SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the where's-a-muckraker-when-you-need-one? dept.
Okay, so, I wasn't going to submit these here because I've really had quite enough of politics for the year but it seems the mainstream media are having an absolute blackout on anything critical of Hillary, to the point of CNN has both coincidentally lost a sitting congressman's satellite feed immediately after mentioning wikileaks and tried to tell their viewers that even reading the wikileaks emails is illegal.
These two videos by Project Veritas Action, apparently with more to come, are the result of a year or so of actual investigative journalism and deserve coverage somewhere though. I don't personally care at all if you like Hillary or not but it's always better to know the truth than to stick your head in the sand, so here they are.
The first part in the series is titled Clinton Campaign and DNC Incite Violence at Trump Rallies. It basically shows precisely what it says it does. Hidden cameras capture Scott Foval of Americans United for Change not so much admitting as bragging that they have operatives in numerous major cities that are actually trained in how best to incite violence at Trump rallies.
The second part of the series is again aptly titled Mass Voter Fraud. In this video Scott Foval is again captured going into minute detail on how not only go commit mass voter fraud but how to get away with it.
Scott Foval and Robert Creamer (also in the videos) are currently unemployed as a result of these videos. Whether Mrs. Clinton should be as well, that's for you to decide.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:55AM
The mainstream media now includes Facebook and Twitter, in my opinion. A complication is that you can and do get banned there for posting material disfavorable to certain candidates, or for that matter discussing certain topics. It seems an easy way to get shadow-banned for a short while on Twitter is to criticize Clinton, as one example. Social media is really heavily curated to prevent some issues from rising to the top. It is not a communications medium and those relying on it or even playing too deeply with it become misinformed.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by weeds on Thursday October 20 2016, @12:18PM
Interesting opinion. The state of the voting population is pretty bad if anyone is getting their news from Facebook and Twitter. If they don't know that FB and T are under no obligation to provide a channel to anyone and are free to control what they publish, those who use them for news are the problem.
Refresher to possibly head off the free speech comments:
First amendment:
"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech"
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @12:25PM
Agreed. However, if your phone company (also not limited by the First Amendment) started dropping your calls whenever you started talking about a given subject (or simply dropping the recipient while keeping your side connected, ala shadow-banning), you might then understand why FB and T users are upset over their treatment by said companies. Apparently, the youngsters nowadays use FB and T much like we creaky longbeards used telephone and email back in the day.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Oakenshield on Thursday October 20 2016, @12:45PM
For certain values of the term "youngster" this may be true. Around my neck of the woods, "youngsters" use Snapchat and Instagram. Facebook is what parents use to tell other parents what they ate for dinner and where they went after work last night. Twitter is where Kardashian obsessives go for their fixes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @12:52PM
The phone company can't because they'd lose common carrier status.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @12:58PM
They certainly could; it's not a requirement that the phone company remain a common carrier. However, it is quite unlikely the phone company would choose to censor communications.
None of which even challenges my primary point that people get understandably upset when their communications are censored.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday October 20 2016, @12:27PM
The state of the voting population is pretty bad if anyone is getting their news from Facebook and Twitte
Truly. And it's worse that most people realize. Millennials and X-ers get most of their "news" from Facebook [journalism.org], or at least they believe what they are getting is news. It is rather insidious because while it is heavily curated towards particular inclinations, the useds on it believe they are getting unfiltered information.
Broadcast media aren't much better. Most in the US only get a single TV station and one or two radio stations, those being Faux News or Cumulus or Clear Channel...
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday October 20 2016, @01:40PM
or at least they believe what they are getting is news. It is rather insidious because while it is heavily curated towards particular inclinations, the useds on it believe they are getting unfiltered information.
This is really important, and the filter bubble [wikipedia.org] effect a likely major contributor to the increasing polarization of politics in the U.S. People have always gravitated toward news sources that seem to agree with them, whether they subscribed to some radical newsletter back in the day, or listened to conservative talk radio, or whatever. But at least most of the time the ideological slant was clear in those things -- you may have thought Rush Limbaugh was the best source of news and commentary, but you also knew you were deliberately seeking out a more conservative news source. This became easier to do with the rise of blogs and curated internet news sources, where people could choose to live inside their "bubble" and only read news from things that agreed with them.
