Yes, it's easy to imagine, because at least OpIndia publish fake news very regularly, so much so that most 'wokes' have given up fact checking them other than in particularly egregious cases (and the ones that do, like AltNews or Newslaundry, get systematically trolled and worse for it...)

https://www.altnews.in/?s=opindia

https://www.altnews.in/?s=swarajya

https://www.newslaundry.com/search?q=opindia

https://www.newslaundry.com/search?q=swarajya

A legit criticism with AltNews, however, is that they rarely if ever fact-check the left-leaning media, and haven't covered the Wire story (yet?). Two possible reasons for that: 1) their mission / bias is to keep a check on right-wing fake news (which is arguably much more organised and successful at spreading its message in India), or 2) most mainstream left wing media does not publish fake news as often?

Newslaundry tries to be fairly balanced on both sides of the spectrum and has covered the Wire story extensively and in a balanced manner: https://www.newslaundry.com/search?q=wire and also covers for instance NDTV and other mainstream stories where they get it wrong https://www.newslaundry.com/search?q=ndtv

But on point 2, honest question: if you feel like The Wire or others are regularly publishing fake news, then are there any serious 'right-of-spectrum' fact checking websites, that actually do credible research on wrong stories and have made it their mission to do so? If not, why not?

Which rock have you been hiding under? By most yardsticks, as an activist campaign / meme, MeToo was extraordinarily successful, since even you seem to be aware that there is such a thing as #MeToo. You must agree that MeToo resulted in prison sentences (like Harvey Weinstein), a huge number of firings from jobs and public positions as entertainers and politicians, and an incremental improvement in awareness and implementation of POSH laws, and arguably a little bit less public mysoginy online (or at least, when you are making such comments online, you know you might risk a backlash and also potentially lose your job, which would have been nearly unimaginable 20 years ago, say)?

Sure, there is arguably a little more MeToo / Wokeness fatigue now, but none of these things are expected to last forever.

Thread / exodus continues here (comment moved to separate thread): https://www.legallyindia.com/convos/topic/241104-luthra-s-william-john-joins-snr-sumithra-suresh-to-cipla

FYI, your comment was marked trollish because of the last two lines.

The (intentionally) disingenuous thing in the Wire trolling has been that it was never about this specific story (which had just enough elements of truth based on previous whistleblower leaks on Facebook to be almost believable), but is gleefully used by opponents of The Wire to denigrate ALL their past and future coverage.

However, if the Wire was a "fake news" outlet (or even "Fake News", as you call it), the Wire would not have issued this retraction and have been investigating and responding to the criticisms. As it's traditionally understood (rather than being used by trolls as a term to denigrate publications they disagree with), a news outlet does not become 'Fake News' (tm) as soon as it has made a mistake in a story. Mistakes happen in journalism, because journalism is complicated.

However, it appears that they were misled and fell for a relatively sophisticated scam (which yes, they should have spotted and can be criticsed for), and did unintentionally publish incorrect / false news (in this instance), or at least news which was not sufficiently sourced. That is arguably one of the worst nightmare of any journalist.

Who duped them and for what reasons will therefore likely be the more interesting story in the long run.

Also, wanted to point out the irony that the word of Facebook has finally bcome trusted again after so long :)



https://www.gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-users-dumb-fucks

It is not a far stretch by any means: Facebook (and other social media companies, Twitter included) have routinely courted governments and given them special access to data, their advertisement targeting algorithms or looked the other way while others exploited their algorithms (already forgotten about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for which FB was literally fined billions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal )

The Wire may have been got it wrong or they may have been the victim of an elaborate fake news campaign themselves or they may have got it right.

What is surprising though is 'everyone' suddenly having forgotten that Facebook does NOT deal in shady dealings. 😂

The question OP asked was literally, "who is giving fake news". Well, asked and answered, Facebook / Meta "gives" a lot more fake news than anyone else. Even if they don't produce it themselves, they certainly disseminate a lot of it and profit from it, that sure sounds like they're "giving" quite a bit of it.

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks-role-in-myanmar-and-ethiopia-under-new-scrutiny

Quote:

In her testimony Haugen blamed engagement-based ranking for “literally fanning ethnic violence” in countries like Ethiopia. “Facebook … knows, they have admitted in public, that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems, but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems to most of the languages in the world,” Haugen said. And that’s what is causing things like ethnic violence in Ethiopia.”

Considering the amount of noise and info- / culture-wars out there about this story, responses may be moderated strictly to stick to factual analysis only, rather than propaganda.

