I can see that you took note of my commentary on word choice, but you seem to be discounting the idea of charity on the part of whoever runs this hypothetical indie media outlet (see lemmy itself) even as you accept the idea of the audience engaging in charity. Of course, there are scams like PragerU that run at a loss as propaganda outlets, but we can see that they do this by being bankrolled by billionaires.

The idea of a service being “illegitimate” when it is not trying to sell things is bizarre, since your argument seems to lead to the conclusion that “it is outside of the economic framework I have put forward” without explaining the basis for the hypothetical scam.

I do not think there is anything to be gained by pretending that the issue of funding (and its sources) can just be ignored.

I propose no such thing! Quite to the contrary, what I am saying is that you are not scrutinizing the question enough. Specifically, the biases that all corporate media has towards promoting the idea of the near-monopoly on “legitimate journalism” held by corporate media and friendly state media, as well as promoting the institutional powers and corporate backers upon which they ground their business. I likewise think people shouldn’t rush to accept state-funded media as being “independent” when they have largely demonstrated a deep-seated bias towards promoting the interests of their state sponsors. This is not a coincidence!

People that are invested in getting stories that are against the interests of the country they are in must first recognize that it’s an uphill battle more complicated than the consumer lifestyle bullshit offered by the sources that – thanks to their capital giving them immense brand awareness – make themselves “easy to come by”.

While it’s undeniably true that subscription-based services spend a lot of resources on keeping people subscribed, they will have a very hard time accomplishing that goal without providing what their customers want in exchange for that. That doesn’t guarantee even slightly that what their customers want will be accurate information, as you demonstrated amply with your Alex Jones, Crowder, and Breitbart examples.

Tell me, does anyone who follows a news source not profess that they want “accurate information”? From CNN to Epoch Times to Breitbart to Yahoo News (funny how underrepresented the left is in major western news sources, by the way), does anyone say “Oh, I don’t care if it is accurate.” No, of course not! And yet, it should go without saying that people clearly have a bit more going on than that for a source like Breitbart to have success. Of course, once we establish some people are acting against their professed desire for accuracy and are happily being fed bullshit, this also brings oneself into question.

So if it’s not merely what they say they want, what do people actually want?

Let me take a slight detour: What is ideology? A set of beliefs regarding both values and empirical facts, I think everyone can agree on that. What is the basis for the adoption of ideology? This is much more contentious, but I think the most foundational element of this has only one good answer: Ideology is a survival strategy.

Ideology is a huge topic, theoretically infinitely huge, between the immense weight of the historical record, the epistemically infinite possibilities for the future, and the stipulatively infinite number of different values someone can choose, and the endless ways these can relate to each other in various forms of inference. People don’t have time for that, and yet in their desire for meaning and connection (along with being directly instructed to) there is pressure from an early age to develop an ideology, so they use what they virtually always do: heuristics, preconceptions in the form of perceived correlations generalized so as to be all-encompassing to their subject matter. This makes it much easier to develop at least a rough ideological framework, but it does not help determine which simplified ideological tenets they ascribe to. This, again, can be explained as a survival strategy: People become enculturated to groups that they are attracted to, and they fall into such groups for material reasons, whether perceived opportunity for gain, promise of security, or being spurned by other groups, all with an immense bias towards locality.

In short, ideology is functionally a way to relate to society on the basis of what is the most profitable or convenient. Capital-T “Truth” is only relevant insofar as it directly impacts one’s own living conditions, and even then it might take up an antagonistic role (see antivaxxers).

So, returning to the original topic of media consumption, I would like to advance the thesis that people want media that comports with their ideology, which means media that they find convenient or profitable for navigating their day-to-day lives. Whether the media advances ideas that are capital-T “True” is not relevant if it is functionally very distant from someone’s life in either geography, chronology, or social grouping.

But if they are going to be around regardless of what anyone else wants, then they are both much freer to provide accurate information and much freer to completely ignore what would, in a more personal setting, be regarded as important social cues that they are being unhelpful. You can’t “vote with your feet” if they tie you down and chop off your legs!

I don’t follow the second part, but I think I’ve demonstrated that the media being “free” to provide accurate information doesn’t mean very much to the information that they will provide. They can do great research, but their vested interest is mainly what amounts to pandering to the ideology of their target demographics.

