To fix this, Ground.news should update their algorithm to perform much more scrutiny for headlines trending on right-leaning sites. Especially considering that nearly all their right-leaning sources have very low or basically non-existent factuality ratings.
...or just remove (entirely) any "news" source that doesn't have a high factuality rating. That would be the most logical choice but I do sympathize with the fact that would remove nearly all right-leaning "news" sites.
If I were in charge I'd reorient the leanings so that sources like NPR would not show up as "left-leaning" but as centrist (i.e. a more European alignment which is more historically accurate/real, IMHO). Which is where they actually sit (in reality). Sites like Breitbart would be discarded entirely as failing tests of factuality.
It is not historically accurate. The terms left and right come from the French Revolution.
Those on the right supported a strong monarchy, those in a center supported a weak monarchy with a republic, and those on the left supported a republic and no monarchy.
Pretty much every news media, regardless if they are now considered "right wing", would meet the definition of left wing historically.
I agree. I was just commenting on how the historical understanding is not more accurate for today's understanding and how his definition of historical was quite modern still.
> A similar story for those who claim left-wing politicians in the USA are really "European centrists" -- possibly true, but pedantic and irrelevant in the context of American left-right discussions.
I also agree, but I think that it is hard to know what politicians actually believe. I'm sure there are a number of communists in congress, they just aren't open about it and support more moderate legislation to not look radical. For all we know many of the left wing US politicians are further left than European ones.
Just looking at what they say and vote is not true to their beliefs.
We don't have "right leaning facts", we either have facts or we don't.
And yes, omitting facts or focusing on others can certainly influence people, but we aren't even at that point any more, we have lies being positioned as equally valid "other side" arguments.
- Factuality (low -> high)
- Partisanship (low -> high)
- Political orientation: social issues (left -> right)
- Political orientation: economic issues (left -> right)
- Political orientation: foreign policy (left -> right)
etc.
Sources like NPR are decisively not centrist w.r.t social issues and partisanship. There has been a distinct change in their reporting over the last ~decade.
(also, I'm aware the left-right scale is very lacking. Economics itself has so many dimensions that left/right is meaningless there.)
Put another way, I wish we had the nuanced shit to sift through where some nice multi-dimensional analysis could save the day. But the issue is people are consuming shit that is demonstrably shit from the first whiff/taste. I can't see how having some pretty vectors to showing them where their shit lives in shitspace is going to be helpful.
The problem with people consuming low-information, rage-baiting, distorted, highly-partisan slop masquerading as news is a problem I don't have the first idea on solving. The issue isn't even with the existence of the shit itself: that sort of content has always and will always exist, regardless. The issue is with (i) the volume of people consuming and accepting it, and more importantly, (ii) how much influence that garbage has on the national discourse and policy. For example, Musk consumes that sort of content and then feeds it into Grok (hello, MechaHitler), which then propagates to elected officials and the electorate and has real-world consequences in policy.
I think the idea is that if you are seeking the truth, and Ground News shows you a story that's being covered exclusively by right or left wing sources, that's their signal that the story could be either a) bullshit, or b) something one side is conveniently ignoring because it runs counter to their agenda. Ultimately it's up to you to you to decide. But, this way, if you hear this story being talked about elsewhere, you've now encountered it and know that it's being almost exclusively covered by one side.
Except this isn't what this guy found. What he found was that right-wing-only stories were invariably lies.
You'd have a point if there was also the same tendency to lying on "the left" (whoever that is supposed to be). Just because you can come up with two sides to an issue doesn't make them equally valid.
There is a truly massive amount of people attempting to prevent criticism of right wing people by constantly deflecting everything with "oh the left wing is just as bad!" and there's an annoying type of person who sees that and believes it.
Like, lies and propaganda are bad for us and our society but we can't get anywhere talking about if everyone has to constantly pretend there are two sides to it.
Naturally, this means the platform includes misinformation, political spin, and propaganda—because it’s not designed to tell you whether a story is true. As for the Blindspot feature, it may flag sources with a history of low factual reporting, but ultimately, it’s still up to you to decide how trustworthy any given coverage is.
The vast majority of the time it's used to justify either lying or repeating lies.
What exactly is the use of a website apparently designed to give equal weight to lies and facts? How does that benefit anyone?
The world doesn't need yet another journalism-related resource that repeats what other people say instead of attempting to actually find the truth. But doing the former is massively cheaper and easier than the latter.
Personally, I find it helpful to see what people outside my usual information sphere are being exposed to—not just to understand why others may think the way they do, but also to better recognize how that contrast influences the coverage I choose to consume.
Thom Hartmann laments regularly that FreeSpeechTV is a close to a progressive network as there is. Meanwhile, he alleges a conservative media owner offered him multiple millions to change his tune in exchange for distribution, support, and marketing. Yes, he also took advantage of the RT America network while it existed to gain visibility but he maintains he was never censored or told to read "must-air" Kremlin propaganda copy.