But suffice it to stay, if you're really looking for the only literally correct answer to your question of "who is giving fake news", it's obviously Meta: the amount of fake news that has been shared globally on its platform over the last decade (and the lies it has told in pursuit of its agenda and erosion of user privacy) surely dwarfs the fake news output of all the printing presses in the world...

Agree, we are mindful of the responsibility that comes with moderation. Regarding FM, the man, as anyone else, is unlikely to be without flaws, but in historical threads about him genuine criticism often is intermingled with what looks like a concerted effort against him, often in language that would likely be criminal if allowed to be published. As such, it is sometimes hard to pick apart actual interest of his students in discussing his legacy, qualities and lack thereof, against the real and nasty trolling attempts that also takes place. In light of the latter, we therefore err on the side of caution on this specific topic and will marking comments contested that do not supply any evidence is one way of doing so.

From what we've seen, it does not appear to be bona fide or in good faith: to the best of our knowledge, the central government's law minister has never before interfered in such a manner in NLU affairs, even in egregious purported cases of 'discrepancies'. And do the advocates' original claims have any evidence attached to them?

The articles shared are not really news (they're originally posted from January 2022) and seem mostly about manufacturing outrage and not entirely balanced, in that they don't paint a full picture and are clearly intended to rile up their target audience (as this post seems possibly likely to).

The basic facts of the story seem to check out, i.e., she appears to be the person referred to and had a conviction for rape of a three-year old in 1994: https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/SomsSUBDirectory/offenderDetails.jsp?offenderid=40993&lang=EN

However, the dog-whistly articles suggest that she was in prison as a convicted child rapist, where she changed her gender therefore became a 'woke icon'. The truth seems more complicated, in that after her release she seems to have come out as trans, and was arrested in 2014 on a misdemeanour, and spent time in a men's prison where she was allegedly sexually abused by prison guards: https://news.yahoo.com/innocent-rikers-120039502.html

Sure, there can be a valid discussion around whether reform of child sexual offenders is possible or whether all of them should be locked up and the keys be thrown away forever (as the article seems to be implying), but her speaking engagements seem to have little to do with her history as a child sexual abuser but are about prison reform and sexual abuse in prisons, which she seems prima facie qualified to opine on.

How else are you academics supposed to investigate the prison system if you do not invite former prisoners to talk? As heinous as her crime was, there is no real evidence of what views she currently holds or whether her contribution to prison reform and trans sexual abuse in prison (which is a real issue) are legitimate.

This clutching of pearls and 'oh the outrage' in those articles and perhaps those tweets is frankly not much different (albeit still somewhat less successful in popular culture) than wokism and cancel culture in its more extreme forms.

Thanks for your detailed comment. Comments were / are featured because they cite sources. Generally 'dogshit' does not qualify as a source :)

The debate is age-old and not very authoritative for the most part but based on common useage, though many judges seem to use most interchangeably and in line with fashions:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/08/16/judgment-or-judgement/

https://www.legalcheek.com/2016/11/is-it-judgment-or-judgement/

We're not sure there's an 100% authoritative answer, but your argument that judgment is the thing a court renders, is one well made, dogshit aside.

Relevant / related: https://www.legallyindia.com/convos/topic/169345-Fresher-Salary-Tabulation-of-lots-of-firms

Figures wouldn't have changed much since then...

Media consumption needs to be about being intelligent and critical, and not consuming your news mindlessly like junk food (as Fox News or the MSNBCs might like to encourage you to).

About Al Jazeera, don't read /watch it often enough to have strong opinions, but we understand they have some good documentaries sometimes and, for example, deeper and wider Africa coverage than most international news channels. They also probably have many reliable news items and others that are less so, and ultimately every reader / viewer should also be aware / will hopefully be aware that they are the soft-propaganda / soft-power arm of the Qatari government.

Why don't you share a few good and bad Al Jazeera articles and we can all decide whether to trust each of them or not on their own merits?

Everyone has personal views, and we can hopefully also agree that moderators (and human beings) should hold personal views that do not accept hate speech or fake news or encouraging propaganda. But first and foremost the moderator's job should be that if claims or statements are questioned or appear to be without factual basis, to question those claims.

We are happy to try and fact check all claims, whether we personally agree with them or not, and even at the risk of feeding the trolls.

It just so happens that in our moderation experience the vast majority of dog-whistle and disingenuous comments tend to come from the right of the spectrum (or from people who get pleasure out of trolling so-called 'wokes').

So, what happened to right-wing intellectuals interested to debate and where are they?

Unfortunately discussion without any moderation, as the internet has unfortunately shown, tends to bring out a lot of discussion that is not bona fide but hijacked by spreaders of fake news, propagandists and trolls.

