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So she's not doing streams with Vaush anymore? Is she part of any specific YouTube niche now?
I don't watch Vaush, so I don't know, but if he couldn't hold on to his BFF relationship with Destiny, I doubt he could handle Shoe.
I think she kind of hangs out with anyone. She made a few haha-only-serious jokes about the key to her survival in Cancel Culture being having a fanbase consisting of 3-4 ideologically opposed groups that hate each other, so I think she deliberately avoid falling into a neiche.
How are you guys aware of any of this? I googled and it appears you're talking about literal teenage girls. 'shoeonhead' is literally a teenage girl who looks like a titty streamer. 'Destiny' is literally a fat beardo gamer kid. Is this really the forefront of public discourse now? If so, is there anything left to save? Nick Land was right.
They're one of the more popular youtubers/streamers that focuses on political content. If you only read news/articles you probably don't encounter these people, but they're prevalent on youtube/twitch/tiktok. Watch a few political videos and they start showing up on your recommended page. It's where a lot of young people get their political opinions and news from nowadays, since they aren't watching television news channels as much.
The Israel/Hamas conflict has actually been getting Destiny a ton of traction since he has a middle of the road take, and a lot of the political left-leaning streamers have a pro-Hamas take, so there's tons of videos/clips of arguments around the Israel/Hamas situation. Honestly not worth your time for anything but entertainment since it's incredible just how poorly informed and horrible some of their takes are. You can ignore them and not miss much, but it is a bit worrying that many people are getting their political opinions from people that are in no way qualified to be speaking about these kinds of situations.
As opposed to what, the infallibly virtuous philosopher kings who ran the media in previous generations? At least these people aren't pontificating from atop a heap of fraudulently-acquired positive affect.
At least there used to be some sort of journalistic standard, and it was a major scandal when major news publications pushed outright lies. Opinion pieces were always a thing, but normally major news stories would at least have sources and there was an attempt to at least present the facts, even if it's in a dishonest manner.
You could argue these streamers also "pontificate from atop a heap of fraudulently-acquired positive effect" since you know, a lot of them create echo chambers by banning all dissidents, they tend to only promote other people that agree with them politically, and they present themselves as experts and speak in an authoritative manner on subjects they know nothing about. Having nuance actually outcasts you from the community. Destiny is a great example of someone who because he is willing to show some nuance on the Israel/Palestine situation gets shit on by a lot of far-left leaning political streamers.
You seem to be saying that these political streamers are superior sources of news than traditional mainstream media. There may be some standouts, but you can't seriously be telling me someone like Hasan Piker is a better source of news and a role model for political opinions than the mainstream news media.
I think I understand what you mean by a "journalistic standard", but it seems to me that this standard does nothing to prevent deceit on the part of journalists, and only exists to insulate them from the necessary consequences of that deceit. It does not impede them from routinely deceiving their audience, but only codifies a method to enact that deceit with perfect legal and social cover. It seems to me that such standards are actively harmful to the public at large; we would be better with no standards at all, and a concomitant increase in public skepticism.
To me, the term "major scandal" means an incident that causes or at least threatens severe consequences for the people involved. I can think of lots of times when the media has been caught pushing outright lies, many of them resulting in dire real-world consequences. I can't think of a single time when this evident malfeasance resulted or even plausibly threatened severe consequences for even a single media organization, or even an individual journalist. It seems to me that a "major scandal" for the media means that they may have to publish a news story about how they've totally fixed the problem and it can't possibly happen again, they swear, and even this level of consequence is a rarity compared to the base rate of naked deception.
The fact that you possess this attitude toward Hasan Piker is exactly why I would prefer people generally to get their information from Hasan Piker and others like him. Your assessment of his credibility seems reasonably correlated to his actual credibility, so it seems unlikely that he could successfully lie to you, and very unlikely that he could do so in a highly consequential way. Even his most diehard fans are not going to presume that his credibility, impartiality and correctness are common knowledge society-wide. He does not have the power of "sure it's true, I saw it on TV".
Legacy media, by contrast, have also created echo chambers by banning all dissidents, only promote people who agree with them politically, and present themselves as experts on subjects they know nothing about, and routinely eschew the very concept of nuance and balance. In addition, they are deeply integrated into our centers of social and political power, and they secretly coordinate their reporting to maximize partisan control over and political advantage within those centers. Their record of mendacity is appalling, as are the accumulated consequences of their lies. Piker is, at worst, an amateur liar. Journalists are professional liars, working in an industry optimized from the ground up to produce precision falsehood on an industrial scale.
