect that level of somewhat technical detail in a news article. Maybe write Matt and ask to show the SEO analysis work. I can understand why RTK wouldn't want that level of detail shared broadly.
I can understand glossing over technical details where they are not relevant to the point being made, but in this case pertinent information is just missing. We still get something that looks like technical details in the form of an ad campaign graph, but that only adds to the confusion since the article is written in a way that suggests the problem is with organic search results.
What lack of detail. The graph shown is from Google search console showing overall impressions and clicks from all search traffic to the site. It drops precipitously overnight after the algorithm update. Or do you think it more likely that the masses of users typing search into Google decided to change their behavior overnight and stay that way. Do you understand how statistics work? Seems your comment is "poorly researched".
At the very least, i want to see it broken down by keywords/queries. I want to see which specific queries are contributing to the drop. It's not "usrtk" or "usrtk monstanto papers" for example, because for those I'm seeing usrtk.org as the first result. For those queries that are contributing significantly to the drop I want to see what results are being returned after the update.
Right. But how many people are typing in "ustrk" If people are already typing in your name, they know who you are. Overnight their traffic dropped off based on "ALL" search terms. The day before there were lots of random things people typed in the generated an impression which had the potential to generate clicks, and the next day that plummeted. All of those random things that were generating impressions before now get nothing. That's a change in the algorithm, not an overnight change in behavior of millions of Google users.
Even just “Monsanto papers” returns usrtk.org as the first result. Knowing what queries are responsible for the drop would allow us to see what is being returned today. That would go a long way to establishing if this is censorship or something else (improvement in relevant results maybe)
You write that the real story here is harder to write than just "finding some old-school left-wingers who think they're being censored by a search engine ranking update." You must have read the entire article because the one I read quoted the director of USRTK as saying, "I can't say this is censorship, because I don't have the faintest idea." In other words, your comment was simply a biased rant, not an informed opinion on the subject. You then go on to bash the left generally, revealing the ax you have to grind against them. It's your credibility, not Matt's or the USRTK's that's lacking.
I meant to say "must not have read."
I have to say, this is the most comically inept spin doctoring I've seen in a while. I can't even commend the effort.
The new HB544 in NH to prohibit government contractors from race-training in their own companies strikes me as censorship. I'm no fan of CRT, and am fine with banning it from government workplaces and schools. But the government shouldn't tell other people what to think. I guess there are laws about not having a hostile workplace, but if CRT is like religion, they get to believe what they want.
It would strike me as censorship as well, were I not aware of the amount of compelled speech required by governments at all levels of its contractors. It's nothing new. CRT is a religion and may believe what it wishes. An employer requiring her employees to receive religious instruction is popping red flags all over the place for me.
Two wrongs don't make a right. R's have an opportunity here to come out on the side of the Enlightenment, which is still broadly popular I think.
I want you to be right. Other things that are broadly popular don't make any difference, such as voter ID, election integrity, support to police, opening schools. Republicans have come out in favor of all of these, and the accusations are "You're a racist." Math is racist, trees are racist, and opposition to CRT will immediately be branded racist.
I suspect D's are digging their own political grave with widespread race training. Let them dig deeper. Those who agree with it are already firmly in the D camp. Many others will be reevaluating whether Biden's crowd is really the lesser of two evils.
Do you object equally to EEO and similar regulations that would prohibit a manager from announcing his opinion that blacks are lazy?
I don't really know about EEO rules and all the ways people can say things that make others unhappy, or to what degree America's past racial misdeeds should affect the present.
I agree despite how painful it is (I dislike CRT), though I'm not quite sure how it's related to my post.
You wrote: "The reality is the left is the group doing the censoring today ..."
HB544 is an example of attempted censorship from the right.
I see. You're right. That would be interesting to read more about.
https://legiscan.com/NH/text/HB544/id/2238380
II. Requirements for government contractors:
(a) All state contracts entered into on or after the effective date of this chapter shall include the following provision:
"During the performance of this contract, the contractor agrees as follows:
The contractor shall not use any workplace training that inculcates in its employees any form of race or sex stereotyping or any form of race or sex scapegoating, including the concepts that: (a) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (b) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (c) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (d) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; (e) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (f) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (g) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (h) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race. The term “race or sex stereotyping” means ascribing character traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of his or her race or sex, and the term “race or sex scapegoating” means assigning fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex.”
