cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 8 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 17th, 2022

help-circle





  • There are two problems:

    1. the reddit frontend (redlib) you’re using is getting rate-limited by reddit. the page which it is trying and failing to parse as JSON contains HTML saying “Reddit rate limit exceeded. Try refreshing in a few seconds.Rate limit will reset in: 489”. So, it might work sometimes eventually but probably not for long. You should find another (less popular) instance to use instead.
    2. the redlib backend is sending this error as HTML even though the url says raw_json=1, which is why you can’t see the actual error.


  • So your proof is a nearly 20 year old article on a pro-Iraq war correspondence and interviewing a right wing pundit during Trump’s first candidacy? It hardly says that NPR is a propaganda mouthpiece, but rather says they have made mistakes as all outlets have done

    If you just listen to (or read) their reporting about the current wars you’ll see they’re still doing the exact same things described in that (almost) 20-year-old article. These aren’t mistakes, it’s their standard operating procedure.

    It hardly says that NPR is a propaganda mouthpiece

    it does, actually. Even when they are being critical of the Trump administration (which they often are) they’re doing it from the standpoint of the (to borrow a lovely term from UK English) loyal opposition.

    And US was wrong to attack Iran, but that doesn’t rule out both sides from doing bullshit reporting. It isn’t that black and white when it comes to sources.

    I agree here. Which reminds me that after you called me out for posting PressTV links you didn’t answer when I asked you this:

    PressTV is absolutely propaganda, and I am selective about what I repost from them - it’s usually something I think is news (or a newsworthy perspective) which is not being reported by western sources. Eg, this is the most recent thing I posted from there. The primary source for the story (the IRGC) is named in the headline; it isn’t like it is pretending to be something it isn’t. Do you think that post is not newsworthy? Is it better for people not to know that the IRGC is saying that? Or, what alternate source could I have linked to about it?

    These weren’t rhetorical questions; I’m actually curious what you think.

    And I am almost certain that stuff in [email protected] is pretty biased because it is lemmy.ml

    Which news communities do you think are unbiased, though? You said earlier:

    NPR and DW aren’t good examples of western propaganda, as they tend to be less biased. NYT more. BBC is mixed. […] Propaganda exists on both sides and it is important to keep that in mind. Though propaganda from dictatorships tend to be a bit more wild and obvious.

    Are there some news communities which you would consider “less biased” but which would actually remove (what you acknowledge is) propaganda from the NYT? (I doubt it, but, surprise me?)

    I think every outlet has biases, and I agree some are more obvious than others. But allowing only the less-obviously-so propaganda from one “side” doesn’t strike me as being less biased at all.

    Fwiw if you look at [email protected] right now you’ll see plenty of western propaganda outlets there amongst the Iranian and Chinese etc sources.



  • However the other comment wasn’t something worth removing

    imo it was ignorant bigotry also. 🗑

    NPR and DW aren’t good examples of western propaganda, as they tend to be less biased. NYT more. BBC is mixed.

    If you think NPR is “less biased” I highly recommend reading this which might help you see how they are anything but - that article in particular is about how NPR was instrumental in bolstering domestic support (particularly “reluctant” or “critical” support among their “progressive” listener demographic) for the Iraq war from the beginning right up to the end of it. See also this and this for somewhat-more-recent analyses of NPR’s propaganda form.

    I am not a campist

    So, for example, in the current war in Iran… you’d say both sides are wrong? You think the US should stop attacking them… but also Iran should stop defending themselves? 🤔

    And you think people who read DW’s Iran section are getting an unbiased view of the situation, while people who read [email protected] are being fed “propaganda” because I post some PressTV reporting of IRGC statements there?


  • Additionally, removing this comment comparing Hamas with Republicans was you

    Indeed it was, and I stand by that removal! In context they were actually saying the Palestinian people deserve genocide because… checks notes Hamas won an election in 2006.

    You must have noticed this was their previous comment in that thread:

    screenshot of Removed Comment "I don't care what the term is, I haven't fallen for propaganda. Hamas will kill LGBTQ where they stand, it's fact. I'm sorry if this destroys your reality but come on. We already know how they treat women. If the people of Palestine actually overthrow hamasand show they want freedom for women and LGBTQ, the I will fully be on their side , but to me, wanting to help Palestine is like wanting to help southern evangelicals. Don't do that." by Nebraska_Huskers@lemmy.world

    … but for some reason you decided to only show their second comment here? 🤔

    Anyway, if you don’t think that is bigotry we’ll have to agree to disagree; I’m not interested in debating it. But icymi do see also the rest of that user’s modlog 🙄 (spoiler: this person claiming LGBTQ rights as their reason to support genocide was eventually banned by their own instance for transphobia)

    Also you seem to like using PressTV, an Iran state-controlled outlet, in your posts on World News on lemmy.ml. You think there is no propaganda there?