The above would be bad enough, but most people assume whatever they say is true, with the result that they have a considerable degree of control over the conversations it's possible to have, even among those who know they are not trustworthy. The New York Times really does set the nation's agenda, even for those of us entirely aware that they're fundamentally, murderously untrustworthy. That is what a "heap of fraudulently-acquired positive affect" looks like. By comparison, the Hasan Pikers of new media are working off old pennies they found in the couch cushions.
If you measure "honesty" in Lawyer-speak, journalists are reasonably honest. If you measure "honesty" by the variance between the plain facts of a matter and the impression the author intentionally conveys to the reader, Journalists are one of the most dishonest groups of people living.
Public trust in news media is at an all-time low, this recent poll Gallup shows only 7% of Americans have a great deal of trust in the media, and 27% have a fair amount of trust in the media. The public is as skeptical as it has ever been.
I'm not sure I agree with your point that having standards is harmful, much of the legacy media isn't following journalistic standards. It's the appearance of having standards but not following them that's harmful, not the existence of standards itself. It would be one thing if you were to argue specifics examples of standard are harmful, but to dismiss the entire notion of standards doesn't seem like the right solution either. You need some framework to make a judgment, and the legacy media's failure to meet journalistic standards is how you know they aren't doing a great job.
Many of these news organizations are unable to generate enough revenue and I say a large part of that is due to the increase in public distrust of news media. Many smaller ones have gone bankrupt, some examples: Gawker, Vice, Buzzfeed, Jezebel. Brian Stelter was basically fired from CNN cause his show couldn't attract viewers, and I'd say it's in large part due to his peddling of lies and disinformation. Lawsuits are a thing, plenty of examples of lawsuits you can find, even settlements and lawyers eat up money, and when your organization is struggling to make a profit you don't want to be spending money on lawsuits. It might not be to the degree you want them punished, but it's not like it doesn't happen either.
What percentage of stories from news media would you say are outright lies are bullshit? I'm not denying there isn't any propaganda, but I'd say 95% of the news is still factually accurate. You just don't remember those because those are mostly boring presentations of facts so there really isn't anything that can be a scissor statement.
The people who have the most trust in the media are old people, well they're getting older and will eventually no longer be here. So I'm more concerned about where the newer generations are getting their information from. They're getting it from social media and streaming services. Nearly 50% get it from social media daily and 48% never even look at cable or network news. You'll be hard-pressed to find a Gen Z kid who has full faith in legacy media, but many of Hasan Piker's viewers believe 100% what he says. So these people actually would be better off getting their news from legacy media because they'll be viewing it with skepticism.
His viewers don't need to qualify the information they got with "I heard this from Hasan", they'll just repeat his talking points as straight-up facts. If you question where they got that information from they'll just respond "educate yourself" and not even bother engaging in conversation. Where did they learn these tactics? From Hasan Piker and other political streamers. Hasan may not have any influence over the people who'll use that line, but he has a massive influence over younger people. And there are people peddling extremist, radical far left and right viewpoints online. I'd argue this is more dangerous than the agenda the legacy media pushes through.
By the way, it's not like the only options for news and politics are political streamers or legacy media. I didn't say people should only get their information from the legacy media, but if it was between getting news only from The New York Times or Hasan Piker, I'd pick The New York Times 100% of the time. And if it isn't clear, I'm not a fan of legacy media either.
The correct way to use polls to examine this question is not to ask people whether they trust the media, but to identify lies the media is pushing, and then use polling to determine how effective those lies have been at shaping the public's perceptions. The results are quite horrifying. That particular lie has killed ~10,000 black Americans over the last three years, as part of the worst single-year spike in violent crime the country has ever seen, and I see no evidence that any real lesson has actually been learned by the general public, any more than they did from getting lied into Iraq, or lied into implementing bussing, or any of the other disasters over the years. Journalists have done it before, and they'll do it again.