Sounds remarkably similar to a speech I heard. "I have a dream . . ."
"Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?"
Based on my experience, Google must award a lot of bonus points for excessive, distracting ads.
I found that hilarious as well!!
As long as the ad revenue goes to Google!
It makes you wonder what other things are being brushed under the rug in this country.
This country has not been a democracy for 30 years, if we are being honest. It a pageant of bullshit.
Oh also, more than 30 years. For some groups it was never a democracy until the late 60s and starting in the 70s - moreso during Reagan's terms - it became an inverted totalitarian plutocracy. None of the major Democrats have resisted this, in fact Delaware Corporation Uncle Joe is the perfect continuation of it.
Nice Sheldon Wolin integration...
When was it ever a democracy? Not being snarky. Obviously, it's constitutionally limited republic but what is the inflection point for you? Slavery? War of 1812? Civil War? Women's suffrage? Prohibition? The destruction of the native tribes? WW 1? WW2? Vietnam? Patriot Act? ...
Chris Hedges writes about this all the time - the rise of neoliberal capitalism started with the Powell Memo in 1970 and really progressed for 20 years with different institutions that used to provide a counterbalance to corporatism being co-opted. We see this in academia, labor leadership, healthcare monopolies formed and invited Pharma to the party, financialization in the investment/business communities, and the rise of the World Bank and the IMF as the loan shark of the world (800 military bases in 80 countries across the world 2020) - the US has built up these bases over time with the Greater Middle East experiencing the largest post-cold war build with bases in just about every country except Iran. We have seen the Supreme Court move to the right and our legal system imprison thousands of people who turn out to be innocent after the fact, and the war on drugs brought to us by the Reagan administration, forgot to mention that the US is one of the big dealers in the drug trade to fund their dirty war operations (see Alfred McCoy's work)... And then we have the Clinton administration rising from an historically democratic party and morphing to republican lite in most of his policy choices --- leading us to the precipice deregulated, market crashes and pretending he was some great savior to the democratic party by tacking right (still calling him a progressive, but no progressive policy to hang his hat on).
Maybe a better way to put it, with the very clear and sensible colonizing points you make above is that there were still people in position of power that could act to move us in a more democratic path, even in light of our history with the decimation of native people, African slave trade, War of 1812, the elite class of 1920's, and our history with interventions, coups, the Post-WWII intelligence networks allowing Nazis to be secretly relocated within the US and South America (Paperclip and Gladio), and leading up to the assassinations of Evers, JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, Fred Hampton. By Clinton and Bush jr. the game was overt, in your face and made clear --- hence the Patriot Act and Citizen's United, the fabricated Iraq war intelligence -- these opened up the spigot for more of the theatre of US political spectacle.
Yes, America is nothing but poop! That's the idea I got from Matt's article too. Right on point!
Kabuki Theater
Thank you once again, Matt. Why do the people who define themselves as liberals not get what's going on? They're in a cult that tells them that anything giving them a different perspective is evil and must be exterminated. The only thing I can understand about this is from experience growing up among young people who acted out as liberals and leftists in CA in the 60s and 70s, and often they then joined cults that were totalitarian. They couldn't handle the freedom. It was weird for me. Suddenly, people I knew who considered themselves free were in cults where they completely obeyed some demented leader. I mean really obeyed. Cut off family, censored people who disagreed. I couldn't talk sense to them. In the 70s my brother went with a woman who joined a cult and she hid under a sheet the entire time of their relationship. Because her leader told her to. I ran into her five years later and she'd turned into a suburban mom, no memory of having been taken over by a cult mentality. So that gives me hope. Maybe this will turn. With a lot of amnesia. But I never thought the mainstream media would be the cult leaders. I find this scarier. Can democracy survive this?
The liberals don't care because they think the ends justify the means. they are on the winning side. If they were on the losing side they would be complaining. The conservatives would do the same thing. As Matt pointed out in a previous article, it used to be that wise people understood this shoe on the other foot argument. Now the schools are just producing wholesale idiots that can't understand this argument.
Whenever I hear them make their stupid cases, I say the same thing. I completely agree that some speech needs to be eliminated, as long as it is me that chooses which of the speech is eliminated. If anyone else has the right to make this decision, then I don't agree with it. The only person I trust to make this decision is me. and the first person I would eliminate would be you.