Sure, but a lot of manipulative people of all walks of life use those tactics, frankly because they often work. Another common tactic is to say “you need to be open minded” and “listen to all viewpoints”, but then when confronted with a viewpoint that differs significantly from theirs, they start lobbing insults and shaming people for disagreeing. Unfortunately, I often see that behavior from people who describe themselves as “leftists”, but who a lot of other self-described “leftists” would probably insult and dismiss themselves as “tankies”.

I don’t see how this is relevant other than finding a way to bring Tankie Discourse^tm into this, which I think we can really do without for the time being unless you’d like to use it to construct a more relevant argument.

I look forward to what else you have to say.

Complete aside, Citations Needed is a cool podcast that is free

I’m unfamiliar with two of those, but I know BBC and NPR quite well. I’d be careful with believing that state media is “independent” just because it’s written down somewhere that it is. Whatever they might say, it’s still the government providing a great deal of their funding, and that same government can raise or lower the money they get.

The BBC is notoriously slanted to the right, but I think gets its reputation laundered somewhat by American Democrats because the American center if much further to the right than Britain’s. When you see how the Tories have attacked them so viciously for having a “left bias” (which is bullshit), it seems reasonable to guess that part of this drift is self-preservation of the organization at the cost of its usefulness to people other than Tories.

NPR toes the Dem line slavishly, inviting to some extent attacks from the right (as Dem-aligned corporate news also does) but rarely even acknowledging that there is a left beyond them (as Dem-aligned corporate news also does).

The idea that paid is better than free is just a joke of a position and I think you can quite easily deconstruct it yourself. Pick some free news source that’s broadly inoffensive, like the free episodes of some shitty podcast or something. However lacking you and I might find it, are we really going to say that it’s worse than whatever Exclusive Content can be raked up from paying subscriptions to Crowder or Molyneux or Alex Jones or some other reactionary cultist? Are we really saying that the paid version of Breitbart is a much better source than some lib shithead’s Twitter feed? Do you even know what yellow journalism is or that tabloids sell by subscription?

Get away for a second from words like “quality” that are epistemically messy and consider the market incentives: What any subscription service wants is for people to subscribe and then stay subscribed. This is what they invest their money in and anything else is either wholly secondary or based on a different revenue stream (like ad revenue, sponsorship, or grants).

Does this forbid them from putting out “high-quality” news? No, not necessarily, but it seems that the “quality” of the news is secondary to whatever keeps the subscription paid month to month. Alex Jones displays an excellent example of one of the most salient investments for these businesses: Fostering dependency. Through his conspiracism, he promotes the idea that listening to his program and only his program allows the viewer to be largely free of whatever “satanic vampire brainwashing” he warns them about. Andrew Tate does the same thing, he just calls it the “Matrix”. However, this is only one approach, and there are many other ways to get your audience to believe that yours is either the only service or one of a narrow range of services worth having, and all the self-flattering that goes on in liberal journalism should tip you off that the neoliberal press behaves almost like a guild, hostile to independent journalists and relatively friendly to those who have the same agenda or the same corporate masters. One can look at any of those bullshit “bias” charts and see how they equate centrism with being “free of bias,” which is simply absurd on its face.

Since they are optimizing for subscription and retention, one of their biggest threats is damage to their reputation. If a paper is operating out of the US and mostly to US customers, this has an effect that people don’t address often enough: The most dangerous thing to these papers short of the government or rioters shutting down their offices are other major powers in US-consumed media attacking them in a way that discredits them to their own target demographic. Bigger newspapers tend to be very siloed in terms of their audiences, so it’s not a huge deal if Fox attacks the NYT or CNN attacks the Sun – usually – but by its very nature this means there is only a very limited extent to which they can oppose the US government before the government becomes serious about retaliating, and thereby enlists all of the other major media outlets in retaliating. Trump flirted with this but never fully committed because the attacks on him specifically were literally part of his appeal to his own base, and these attacks never questioned the broader structures of power represented by the WH itself or the two-party system.