    PressTV is absolutely propaganda, and I am selective about what I repost from them - it’s usually something I think is news (or a newsworthy perspective) which is not being reported by western sources. Eg, this is the most recent thing I posted from there. The primary source for the story (the IRGC) is named in the headline; it isn’t like it is pretending to be something it isn’t. Do you think that post is not newsworthy? Is it better for people not to know that the IRGC is saying that? Or, what alternate source could I have linked to about it? I also post things from NYTimes, BBC, NPR, DW, etc, but I don’t think any of them covered that story. (Are those outlets all strictly not propaganda in your view?)


  • nowhere did I say it was propaganda in this instance

    you didn’t say it but you strongly implied it by saying in this thread that i “spread propaganda” without mentioning (until your later comments, thanks) that you don’t actually think what i’m saying here is “propaganda” (by which you mean, i infer, “incorrect”).

    I am saying you spread propaganda because it has been proven time and time again that you do.

    proven! lol ok, sorry i missed my trial 😂

    fwiw depending on the definition of propaganda i could actually agree with you - a lot of what i post is advocacy for something (as is some of what you post).

    eg, looking at a few of my recent posts: is this propaganda? or this? or this? i would say all three definitely are, in the sense that they are politically motivated communication, and i stand by them.

    but you’re obviously using the term “propaganda” in its pejorative sense because you disagree with (some) of what you’ve seen me advocating for (and/or agree with other things you’ve seen me debunking), which imo is intellectually dishonest. rather than say “i disagree with arthur about XYZ, but in this case the evidence is lacking for the claims being debunked in this thread” you just said that i “blatantly spread propaganda” and drew a spiderman meme equivalency between me and the other person who you now acknowledge (thanks) is “more wrong” in this case.



  • The previous post is an ml propaganda account.

    imagine thinking this is a propaganda account, lmao 😭

    Where did the recent drop in social media engagement of European far-right party members come from? I posted an article yesterday with examples for that, and everyone can go these accounts looking it up.

    This post? That is the same article as is linked in this post, and exactly what I did look up to verify in my comment at the top of this very thread.

    I admittedly only checked their first example, to be fair, but given that the fascist who’s lack-of-retweets they’re saying is evidence also had just 6 RTs on a tweet before the strikes… I expect to find the similar non-evidence in the other two also.

    To be clear: I don’t doubt that those chuds have lots of fake followers, and they probably do buy twitter engagement, and sure they could be buying it from Russia… I’m just saying the narrative about these yandex strikes causing a drop in inauthentic behavior appears to be bogus as far as I can tell.





  • From the article:

    As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.

    That… is not what that means. The HTTP requests graphed by Cloudflare shown in the Tom’s Hardware article are the yandex web crawler. This is traffic from YandexBot, which is their search engine’s equivalent to GoogleBot. That drop in traffic doesn’t indicate anything whatsoever about russian-hosted accounts on social media, it’s about a search engine’s bots reading web pages. 🤦

    Note that the TomsHardware article graph comes from here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238 - this is one of Yandex’s AS numbers. In case you doubt that the traffic cloudlfare calls “bot traffic” there is really just the YandexBot, and you really want to believe that maybe Cloudflare is classifying social-media-posting HTTP requests as “bots” in that graph, you can check their graph for YandexBot specifically here https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/directory/yandex and you’ll see:

    second panel of The Office "it's the same picture" meme

    Besides grossly mischaracterizing what the Tom’s Hardware article says by implying that the YandexBot web crawler has something to do with the kind of bots they’re talking about, this The London Economic article also cites some slightly more plausible sounding evidence for reduced social media activity:

    Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.

    Could British fascists be getting retweets from bot farms in a yandex datacenter? Sure, they’re a cloud provider, they’re no doubt hosting some stuff like that.

    But, does this example actually demonstrate it? No. The first yandex datacenter strike was on October 8; here is a tweet from @TiceRichard from October 6 with only 10 replies and 6 retweets: screenshot of the tweet linked and described

    If there has actually been a measurable drop in “inauthentic” social media posts (or other retweets or likes or whatever) as a result of the yandex datacenter strikes, I still haven’t seen evidence of it.




  • Why is Tuta shitty?

    here and here are two of my past comments about them with more links, but, tldr:

    • their email encryption is not interoperable
    • their encrypted email service encourages people to use a browser-based thing with an incoherent threat model: the server that the e2ee is supposed to protect you from is the same one that serves you the code each time, which means that it would trivial to subvert it on-demand for targeted users with a negligibly-small chance of anyone catching them in the act. this is an example of cryptographic snake oil.
      • note that whether (or how often) they actually do subvert their encryption for targeted users is unproven; it has been alleged in court testimony that they do, and that the entire service is in fact a honey pot for doing exactly this (see my other comments for a link about that), but the testimony is perhaps not the most credible. however, the fact that they have the ability to do this (and without much chance of being caught) is undeniable and obvious to experts while being very much not obvious to most of their users.
    • they are incessant blog spammers, writing advertorials about every vaguely-privacy-related news event to promote their products
    • and, a new item on the list (not particularly surprising, given their history of shameless hucksterism): their README claims a clear policy against AI contributions but if you click that link and scroll up and click the three dots next to the commit message (“test plugin kit and nextcloud plugin”) you can see it says “Assisted-by: Claude:claude-sonnet-5”. (This kind of dishonest bandwagon-jumping-on is very on-brand for tuta.)