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Elon Musk has floated the idea of creating Pravda, a web site that would allow users to rate/review the credibility of media organizations and journalists. Pravda Corp. was formed in Delaware and incorporated in California, according to an October 19, 2017 filing. Jared Birchall, a director at Musk's Boring Company, is President of Pravda Corp., and the addresses are identical:
Musk's idea quickly raised concerns that the reputation of news organizations and reporters could be determined by what could be an easy to manipulate online popular vote.
"Elon's next company: Rate My Professor but for Journalists. What a great idea that won't be gamed immediately in extremely predictable ways," Rene DiResta, who researches computation propaganda and is a policy lead at Data For Democracy, wrote on Twitter.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, told CNN such a service might might make sense if it employed a careful methodology and was overseen by an independent journalism foundation.
"It's not a crackpot idea," he said. "The question is why should Elon Musk be the one running it and how trustworthy would it be if he ran it."
Musk has been criticized a lot lately.
Also at The Verge, New Statesman, and The Washington Post.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Monday May 28 2018, @02:47PM (23 children)
Many of the media outlets who have been very vocal about how thin-skinned Musk is and how he rants on Twitter, have now been found with those precise attributes. Hilarious, except it's so sad that it's all come to this. If the media can't be trusted to hold those in power to account, we have lost our perhaps most valuable asset in the defense of democracy.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by quietus on Monday May 28 2018, @02:53PM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @03:54PM
It's protected by CloudFlare. Archived here: https://archive.is/jeSG3 [archive.is]
(Score: 5, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday May 28 2018, @04:18PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday May 28 2018, @03:10PM (16 children)
The gist of your comment is basically a generalization of the media in general, especially since around the election time.
I have said over and over again that I was a faithful NPR listener for years, but if there is one thing this election proved, it's that even the classiest news outlets will resort to tabloid-style journalism and lower themselves to the level of crude ad-hominem attacks and otherwise exaggerated sensationalism.
It also doesn't help NPR that, being mostly Jews, their voices are grating and annoying even before they become audibly irritated.
Unfortunately, even if Musk and his Pravda staff were pure of intent, the human element (and especially language in particular) leaves too much wiggle-room to make totally subjective judgement. If you want to see exactly why this is a bad idea, look at Politifact. The beauty of human language is that you can write a truth while simultaneously convincing the reader of the opposite truth.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @03:31PM (6 children)
.. and people keep saying there are no nazi's here.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday May 28 2018, @04:57PM (5 children)
But Eth is an *ironic* Nazi. You know? The ones who say and do all the neo-Nazi stuff but don't actually mean it (while you're looking directly at them). Imagine a Boo Diddley, except when Mario turns away it does the Heil instead of sticking its tongue out...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday May 28 2018, @05:16PM (4 children)
Trolls are not, typically, nazis, but they will do whatever they think will get a rise out of the audience. If it's nazism that causes the audience to lose their shit, the trolls will play nazis. If a troll finds an audience of nazis, he'll pretend to be Jewish instead. Or perhaps Neil deGrasse Tyson. You get the idea.
The internet is infested with trolls. There may be some nazis too, but they're statistical noise next to the trolls.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday May 28 2018, @05:41PM (3 children)
A good writing exercise, one practiced by debate teams even, is to defend a point in which you don't believe. To become your enemy makes you more acute in defending your point. Unfortunately, the more you stare into the abyss, the more the abyss stares back at you.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Arik on Monday May 28 2018, @06:32PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @06:54PM
EF just being stupid again.
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:06AM
So... you're saying that all these assholes on the internet are because of goatse?!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Monday May 28 2018, @03:54PM (3 children)
I had the same experience. They're still on my dial in the car, and there's still interesting content, but all too often I tune in to one of the 20 minute hates and tune right on over to something else instead. It's not even that I like Trump, I disliked him before it was cool and I still think he's a chump :P but they don't go after him for anything rationally defensible even, it's just a reflexive, tribalized, almost ritualized exercise in hatemongering. That shit turned me off to certain talk radio hosts when it was Obama that was the target and it turns me off just the same when it's aimed at Trump.
It should be beneath them to act like this, and the fact that it is not robs them of all respect in my sight.
"It also doesn't help NPR that, being mostly Jews, their voices are grating and annoying even before they become audibly irritated."
Lol, sure. Jews have grating voices (is this genetic jews, religious jews, either/both? just how does that work?) and that's why there are no famous jewish singers.
Wait, what?
I really think you are an intentional parody sometimes.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday May 28 2018, @04:50PM
I'm surprised you didn't juxtapose his "lower themselves to the level of crude ad-hominem attacks" with his "being mostly Jews, their voices are grating and annoying".
