Censorship

News used to have pretty strict standards to what they would air or publish.  TV news only had three networks that just had an hour of news in the evenings.  They had time to check sources and decide what to air and what not to air.  News papers, published a paper once per day. Again, they had editorial boards that OKed everything that was published and many articles would take days (or longer) to research and write.  This was regulated with the Fairness Doctrine that was put in place in 1949.  The Reagan administration did away with that in 1985.

Then guess what happened.

In the late 80s and early 90s, along came talk radio.  Rush was the biggest influence there.  He threw out to the airwaves whatever he wanted (no matter if it was real or not) and his goal was to influence people in the direction of Republicans. He constantly preached that MSM is controlled by liberals with ulterior motives against everything that is good in 'merica.  Fox took that to TV and the masses of people flocked to both sources thinking they are FINALLY getting the "truth" from a "fair and balanced" source.....which was far from that.

Liberals tried counter that with MSNBC..etc. and totally failed.

The problem is, the masses in 'merica now believe they can't believe anything from legitimate news sources.  These news sources might be 90-95 good news sources.  But, then they get something wrong or are influenced by biases on 5-10% of what they air and people throw up their hands and proclaim they can't be trusted.....then they run off to the internet, OAN, Newsmax or Fox News to get the "truth".

This right here, will literally be the downfall of our country because nobody will believe what is being reported and they run to their own "sources" that just regurgitate crap that reinforces the consumer's own biases.  People are never challenged on what they believe and people are not open to being challenged.  But, it all goes back to the late 80s and early 90s when people were convinced they couldn't trust traditional news outlets.

 
teachercd said:
Got it!  That makes way more sense.

With that said, I am 100% fine with hating on nazis, nazi lovers, hamas and pro hammy bros.  
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The problem with regulating “hate speech” as everyone knows is defining what actual “hate speech” is.    The stuff like Nazi crap or pure racist context seems easy to show as hate speech.   However, when people say for instance that they think transsexual people have a mental disorder causing them to believe they are a different sex.  And then that gets labeled as “hate speech”, we got a problem IMO.   
 

Or, if a X poster makes fun of far right or far left poster freaking out about something, we’ve seen that labeled as hate speech in years past.  
 

 
Archy1221 said:
The problem with regulating “hate speech” as everyone knows is defining what actual “hate speech” is.    The stuff like Nazi crap or pure racist context seems easy to show as hate speech.   However, when people say for instance that they think transsexual people have a mental disorder causing them to believe they are a different sex.  And then that gets labeled as “hate speech”, we got a problem IMO.   
 

Or, if a X poster makes fun of far right or far left poster freaking out about something, we’ve seen that labeled as hate speech in years past.  
 
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Totally agree.

For instance, I think if a person is Pro-Hammy and posts that, to me that is hate speech.  Just like if someone said they were pro-nazi.

But there are thousands of college kids that were pro-hammy.  Clearly they did not think the hammies are bad people.

 
teachercd said:
Ehhhh, sort of.  

But before that 100% of Americans that "got the news" got it from newspapers and your local news anchors.  Maybe 60 minutes.
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Well, yeah.

If your life depended on it -- and maybe it does -- do you believe the "news" from Walter Cronkite and the Washington Post, or from an X blogger linking you to excerpts from Joe Rogan and InfoWars?

 
Archy1221 said:
The problem with regulating “hate speech” as everyone knows is defining what actual “hate speech” is.    The stuff like Nazi crap or pure racist context seems easy to show as hate speech.   However, when people say for instance that they think transsexual people have a mental disorder causing them to believe they are a different sex.  And then that gets labeled as “hate speech”, we got a problem IMO.   
 
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Meta will now allow posters to call transgender people "it."

In terms of cruelty and intent, is calling a trans person "it" substantially different than calling a Black person the n-word? 

But yes, in your example we should probably flag misinformation about transgender people as "misinformation" rather than censor the poster for hate speech. 

 
teachercd said:
Because we have.  For 300 years we have gotten our news from other people.   Unless you were the one there witnessing it, you got it from other people.  
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And there has always been people spreading fake stories.  I think what most of us are getting at, is the amount of fake information (that looks more and more real each year with AI) is mixed in with the "news" that we would normally trust.  We no longer just watch CBS for 1 hour, or pick up one newspaper.  We are force fed stories from 1 million different directions, and hardly any of them are confirmed to be true.  This environment has also forced the formerly trustworthy sources to rush stories so they aren't late to the party; this almost certainly causes sloppy reporting.

@BigRedBuster laid it out pretty well a couple of pages ago.  Everyone's belief systems are created by internet algorithms and it is works well enough that it makes the people feel like they are using free will and critical thinking to come to the "truth".  At least their version of it.  People should not only confirm claims by cross-referencing other sources, they should also research the authors to see if their is any bias from the author.  You're a S.S. teacher, you know that.  But with this informational firehose coming through the internet, and the gratification that comes from people "liking" our hot takes, no one does any thinking. 