Gary - Spare me. Tumps supporters in the media are the cause of this. The media on the left and right had misinformation before Trump but it was much much more limited and as we learned in HATE INC the biggest problem was what they did NOT report.
Trump's media went too far in the misinformation area and it ended up with him LYING about winning the election and convincing his misinformed supporters to attack the capital. He and his media supporters went too far. Now we are all going to lose a larger degree of freedom of the press
Stop with your lame excuses. This one is on people like you!
How do you even respond to someone like this? I don't get it. the problem is the democrats and republican media are the problem. This person thinks their side is good but the other side is bad. Completely screwed up. They are really messed up. If you think the other side is the problem then you are completely lost. If you realize that both sides are the problem then you get it. Otherwise just shove your head up your ass because you don't get it.
You clearly suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. The media and Democrats have created an echo chamber that makes all things conservative the product of a nebulous systemic racism. They follow the leftist mantras handed down for nearly a hundred years and have made the left's "critical theory" a product on steroids: Critical Race Theory. Orange Man bad. Orange Man supporters equally bad. The patience of the leftists has finally borne fruit. Sadly, they have not been taught history. They cannot see that the elites who control them will eventually turn on them and they will suffer, too. This one is on everyone who has bought into the left's promises. We are on the brink of collapse in this country and few understand just how bad things can--and no doubt will--get in the near future. I am a combat-wounded, 100% service-connected great-grandfather. I do not worry for myself: I fear for my children, their children, and their children's children. Good luck, useful idiots. . . .
Orange Man is an irredeemable liar and created a reality distortion field that covered his MAGA mob about the election being stolen causing a crisis culminating in the insurrection. If you can't agree with that, you are the useful idiot.
What does that have to do with anything important. Also, there was no insurrection. An insurrection would have had organization and goals.
That was an ejaculation.
Hell, I've participated in administration sanctioned college occupations that more closely resembled an insurrection. At least we got to do a sleepover on carpeted floors while we held the building.
Something tells me you had no confidence in the results of the 2016 election.
Some might call this comment misinformation. You say ‘we learned in HATE INC’ but you are clearly missing the entire point of ‘HATE INC’ and did not...learn. This one is on (stupid) people like you!
I would bet you good money that the folks at EFF lean left/liberal. https://www.eff.org/
They've fought internet censorship and other issues for a while now.
I don't think Internet censorship can be adequately discussed without the "right to be forgotten" issue. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/uruguay-steps-too-quickly-right-be-forgotten-quagmire
I'm not sure what you mean by "liberals" here. You do realize that Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are both left-leaning old school liberals, right? I'm a lefty and I have been following this online freedom stuff for a long time. Are you talking about people in your everyday life? Sounds like what you really mean are Democrats, lol. But I guess you're right - most of them would self-define as "liberal" even though they don't know the sociological or historical definitions of the term (there are different ways to classify "liberal" thought - it's different in EU than here, for ex.)
Regarding the cults and communes of the 60s and 70s, you'd also be surprised how many of them failed because organic structures of power, control and abuse formed and people got sick of the reality (authoritarian systems) being different than the mission (freedom). You should check out Adam Curtis' BBC documentary on it. You certainly won't see most of that information on US corporate mainstream media.
Righties are just as likely to form and join cults, however. Qanon morphed from a catch-all conspiracy theory into a full-blown cult with a hierarchy and all the rest. They have names for different 'levels' of the (loose) organization like "bakers" and such. Interestingly, in one of the Adam Curtis documentary series (he has several - I recommend them all) he discusses the origins of the modern "illuminati" conspiracy theory - it was completely fake, set up by two guys who were bored back in the 60s or 70s - and how it fed into, hell even formed the foundation for more recent ones like Pizzagate and Qanon.
You do know who is doing the censuring right? The concept of media watchdog... or giving truth to power... oh never fucking you’re a libertarian Bot devised by the ghost of Milton Freemen... I give up.
I miss your point
It's really just about manners, appearances, and money. That's what liberals live for.
"computers don’t easily distinguish between conspiracy theory and legitimate reporting that runs counter to present accepted narratives"
All google did was plug-in "lab-leak hypothesis" into the no-no bin as soon as it became a Trumpian factoid, and voila problem solved. Except for the annoying fact that it's still extremely likely Covid came from the Wuhan Virology Lab. Combine the politization of that fact along with China extremely interested in keeping it out of bounds, and we have a recipe for some very very shady shit going down on the google
I am a Trump supporter but have always been amazed at how Trump made people lose their minds. There is PLENTY you can objectively criticize about Trump without all the lying.