On an object level, standards exist to be enforced. If the standards don't result in enforcement, they're worthless. On a meta level, power lies in people, never in the rules people create. Good people don't need rules, bad people won't obey them. Rules help at the margin, but they don't solve the basic problem of a corrupt class with ready access to serious power. The solution isn't to try to enforce the rules on fundamentally untrustworthy people who have zero intention of having their desires and values constrained. The solution is to recognize them as an enemy, and then to apply relentless coordinated meanness to them until they are too scattered and harried to cause further harm.
If you are set on putting your hope in rules, then find rules that correctly apportion accountability for the harms caused by misuse of power, and then enforce them, and keep them routinely updated as vulnerabilities and workarounds appear. This still won't help unless a supermajority of the people who are supposed to be constraining want to be constrained, but if that's the population you've got, they can do a lot of good.
No. The way I know they're doing a bad job is by comparing their observed actions to their stated goals, and by comparing the results of those actions to my own values. I don't give a fuck if they claim to be following their own rules or not. If this result is allowed by their rules, then their rules are worthless. If this result happened despite their rules, their rules are worthless. There is neither need nor point to turning this into a lawyer LARP, not when we can simply assess the situation according to our common values.
It's true that the general decay of trust in media is happening, and that this has resulted in lower profits for many media properties over time. This is clearly insufficient to dissuade them from perpetuating their abuses, so it seems to me that more robust and legible action is necessary. You are approaching the issue as though the existence and maintenance of a powerful, influential media should simply be assumed to be an immutable feature of the universe. It is not. We can in fact create an environment where their behavior is sufficiently disincentivized that their class ceases to exist as a coherent entity.
The large majority of all media output addressing any question of consequence is some manner of bullshit. That is to say, most pieces addressing questions or issues consumers care significantly about are designed to deceive those consumers about that issue in some significant way.
I think your estimation is likely quite high. Further, it does not help if I make nineteen completely factual statements along with one lie, if some of those factual statements are used to support the lie and the others are irrelevant to the topic at hand. If I try to fool you into thinking that your Significant Other is cheating on you, introducing myself by my actual name, addressing you by your actual name and gender, giving a correct description of your Significant Other's appearance and the appearance of their vehicle are "factually accurate" statements. If I claim to have followed them around all day, and honestly list off nineteen places they went, and then lie about the twentieth, that likewise would match your 95% accuracy figure. The fact remains that my core mission is deceit, and the factual truths I'm telling you are being used to support my mission of lying to you, either by directly supporting the lies or by serving as a smokescreen for them.
Another way to phrase this would be that they say things that are true and things that are interesting, but the true things aren't interesting and the interesting things aren't true. Unless you consume news purely for entertainment, what makes boring facts boring is that they do not matter to you in any significant way. Being honest in ways that do not significantly help me while constantly lying in ways that harm me is an unacceptable pattern of behavior. I don't care if they correctly identified the state, county and city then-nominee Kavanaugh resided in, correctly cited relevant dates, correctly attributed quotes, correctly identified the sequence of events they covered, and so on through the infinite catalog of minutia it seems your argument must based on. I care that they smeared him with false rape accusations. Getting that wrong invalidates everything else.
Skepticism of the sort you cited above is insufficient to prevent the harmful consequences of our current media establishment.
The current media establishment likewise propagates such contentless responses ("racist", "sexist", "bigot", "homophobe", etc, etc), but in addition generates the omnipresent, apparently sourceless consensus of common "knowledge", which is significantly worse. Again, Piker has not helped start literal wars, nor has he crippled policing nation-wide, nor has he undercut major pillars of our society. I do not doubt that he or some demagogue like him could eventually become powerful enough to cause equivalent harms, but our present system has already done these things, and continues to do them. The worst Piker could possibly be is as bad as the media currently is, and I think it unlikely that he could actually achieve such an outcome were the current media to suddenly vanish. If we can destroy the current media establishment, preventing Piker and his ilk from taking their place seems like a cakewalk by comparison.
I reiterate that I prefer amatuer, isolated liars to professional, coordinated liars, and cannot fathom why anyone else would prefer otherwise. Here's an example of a lie the New York Times is currently telling. Nothing Piker ever has done or ever is likely to do is as bad as that single article, in terms of its actual effect on my life and wellbeing.
If you don't want extremists, all you need to do is ensure that your reasonable, moderate centrism delivers the results it promises. If it had not failed to do that, we extremists would not be winning to the degree we are.
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