Oh yeah, and there’s the adjacent matter of “Access Journalism.” You know what makes the news a lot? Big and powerful institutions. If you want to do interviews with people who are either being reported on by other outlets or have information pertinent to a story being reported by other outlets, you better have a track record of being friendly in your coverage, or you’ll be denied the interview!

Overwhelmingly, being a big media company making its money on subscriptions does create a bias, not towards “higher” or “lower” quality, but towards being friendly to the structures of power that the company is based in and reporting on!

A huge amount of what you discuss is covered very explicitly in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” so I’ll just offer the text and audio formats of that in case you are interested and leave you on your way.

If people chose a ‘red’ government, and they are chosen through continued fair elections with no disingenuous means or force, all the power to them.

What would that look like? Specifically, let us imagine a world where it is true that Cuba or the DPRK or wherever does indeed hold free and fair elections on a regular basis, but that everything else about the world was exactly as you, I assume, admit it is (such as the vicious sanctioning and libel by western powers). From where you are sitting, what would the difference be? What sort of information would you be aware of, would you receive from where you are in the world and the media you consume, that was in any way different?

I have some memory of you being reasonable when actually presented with arguments. I would strongly encourage you to try to actual talk to these people that you speak about in such strong pejoratives, perhaps by asking them non-presumptuous questions. I think you will find that they have more to say than you give them credit for.

The people running beehaw are extremely dishonest about this issue, citing “hate speech” as a reason for defederation with platforms that aggressively ban and remove hate speech, including the only instance I know of that actually displays pronouns with the username (Hexbear.net , which they preemptively banned).

The other person was calling them a supporter of fascism, no sense whining about them being “combative” when that’s a serious accusation

No I never implied that at all

Emphasis mine

It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist.

Get out of here with that bad faith nonsense

The users from certain other instances are talking about it nonstop and trying to make it a wedge issue, so it’s not surprising

Unfortunately I also saw the videos and pictures of tanks grinding bodies into pulp and washing them down drains shortly after this… That one certainly made me think.

No you didn’t, because no such video exists. No such video exists because that story – of pulping bodies and “washing them down drains” – is ridiculous, impractical nonsense made up by someone who wasn’t even there (I forget if it was student leader Chai Ling or one of the reporters sitting in their Beijing Hotel room who is responsible for that specific gem, but both lied about witnessing things they weren’t there for).

Why do you need to lie about what you have seen in order to defend your thesis? Aren’t these real and serious events that deserve to be treated with gravity? I don’t feel particularly inclined to speak so flippantly about the people who actually did die on June 4th – incidentally the day before the Tank Man video, which is of him obstructing tanks leaving the square.

I appreciate you magnanimity :)

It’s also an article by Foreign Policy because I didn’t want to get into a spat about sourcing. Mostly it applies to businesses, not people, and unsubstantiated words like “draconian” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. FP likes to obfuscate that fact, but you can see even in what you quoted that they tip their hand on the rhetorical contortions they are doing when they list:

These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.

hmm, what do these things all have in common? They all apply overwhelmingly or virtually-exclusively to businesses! E-commerce can, without further elaboration, apply to peer-to-peer interactions like on ebay, and “court judgement” is a similarly vague term, but you don’t get some normal private citizen on charges related to “food safety,” “foreign economic cooperation,” or – based on it not being titled “traffic law” or whatever – “transportation”, and the overwhelming majority of both tax payment and tax fraud is done by the rich.

There is a social credit system for businesses, and their should be. Reddit memes about “-20 billion social credit score” for posting a meme with lego tanks has no place in reality.

Please read what someone writes a little more carefully before trying to do gotchas. I said:

Of course, my answer is that some speech is worth protecting and some is not and questions of natural rights have nothing to do with that,

i.e. natural rights are not relevant to useful questions about moderation. I only use the term to call the concept irrelevant. Then I said:

so the chauvinistic redditors posting social credit score memes that were tired years ago and thoroughly debunked don’t need a platform

My complaint is letting people post low-effort* memes and misinformation isn’t worthwhile, and if your concept of “Free Speech” conflicts with that, then that concept should be replaced by something better because you’re just caping for garbage.