Who lies about Trump.. the Truth is horrifying enough. His abuse of Misinformation is the reason Google doing this is going to continue and grow worse over time. Abuse is abuse... Freedom of publish Misinformation vs Holding on to our Democracy. I will always vote for holding our Democracy.. Trumps media supporters BLEW it for all of us... And you support him? Traitor!
Definitely keep paying Matt, but also open a new tab and head on over to CNN. They have a comments section, and you will find your people there. Go to them!
And reruns of those whacky Cuomo brothers in action. How we laughed...
CNN has a comment section?
You been asleep the last five years?? Almost nothing but lies about Trump. Sorry we disagree but I love him and his accomplishments. Best wishes.
If the Democrats had a different set of lack of scruples they could've run Trump under their ticket. He's no more a conservative than Biden is a liberal. But he definitely had some back benchers with better ideas. Or at least a clue.
Even if they were a little bit wacky.
Lost those along the way. And the election because of.
Not sure how to classify Trump. Utilitarian?? If the Democrats had made the tiniest effort they could have worked with Trump on any number of issues. He likes to cut deals. They choose not to. Biden is just a mentally challenged old corrupt befuddled fool
Bring me the head of Bill the Cat!
I sure would like to see an Ack button. For positive acknowledgement.
Something between meh and like. Although altogether, those would be a wholesome trinity.
Who do we talk to in this place about getting better service?
In respect to this comment system and its array of responses (1), I don't love your remark, but I think it's more true than not as far as it goes.
Not to mention the lack of an edit function.
Google has become a pawn of China. They have utilized their company to assist the CCP in hiding, misinforming and deceiving their public just so they can keep doing business in China. Time for the USA to start playing very hardball with these "publicly traded" companies. They are skewing the entire information flow within this country. Life was much better before they came along and allowed the worst creeps and political junkies a mega platform to spread their hatred, lies and insults without any identity or pushback. The internet is an open cesspool that is polluting our society much more that any smog, or factory smoke would ever be allowed by EPA. Yet this stench permeates into the very fabric or American life while Congress sucks up the campaign donations and does NOTHING. Time for individuals to run on a platform of wrecking and/or controlling these monsters.
why don't you urge people to switch to a different search engine? It takes 1 minute to switch from google search to duckduckgo search and break the googles search 'monopoly' power.
I did that for a while, but the problem is, for nonpolitical searches, duckduckgo kinda sucks. For political searches, duckduckgo is better because it returns results without apparent ideological manipulation.
you can switch back and forth pretty easily-- just type google.com or duckduckgo.com into the address window of your browser and that takes you right to a search window for that company-- that way you could avoid being manipulated by do your searches on anything remotely to do with politics or current events searching with duckduckgo, and still use google for other stuff. Although the best way to register your disapproval of google's manipulation and censorship is to cut the cord altogether-- hit them in the pocketbook.
I do that manually on certain searches. Going from Google to Bing, even, makes a big difference for political-type searches.
Remember that you are the user of the search engines, not the sites indexed by them. If you dislike the way Google manipulates search results for social/political purposes, trying some alternatives seems like a pretty good idea.
I’m on the DUCK!!
Quack! Quack!. Duck and Bing ONLY. Google - "Perception Management" tinkering with reality.
And StartPage (used to be ixquick). I use google's search engine only rarely.
You are correct DLR, the problem isn't the algorithms, the problem is that too many folks rely on Google. That is why I use Google about a 1/3 of the time, bing the other third, and duckduckgo for the last 3rd. It really isn't that hard to change it everytime you do a search. But Google may also be setting their algorithms up to feed people want they want to see. Also, there may be some rules that are not algorithmic that specifically cancel some folks web sites. You really can't tell.
Fastest way to make money in the US of A is to leverage laziness. People are busy. KISS - thus we have Microsoft (bundling of apps with windows) and google (bundling of search, email etc.) controlling desktops.
Kind of like taking someone's ballot to the ballot box for them because they can't be bothered?
I use Duck most of the time. If I have issues with it I just type in ‘google’ and use that engine. Easy easy.