The only solution to any of that is to nuke social media.  It won't happen, I'm just venting because I'm inside and can't see any clouds to yell at....

 
funhusker said:
And there has always been people spreading fake stories.  I think what most of us are getting at, is the amount of fake information (that looks more and more real each year with AI) is mixed in with the "news" that we would normally trust.  We no longer just watch CBS for 1 hour, or pick up one newspaper.  We are force fed stories from 1 million different directions, and hardly any of them are confirmed to be true.  This environment has also forced the formerly trustworthy sources to rush stories so they aren't late to the party; this almost certainly causes sloppy reporting.

@BigRedBuster laid it out pretty well a couple of pages ago.  Everyone's belief systems are created by internet algorithms and it is works well enough that it makes the people feel like they are using free will and critical thinking to come to the "truth".  At least their version of it.  People should not only confirm claims by cross-referencing other sources, they should also research the authors to see if their is any bias from the author.  You're a S.S. teacher, you know that.  But with this informational firehose coming through the internet, and the gratification that comes from people "liking" our hot takes, no one does any thinking. 

The only solution to any of that is to nuke social media.  It won't happen, I'm just venting because I'm inside and can't see any clouds to yell at....
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I feel like with more social media we might be getting more accurate news AND more fake news.

Years ago, like you said, you watched the one hour news and that was pretty much it, what you saw was what you got.  And we all just thought it was true.  Maybe some of it wasn't though?  Maybe we were being fed stories?

Right now we get more information.  Which means more true info and more false info.  So there is good and bad.

 
teachercd said:
I feel like with more social media we might be getting more accurate news AND more fake news.

Years ago, like you said, you watched the one hour news and that was pretty much it, what you saw was what you got.  And we all just thought it was true.  Maybe some of it wasn't though?  Maybe we were being fed stories?

Right now we get more information.  Which means more true info and more false info.  So there is good and bad.
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Let's say we used to get 7 hours of "news" per week.  90% was good and 10% was bad.  That 7 hours was from very structured news media that took it's time (relatively speaking) to formulate a story with regulations on how to do it.

Now, "news" that is broadcasted in some fashion is  168 hours per week and 50% good and 50% bad.  However, That is from a gazillion different sources and you choose to only watch 7 hours of whatever validates your biases.

Just because we are getting more, doesn't mean it's better.  Now, there is more good than before.  But, it's mixed in with so much crap that it doesn't matter.

 
BigRedBuster said:
Let's say we used to get 7 hours of "news" per week.  90% was good and 10% was bad.  That 7 hours was from very structured news media that took it's time (relatively speaking) to formulate a story with regulations on how to do it.

Now, "news" that is broadcasted in some fashion is  168 hours per week and 50% good and 50% bad.  However, That is from a gazillion different sources and you choose to only watch 7 hours of whatever validates your biases.

Just because we are getting more, doesn't mean it's better.  Now, there is more good than before.  But, it's mixed in with so much crap that it doesn't matter.
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100% agree.

 
BigRedBuster said:
Let's say we used to get 7 hours of "news" per week.  90% was good and 10% was bad.  That 7 hours was from very structured news media that took it's time (relatively speaking) to formulate a story with regulations on how to do it.

Now, "news" that is broadcasted in some fashion is  168 hours per week and 50% good and 50% bad.  However, That is from a gazillion different sources and you choose to only watch 7 hours of whatever validates your biases.

Just because we are getting more, doesn't mean it's better.  Now, there is more good than before.  But, it's mixed in with so much crap that it doesn't matter.
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Just what I was going to add. More isn’t better, even more of the factual information, if you are unable to differentiate it from the false news. IMO, less info with a higher trust factor would be much better than more info that nobody knows wtf.

 
Guy Chamberlin said:
Meta will now allow posters to call transgender people "it."

In terms of cruelty and intent, is calling a trans person "it" substantially different than calling a Black person the n-word? 

But yes, in your example we should probably flag misinformation about transgender people as "misinformation" rather than censor the poster for hate speech. 
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Huskerboard allows posters to call groups of people “pieces of s#!t”🤷‍♂️ (based on political affiliation and sometimes worse based on fandom affiliation) 

 
teachercd said:
I feel like with more social media we might be getting more accurate news AND more fake news.

Years ago, like you said, you watched the one hour news and that was pretty much it, what you saw was what you got.  And we all just thought it was true.  Maybe some of it wasn't though?  Maybe we were being fed stories?

Right now we get more information.  Which means more true info and more false info.  So there is good and bad.
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More information. Less knowledge.

I'm not the first person to make that observation.

 
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