LI should definitely be a space for those on both sides of the political spectrum to air genuinely held views. But if it becomes dog whistle calls for hate or blatant attempts to troll that are not based on fact, then those are not genuine actors who are interested in having an honest informal discussion but have ulterior motives (OP's Fox video was an example thereof, as it was a distortion of facts based on the speech of one publicity-hungry lower court judge / politician to feed into a popular propaganda narrative that, to paraphrase another comment 'wokeism is worse than fascism').

Counting: still zero comments answering the 3 very reasonable questions asked above trying to put a factual or at least bona fide backing to the claim that 'woke and cancel culture is worse than fascism itself'.

If we receive no answers that even try on a postcard or a comment (and instead more rants like #3 and #4 below), then that will be taken as a good signal that future comments in a similar vein will just be marked trollish and not published at all, since they apparently lack factual backing and/or reasonably held-beliefs supported by evidence.

We can understand woke and cancel culture is annoying to some and has arguably gone too far. But much of this hyperbole is, frankly, bullshit.

You sound rather more whiny yourself than the 'wokes' you profess to hate so much, but in the slim case you're not a troll, please explain the following about why you think cancel culture is worse than fascism:

1. What do you think fascism is? How about authoritarianism?

2. Would you prefer to live under a fascist or authoriatarian government or a broadly liberally-democratic government?

3. Why do you think that people being 'cancelled' online by 'wokes' on Twitter or being occasionally shouted at by wokes is a worse problem than a fascist government (or modern-day fascist-playbook / authoriarian / less-democratic governments such as in China, Russia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey) persecuting minorities or political opponents or others they disagree with, by throwing them in jail or sending them to 're-education' camps, or in some cases, just murdering them?

(Not R): Sarcasm noted and amidst it also the point that the NYT and Washington Post make mistakes and are biased, particularly more so during the recent Trump years and when it comes to US foreign policy.

That said, the vast majority of what they publish does have journalistic merit and is important. Just take respective yardsticks such as the WaPo's Watergate reporting and NYT's Pentagon Papers, or things more recently like the Snowden leaks. Or on a more mundane level, the thousands of stories about daily governance and events that they get right.

But yes, the editors and reporters are people too and sometimes make mistakes, or buy propaganda from the wrong quarters, or get destabilised by professional bullshitters like Trump or politicians like him, who routinely tell so many lies and half-truths it becomes very hard for journalists to do their job covering what they say without their own biases beginning to creep in after a while.

Take Covid lab leak, which you cite.

1. Trump did not know for sure that it was a lab leak but very quickly claimed he knew, no doubt for political mileage.

2. NYT, WaPo etc did not know for sure it wasn't a lab leak either, but at the time there was no evidence other than Trump's statement and speculation, and reporting it as fact would have been the wrong thing to do.

3. The 'lab leak as fake news' very quickly took on an orthodoxy of its own amongst the anti-Trump media, where coverage of it was long derided as conspiracy theory, whereas the right basically claimed to know for sure that it was a lab leak. But conclusive evidence for either side does not (and may never) really exist, and until then claiming you know one or the other as fact, is passing off opinion as fact.

All TV organisations have flaws and political biases, but some like Fox barely even pretend to peddle anything except outright propaganda and have very scant regard for facts.

If you're talking about the other end of the spectrum, CNN, MSNBC, etc are almost as bad on some topics but from the other side of the political spectrum.

Sure, CNN & MSNBC are sometimes a bit more subtle and inconsistent in their propaganda, which arguably makes them even more dangerous as it makes it even harder to spot the lies, whereas on Fox News it's usually pretty obvious when they're lying if you're somewhat clued in and can listen between the lines.

Therefore, neither of these should be relied on as primary sources of information but you should make up your own opinions, perhaps by pitching various media-organisations' versions of the truth against each other and trying to figure out what's the most realistic version of events without the hyperbole and spin.

Another warning, Fox News reports are often BS so please try to be 'fair and balanced' when posting their content - please try and dive a little deeper into the subjects.

If an interesting debate was intended by the OP (as opposed to a debate / clutching of pearls on how 'cancel culture' - which is perceived by a few on the 'right' as the greatest evil of our times - is bad), there are other more useful resources than a Fox News 'debate' (besides the obvious polarisaiton / politicisation of US society / culture).

Here something from the conservative National Review, which broke the story, and thinks the judge's approach is 'misguided':
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/judge-hos-misguided-answer-to-illiberalism-at-yale/

Here's the left Mother Jones making fun of the judge:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/james-ho-yale-law-school-boycott/

And here's Above The Law with its always-amusing take:
https://abovethelaw.com/2022/10/after-james-ho-boycott-another-conservative-judge-responds-great-more-yale-clerks-for-me/

Over to you.