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday May 28 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
Yeah, wouldn't generalize such a think and think eth really wouldn't either and is trolling. But I can certainly think of one good perfect "canonical" example. Mark Levin. On the radio he seems to be near a rage stroke about half the time and I can't stand the sound of his voice. So I don't listen much and the Mrs also agrees that she can't stand his voice and changes the station so I often don't get a say in the matter. :) But we watched the premiere of his new FNC show and agree it is a great thing, deemed it DVR worthy after the 2nd episode. The difference? He does a sit down interview with a guest for the whole hour and is calm and rational. So few long form programs on TV (lots online of course) and without the shouting the guy really gets a chance to show he really knows his stuff. Makes one wonder if the shouting is a gimmick and there is simply an audience for it on both sides.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Monday May 28 2018, @06:35PM
A few decades ago, a guy that screeched and raved had a relatively hard time finding an audience. It was perceived as crude and boorish.
Now, it's perceived as free and unfiltered, and lots of people cynically play that. The stigma on boorish behavior in general seems to have pretty much evaporated, and outrage mobs are not a replacement.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @04:22PM (4 children)
How do you tell when EF is being stupid? ... He is.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @04:45PM (3 children)
Apart from blaming it on the Jews for it, he does have a point. One of the two issues where you can assume they have a massive bias is in reporting on Israel. The other is reporting on women's issues. Both of which they don't bother to even pretend like they're being objective the reporting has gotten that skewed. But, for most other stuff, they seem to do a pretty good job of covering things based on the facts.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday May 28 2018, @05:10PM (2 children)
Assuming 'they' refers back to 'the Jews' in the prior sentence, that's overgeneralization at best. There's considerable tension and division, and you'll find that some of the sharpest critics of that state have been and are today Jews. On the other hand of course the state does have considerable institutional support by inertia and many positively enraptured supporters, and many of them are Jews of course, but the "evangelical Christians" actually seem to outshine even Jews here, assuming you are talking about the US. Jewish communities are traditionally liberal and current events are sapping support from that quarter, while evangelicals are much more numerous and instead of being turned off by current events they revel in them. Look at Nikki Haley. Certainly not a Jew, and I doubt she has any actual concern for Jews either, but many evangelicals believe in an interpretation of Revelations which has "the Jews" gathered together in the holy land, just before they're all slaughtered and Jesus returns, and you can see how this would motivate a sort of unreasoning and unconditional support.
"But, for most other stuff, they seem to do a pretty good job of covering things based on the facts."
I think you may be exposing a little naïveté there. How often do you fact check them on the other things?
In my experience, every time I've been 'on the ground' for an event and then watched mainstream coverage of it, the coverage has been inaccurate. Every single time.
It doesn't always appear to be bias - there's room for good old fashioned sloppiness, and incompetence, but the more cases I've been able to fact check the media on, the more convinced I am that traditional news sources almost never get anything right.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @05:17PM (1 child)
You're not literate if you don't think that the "they" refers to some sort of organization that engages in reporting. Last I checked, Jews are not known for reporting on various current events.
As far as their accuracy goes, I get my information from numerous sources and what they're covering is generally consistent with what other media outlets are covering. Especially ones that are also not taking corporate money. We don't have time to fact check absolutely everything, which is why critical thinking skills are so important. The news available from NPR is much better than what you see in many other outlets, even if it isn't perfect. For example, the coverage they gave of the great recession was one of the few places that took the time to actually explain what was going on and place appropriate blame on credit default swaps and the ability of corporations to take them out as a wager rather than as insurance on assets they actually owned.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday May 28 2018, @05:26PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday May 28 2018, @06:42PM (2 children)
Did you even read Musk's tweets on that topic? How can the media hold the powerful to account when the media ARE the powerful? They are both the watchmen and the watchers. The statement that "all "media" is created by six multi-national corporations" is not quite true but close enough for a first approximation because so little gets created outside those six that combined with those same six also controlling distribution that they control The Narrative. Amazon is on the verge of muscling in and becoming number seven. Those same six corporations are also heavily intertwined with the ruling Party both on the official org charts and by blood and marriage between the people who run them and those who rule us. The only question is, "does the media push the Party line or does the Party now obey the media?" Considering the media attracts much dumber people and The Party has increasingly exhibited a lot more idiocy in its governing the fear is the mouthpieces have become the brains of the outfit.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:15AM (1 child)
Your comment and mine are not mutually exclusive. I do however remember a time before the media solely became the playground of the powerful. Or at least, a time when they weren't so blatant about it.
Do I think Pravda will work/be a good idea? No, odds are it'll be trolled, flamed, botted, heckled and hacked into oblivion, just like any other brightly painted target on the internet. Might it still be a worthwhile exercise despite that? Possibly. The Streissand Effect could potentially lead to some changes, but what they would be and if they'd be for the good, I cannot guess.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:53AM
Agreed. Sometimes failure can be a great teacher - not just to the person but others observing. What's worse is to not even try. Musk maybe cuckoo and/or have his own sinister agenda, but I applaud him for at least trying not matter how futile or dumb. In this regards, he's done more, no matter how infinitesimally small, than the armchair critics. Even if the news of this stupidity makes a single person realize a tiny bit that they may have to learn to exercise some doubt to their daily news feed is potentially a seed worth planting.