Internet search engines are primarily for shopping and institutional propaganda. If you scroll past the first page and fine-tune a search you may find something, but it's a pain. The solution isn't that difficult. Just find alternative news sources and bookmark them. Articles like this one give clues and I hate to say it but Twitter is a gold mine for finding alternative views from poster provided tweets, but Twitter search is even more of a joke than Google.
I don’t do Twitter, but, being a conservative liberal, I found twitchy. Their whole format is based on tweets. They posted so much excellent information, I had to pay, voluntarily, for their service. It’s like they were my research assistants. You are right. Twitter is a good source of information, but I’m not willing to get down into that pig sty, myself.
I think support for breaking up the tech monopolies is growing rapidly.
Yeah, but do you really believe those in power intend to bite the hand that feeds them?
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/06/justice-thomas-highlights-that-in-the-civil-rights-cases-places-of-public-amusement-were-not-traditional-common-carriers/
Interesting series of items at Volokh Conspiracy about common carriers and a possible solution for the tech industry
Thank you so much for profiling US Right To Know: real journalists doing real work reporting the real issues, true American heroes! Just checked out their latest news and HOO BOY are they not in the friend making business. Their latest series is revealing how Gates and his buddies are trying to colonize Africa's food economy, possibly as a test run for doing the same thing in the US since he's the US's biggest owner of farmland :
"the UN appears to be organizing a corporate agribusiness power play led by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Over 500 civil society groups are protesting the Summit’s direction and the appointment of Agnes Kailibata, president of Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy in charge of strategic direction. These groups want the UN to withdraw from the UN-WEF partnership they say is “helping to establishing ‘stakeholder capitalism’ as a governance model for the entire planet.” "
I subscribed to USRTK just now, as I've done with writings of various substack authors, but wonder how many other remaining bastions of free speech are being censored as I write this.
Yeah, me too. A good source of articles you wouldn't find easily elsewhere. And despite what Ena believes, class action lawsuits are often the only way to hold powerful corporations accountable for their criminal behavior, to some degree.
You live to be a pawn of careerists doing PR for class action lawyers, masquerading as public health advocates...without a single health related credentials among all collectively
Good luck to you.
You clearly can't differentiate PR by a bunch of class action lawyers from journalism...a profession tasked with informing the public, rather than carving out a cushy career for themselves by hijacking ballot initiatives to do Public Relations Campaign for greedy class action lawyers. Once the billions have been disbursed, these mediocre obscure "journalists" move on to exploit the public fighting the next BIG EVIL because they need well paying jobs where no-one is holding them accountable.
Google's search algorithm (lumping all of them into one insofar as the user sees it) is a fucking joke. The first full page of hits on any search string containing terms that may have commercial relevance is ALWAYS openly stated (sponsored) advertisements followed by advertisements written and delivered in a tricky manner to fool you into clicking on some product or service being sold. So even WITHOUT directing searches away from people or organizations, there's a lot of crap to filter through.
Duckduckgo is not as bad, and it maintains your privacy, but it's also got problems. It's my default search engine now, but their search function just doesn't work as accurately as Google's. I think I need to dig into the "bangs" feature and some of the other filtering code/flags because I may not be taking full advantage of it. But I recall several times having to try three or four different combinations of search terms, then going to Google and doing the same with much more accurate results. Maybe someone with more expertise on the matter could help me.
Also, I've switched to the Brave browser and away from Chrome. I still use Firefox occasionally, but it's slower and more of a resource hog. That has been getting better I think with many of the open source improvements over the years. Fuck Google.
Well. That was weird. My post doubled itself. I only meant to delete one. Anyway. The more people use duckduck, the more it learns and the faster it will get.
Google search is optimized for revenue, not search.
There is a side of this censorship issue that I simply don't understand: why is assumed to be automatic that readership or viewership of any given website MUST go through Google or Facebook or Twitter?
I am a TK subscriber (you're welcome) because I have been an admirer of Taibbi's writing for a long time. I have been aware of Matt through various sources, including his prior television appearances and his work for Rolling Stone. I was unaware that he had left RS until I saw one of his pieces here linked to on the site Naked Capitalism. That's what brought me to TK News. No search engine or social media involved. I've been an NC reader for years, after finding that site through seeing/hearing its founder, Yves Smith, interviewed on television and radio. I subscribe to NC's daily newsletter, which takes me directly to their site. Again, no search engine or social media involved.