But Facebook is SO much more insidious than all of that, because users are completely unaware of how much filtering may (or may not) be going on to "personalize" their experience. Same thing with Google searches. I first noticed personally back in 2012 when I was interested in the whole Ron Paul fiasco and the Republican Party's reaction to it. I wasn't really a Paul supporter, but I was somewhat disturbed by the way the whole thing was handled, so I'd search for "Ron Paul" every few days to see what was going on. Soon, Google News started showing me a lot more links to news about Ron Paul... which at first I took to mean that he was getting more national attention or something. But then I compared it to a friends' results, and I discovered that no -- Google was just showing me what I wanted. But for a diehard Ron Paul supporter, this could be incredibly misleading. Thus, it doesn't surprise me at all when you encounter people who have completely weird perspectives on their favorite candidate or whatever -- why not? Their news sources seem to tell them that they are correct!
This is actually the truly disturbing aspect of Facebook's data collection/ad revenue scheme. We can't know all the details of Facebook's algorithm, since it wants to keep it secret to make profits. But in the course of doing so, they are actually altering "reality" for people by selectively feeding them stuff without letting them know how it may be biased. I have no problem with a customized news feed or whatever, but when you can't even find out how exactly your "news" is being tampered with... that's profoundly disturbing.
(And for those who would argue that our news is always "tampered with" by journalist/editorial/whatever bias, I agree to some extent. But the potential for unintended "feedback loops" now is much greater and thus potentially much more divisive.)
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Friday October 21 2016, @04:16PM
By somewhat-related coincidence, I was talking to a funeral director today who uses Facebook to advertise her business; she told me she kept seeing any amount of suggestions that she should be looking at celebrity gossip, but nothing more appropriate to her line of work and no suggestions to 'friend' people she hadn't seen in years. I get a fair bit of the latter (why not say hello to that arsehole who bullied your brother in school?), plus every time I look at that site on my phone I get an invitation to 'friend' Zuckerberg. I've never met the man!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:38PM
Millennials and X-ers get most of their "news" from Facebook [journalism.org]
I get what you're saying, and I think a lot of old people underestimate how much young people rely on social media for news. I wouldn't be incredibly surprised if your statement was true, but it isn't backed up by your link. Your link is showing that Facebook has a wider reach for that demographic than any of the other news sources measured, not that it is the source they get the most news from. Note that the percentages in the poll add up to well over 100%. If a group of 10 people each read 1 story a week from Facebook, and 20 stories another news source (that varied from person to person), Facebook would still be the most popular news source by the metric used even though there would be 10 other news sources that each provided twice as much news as Facebook.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:47PM
In fact, reading further, they actually list the sources that Millenials cite as their main source of political news* and Facebook doens't make the short list: CNN (21%), Local TV (10%), Fox News (8%), Google News (7%), Yahoo News (7%).
*The entire scope of the polls being discussed is political news, not news in general, so this isn't a switch-and-bait.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday October 20 2016, @09:39PM
Broadcast media aren't much better. Most in the US only get a single TV station...
It's certainly no better where I am, pretty but vacant idiots reading propaganda off autocues.
I counted three mispronunciations of either place names or people's names on the most popular 6 o'clock news broadcast in New Zealand last night.
The news bulletin was followed by a couple of gurning fools blathering about how awful Trump is for another 30 minutes or so. I watched some of it out of total disbelief at how balance has disappeared from our air waves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:39PM
Don't remember if I've ever heard where you are from, Weeds. But, the state of the US electorate is sad indeed. Note that important issues are on the back burner, and have been for half a century, while unimportant crap like gay marriage commanded front page attention for almost a decade.
Note that congress continues to abdicate authority to corporations in the form of "trade agreements". The electorate doesn't have a clue that our elected officials are pissing away our sovereignty.
Note that our current choice for president are a clown and a murderous theif. Again, the electorate hasn't a clue.
And, as you mention, damned near no one has a clue that FB and T capitalize on each and every user, while working hard to shape opinion.
I first heard the term "social engineering" with respect to Kellog pushing breakfast cereals a hundred years or more ago. Today, the great-great grandchildren of that generation clamors to be engineered again.
It's crazy - just crazy.