*please don’t get debate club about this term, it’s a waste of time. Shit that is just a jpeg copied and reproduced endlessly so you can get updoots to the left because winnie the pooh is evil is low-effort. If someone does their own bespoke photoshop of the bear copulating with a tank, it is not low-effort, though you should ban that person for other reasons (obscenity, etc.)

this is an illustration of why enforcing ideology is not a good idea

This reminds me of people saying the government shouldn’t “legislate morality,” i.e. be involved in or have a stance on moral issues. In both cases, it seems to me to be oblivious to the status-quo that ideology/morality are already enforced in those respective domains and there is no end in sight for that.

The admin who kindly gave me some of his time indeed already shared the basic ideological tenets of the administration policy. The deplatforming of rudeness, of crassness, and of, uh, “lumping one type of people into a group indiscriminately” are all ideological concerns unless you want to look at it merely as market concerns, as though that changes the fact.

It’s also common practice to at least nominally ban the spreading of misinformation, though our host gave no indication of doing that, and this again is also a highly ideological tenet. If misinformation drives engagement – and we know it can – why ban it? Presumably because it is also a social ill, or because you want to have a positive reputation, etc.

But these are things that are obfuscated in the “Discourse,” thanks in part to the wonderful legacy of classical liberal authors who wanted to find a way to make their ideology look like non-ideology (see Locke using faux a priori arguments to protect the property rights of monopolists).

If you want a comparison, I’ll use the Republican whipping-dog because you are probably familiar with it. Repubs talk a big game about “Small government.” “The government that governs best governs least.” “The most terrifying sentence in the English language is: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” And yet, though they are not alone in this, they are perhaps the most enthusiastic supporters of increasing the power and funding of police and the military! That doesn’t seem like “small government” to me! But that’s because when they talk about “government” in this context, that’s not what they mean, they mean a very narrow subset of laws mostly connected to austerity and corporate deregulation that they want to promote. This kind of double-talk is a rhetorically powerful tool for derailing critical thinking by essentially baiting the listener into conflating cases that are very different.

The blanket denouncement of “enforcing ideology” reminds me of that. Sure, there are bad ways to do it, and you provided an example, but that does not mean it cannot be done well and it obfuscates that it is already being done! The question is not about whether or not to enforce ideology, but what ideological lines to enforce and how. The status quo is not neutral just because we have been habituated to it!

Edit: Total aside, but I don’t believe in natural rights (I think human welfare is better advanced by other frameworks), I was just speaking in terms of the ideology of the Constitution, which does support that idea.

Ha, fair question! They have plenty of people they dislike, but what I was trying to refer to was their opposition to what they call “tankies” and I call “People who believe that the US lies about its enemies, particularly its big geopolitical rivals.” Specifically, while they are conversationally annoying about it, what really bugs me is their campaign to defederate and get others to defederate from spaces they deem “tankie-friendly”. I think that really undermines the platform as a whole to pillarize things that way (i.e. closing things off into silos).

“Sectarianism” arguably isn’t the right word for that (it has intra-ideology connotations), but I didn’t think it was worth splitting hairs over.

I’m the first one to say that an uncritical and crassly-applied “free speech” ideology is deleterious, but it’s the First Amendment that doesn’t apply, not the concept of Free Speech itself. Under the Constitution, you are free not to apply the concept of Free Speech yourself since the First Amendment doesn’t apply to your moderation, but that does not answer the question of whether you should or not.

Of course, my answer is that some speech is worth protecting and some is not and questions of natural rights have nothing to do with that, so the chauvinistic redditors posting social credit score memes that were tired years ago and thoroughly debunked don’t need a platform, but that’s just my take on the matter.

Oh yeah, and the “orc” meme is clearly racist, but that’s why I worded my original question the way I did.

Thank you for your time and have a good day.

Thank you for letting me know. I always forget about that because I can see their replies. In any case, I’m more worried about what the people on lemmy.world think, since Beehaw has basically become a purpose-built engine of sectarianism, so the content of those replies would be a foregone conclusion.

I’ll try to remember to use my lemmy.ml account in the future for this.

Does that mean that you find everything in this thread that hasn’t yet been removed to fall within those bounds? (excluding very new stuff that you might not have gotten to)

You’ve got real points here, but there’s also an issue with sectarians deliberately pillarizing the lemmy fediverse, which can only end up producing other sorts of garbage seen on social media with siloed interaction.