We seem to be losing track of a fundamental truth about how the internet works: one site links to another. You see something that interests you, that has a link to its source, you click the link and go to that particular site. If you like what you see there, you can visit that site again in the future. You can bookmark it for quick and easy access; you don't even have to type the address. If the site lets you sign up for email alerts--I can't imagine a news site that is serious about covering topics and cultivating a readership that doesn't have that--then you can get your pipeline to that site directly delivered to your inbox. Yet again, no involvement from Facebook or Google or Twitter is necessary.
So how, then, is a lack of participation by those companies censorship?
If we're talking about a site getting shut down by government decree, so that its content is no longer available at all to internet users, that is certainly censorship.
But that does not seem to be the nature of the argument here. The sites cited above indicate that they had traffic, people who visited their sites at one point, but then there was a falloff, presumably because of changes to search engine algorithms. But why did those previous visitors not continue to exercise the (fairly minimal) effort required to visit those sites directly themselves, of their own volition, if those visitors found the content valuable to them?
There's only so much that we can do, or expect that others can do, to lead members of a society to actively engage themselves in the process of educating themselves in what they need to know. If there is only ever to be a perpetual expectation that the public can never be bothered to act in their own interest, that they can only ever expect information to be found and prechewed for them by internet giants before being vomited directly into their mewling mouths like so much pap, then it is foolish to expect there to be any difference made in society at large by the transmission of information, no matter how that information is made available to a populace that is so stupid and lazy that they can't be bothered to find anything worth knowing through their own efforts. That's the core problem--not the vagaries of Silicon Valley's devotion to the First Amendment.
God, what a pathetically arrogant comment. “... a populace that is so stupid and lazy that they can't be bothered to find anything worth knowing through their own efforts.“. Pity the poor folks who find things serendipitously or by a random process of inquiry by entering queries into a search engine rather than being lead by the nose like you appear to be. If it ain’t linked in a site you read you won’t see it. Talk about lazy. To say nothing of stupid.
I've met people many who are too busy with their lives or are otherwise indisposed to get involved in political discussions. They believe they'll get along by going along. This is where the stupidity lies.
Exactly
This is like saying - why do all phone calls go through the Bell System in 1948...
Good point that it's unclear what actually happened, but Matt's happy to go with catty remarks that appeal to his pompous left-leaning base to cover his innuendo and assumptions.
Great comment. People got addicted to the cult of Free, and can't seem to escape it. A side benefit to all of this is that people will go back to what you describe, the www of 1999, where you 'hop on' and journey on your own, and follow the links you want. I don't like google anymore, so if I want to search, I use the Brave Browser, and the qwant search engine. Those tools and my bookmarks are enough. I suspect the wave is heading in that direction for many.
Except that nothing is really free.
Powerful corporations in concert with a powerful Government and corrupt and deceitful MSM. Sounds like trouble.
There is a real use case out there for a search engine that filters out entities that advance corporate and government narratives regularly. I'd so use that.
You go to the Olympics, win a gold medal at gymnastics, getting a 10 from every judge. Next Olympics you do same routine, with two new feats, all of which you perform perfectly. Every judge gives you 6.
You lick your wounds and resolve to do better next time. You ask the judges what was the problem.
"We're not really sure why we all gave you 6. But trust us, there's nothing underhanded going on."
"Don't be evil" was removed from Google's Corporate Code of Conduct sometime during late April 2018, so half way through Trump's first term the powers that be at Google must have changed gears and decided it's now OK to be evil.
Two years ago I switched to Brave and Duck Duck Go and am better off for it. Good riddance!
They changed the motto in 2015 when they made google a subsidiary of the new, larger Alphabet corporation, but a fair point nonetheless. They no longer strive to not be evil as a corporate policy.
https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/
New motto: Okay, be evil, but only if it's profitable.
Workers in the Wuhan lab were being attacked and/or peed on by wild research bats. It’s not The Island of Dr. Moreau, just a shitty zoo/pet store.
Said workers disappeared from the lab and have not been made available for media contact. I read all this in a National Review article last summer.
As I understand it - half were welded inside their apartments and the other half flown directly from Wuhan to Milan.
A referene/link for this would be really helpful - and I'm not too keen on National Review.