The left has always had to fight an uphill battle politically and culturally and financially, which is why they've been at their most successful when working outside of system versus trying to work within it.
The progressive spectrum rarely wants to cooperate or coordinate and is often too preciously-pure rather than pragmatic to learn about business to succeed.
Dragging the Overton Window back left won't magically happen with Che Guevara T-shirts, People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front, or pure ideals "too perfect" to be tainted by making a venture out of it.
Credible news isn't left leaning as much as it is the leftovers of anyone who doesn't belong to a group that is fundamentally disinterested in an objective view. Credible news is only left leaning to the extent that anyone who doesn't fall into the far right wing spectrum is left leaning. Sort of a false dichotomy.
As far as credibility goes, I think they're as credible as they've ever been. How credible that is is left as an exercise to the reader.
I think there is a false sense of everything being left v right. Perhaps there could be a few more spectrums on there e.g environmental, fiscal, social?
In the same breath, he quotes an article about it dousing Newfoundland in microplastics; a broad sweeping conclusion from a laughably flawed study method for the given results. And to be fair, this isn't a diss on the student's effort: scientific study is the holy grail. However, that headline and what was actually done represent two incredibly different things.
So in actuality, perhaps he's just calling his own biases out: The Left leaning articles published in Ground News often attempt to invent consensus by quoting one-off studies. Perhaps his own desire "to be right" or social pressure "to be on the forefront of knowledge" fans the thirst for early conclusions.
Hidden poison is worse than obvious manure.
However this is all scooting around the fundamental problem that we are all individually responsible for critical thinking - ideally developed through primary and secondary education.
Track major new sites over time and build a portal that lets you see the front page news with some time delay (1 month, 3 month, 1 year) and annotate each story with “what happened since then?”
Too often big stories get ignored and forgotten. Or baseless fearmongering and speculation never confronts the fact it didn’t come true. I think we’d all benefit from this ability to step back from the rapid news cycle and see a bigger picture.
antifa•7mo ago
Sadly, this is downstream of mainstream news itself. I think if Ground News attempted to truly solve this problem, the right would condemn Ground News as "fake news" or controlled by Soros like they do Wikipedia.
I'm looking to be skeptical of Ground News, because almost all YouTube sponsors are scams, and we remember Honey was recently exposed as a scam, but this isn't enough to convince me.
xerox13ster•7mo ago
I won’t use Ground News or Brilliant (I tried it in 2019 and was unimpressed) because they market so aggressively, something doesn’t smell right!
pstadler•7mo ago
wnc3141•7mo ago
dzhiurgis•7mo ago
Their app wants persistence and they had sister who sells residential proxies, if you catch my drift.
burnt-resistor•7mo ago
dzhiurgis•7mo ago
But yeah I agree. You have to trust someone, somewhere. Adding layers helps tho.
burnt-resistor•7mo ago
mahmoudhossam•7mo ago
thmsths•7mo ago
whycome•7mo ago
spookie•7mo ago
burnt-resistor•7mo ago
jayrot•7mo ago
alganet•7mo ago
We have enough "left-leaning skeptics" and "right-leaning skeptics", even some "neutral skeptics", but barely any skeptics.
The word "skeptic" is poisoned by I will continue to use it. That's intentional.
wnc3141•7mo ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/opinion/trump-beirut-poli...
Essentially that in a state of sectarian politics, everything is political.
> ..."During the course of the dinner, someone mentioned the unusual hailstorms that had pelted Beirut the previous two nights. Everyone offered an explanation for this extreme weather event, before Malcolm, tongue in cheek, asked his guests, “Do you think the Syrians did it?”...
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
That said, having it as the main tool in the toolbox* is...
Something to be skeptical about?
*Bundled up with another in-your-face one like "personal experience", this also screams "political".. and thus hard to take seriously (particularly when those personal experiences are actually relevant)
Freshness- whatever. You probably already know fresh is somewhat popular, but are you really sure you want to be right but not loved? Be respected by your (fr)enemies maybe? Not even that?
(I'm certainly skeptical about "loved for being right" :)
alganet•7mo ago
Get your arguments together, c'mon. I expect more.
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
alganet•7mo ago
Can't you grasp meaning? Even LLMs can.
georgemcbay•7mo ago
Anything advertising on youtube or podcasts is a negative indicator for me as these platforms have followed the path of talk radio in having a very high ratio of the products that advertise on them being dodgy if not outright scams.
I'm sure there are exceptions that are totally fine, but the pattern follows often enough that if I don't have a pre-existing relationship with a brand before seeing/hearing a youtube or podcast ad for it, it goes into the scam bucket in my head just through the negative advertising platform connection.
wnc3141•7mo ago
https://imgur.com/a/how-to-create-unique-successful-minimali...
burnt-resistor•7mo ago
Plus, advertising on every Youtube channel makes me suspicious.