“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Post got removed in .world for not being a “news source” even though Klippenstein is definitely a very established independent journalist, so trying again here I guess.
I can’t speak to what News does or does not do, I’m not a mod there.
I have told you why it’s removable under thr rules for Politics and World, both of which have different rules than News.
That’s the way the communities work.
I did assume you were a News mod by mistake, so sorry about that.
My overall point though is just that News seems to be inconsistently applying a rule which isn’t even really specified anywhere, and it would be nice if it was either clarified as a rule that any substack is banned, or not having substack alone as a grounds for removal, so that in the future anyone who posts an article from a reliable source that happens to use substack can’t just have it and any conversations arbitrarily removed.
He was a News mod, as well as mod of many other .world instances which he now is not, on his profile when I made the original comment that incited this chain of comments.
I checked before posting, so as to actually make an accurate critique.
I did not take a screenshot because I did not think that such a thing would be necessary, but apparently this guy is a reddit/discord tier gaslighter.
That would be something to take up with the News mods, all I can explain is why we don’t allow them in the groups I mod.
News may have similar opinions or they may have their own ideas. I haven’t talked with them about it.
Yeah I don’t blame you for the specific rules in News, I feel like the main point of disagreement we had was your reasoning for not allowing substack articles doesn’t really make sense to me. But regardless, we were definitely speaking past each other somewhat, so sorry about that.
It’s all good. My personal beef with Substack is that literally anyone can do one. I have better things to do with my time than personally vet each and every Substack blog, keep a list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice and share that with all the other mods. That’s why we just go “Yeah, Substack? No.” Same if it were Medium, or Blogger, or X or Youtube or Reddit.
If it’s a real news story, there will be (eventually) a real news article to link to, as happened here.
Let’s say RFK Jr. sets up a Substack about how vaccines are all causing brain damage. That would be removed as well, we don’t even have to bother debunking it, just being on a source that has no vetting is enough.
My rebuttal to that is what if he set up a news website instead? Like I said in a previous message it’s not that hard to make a fake news site. It has a higher barrier to entry sure, but not one that’s impossible, anyone with a moderate amount of web design skills or like 50 bucks and access to fiverr could probably get one built for them.
In that case you’d get an article from it posted, read it/read the about us page, probably Google the name/authors name, and see that it’s non-existent and remove it. With substack the process is really the exact same, so banning substack specifically just feels arbitrary.
Also, specific sites known for extreme bias or disinformation are already banned right? So why isn’t substack handled the same way? There aren’t that many independent journalists on Substack people would be posting, I can think of like 2 or 3 sites I’ve seen. Any opinion piece would be banned for being an opinion piece anyway, regardless of where it was posted from originally, substack or otherwise.
Plus with these substack blogs, it’s not even something you can enforce without opening the article to see its on substack anyway. The URL for the ones ran by independent journalists don’t have any reference to substack in them, so you need to open it up and look at the site, which at that point taking an extra 15 seconds to check if it’s reliable isn’t that much more effort. And if you don’t need to open it because you recognize the URL, then you should also know whether that URL is for an actual journalist or someone spreading misinformation.
Basically it just feels like substack sites aren’t a unique problem that doesn’t also exist with “regular” websites which may or may not have misinformation or extreme bias.
If it were an actual news site with actual reporting? Sure, I’d allow that because to do that WELL there would have to be some level of fact checking, accountability, etc. etc. Naturally there are exceptions to that (cough) OANN, Breitbart, NewsMax, whatever passes for the Weekly World News these days.
Man, I love me some Bat-Boy, but not all news is created equally. :)
We don’t allow ALL news sources, there are truly awful ones. Check out this one I removed from Politics the other day:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/dnyuz/
"DNyuz is an Armenian website that plagiarizes content word for word from major news sources. They literally copy and paste entire articles and embed their advertising code for profit. As one can imagine, a source like this completely lacks transparency as there is zero information to be found about authors, owners, location, or mission.
Since November 2019, the Drudge Report has been linking to this website presumably to bypass paywalls on major news sources such as the New York Times. According to a Buzzfeed report, Dnyuz was founded and is run by “Hayk Karapetyan, a web developer living in Armenia.” They further report that Drudge has driven 8 million page views to DNyuz from November 2019 through May 2020."
I mean a news site that doesn’t actually exist, full of fake articles, or just opinion pieces, or AI generated garbage, or straight up lies meant to trick people.
What’s the difference between that and a random substack blog with the same type of content? Presumably neither would be allowed, so why is the fact that one is substack based relevant? Either way it’s full of lies or opinions, and doesn’t constitute a reliable source for a post.
And if it did have actual reporting, same question. Why does the fact that the reporting was published via substack make it not allowed? The quality of the information is the same either way.
The fact that you have a list of non-allowed sites is kind of my point. You still need to verify when a new site is posted you aren’t familiar with, or if someone is trying to post misinformation via a site like Breitbart you recognize it and remove it.
So no matter what you need to spend the effort to moderate the sources posted. Why is substack banned in that case? Even without substack being allowed you gave me a list of multiple sites you (rightfully) don’t allow, as well as a site you only just learned about and banned the other day. So why would substack change anything in that case? Looking through the mod log substack links aren’t posted very often so it wouldn’t really be that much of an increase in effort, and just gets rid of potentially valid sources of news for no real reason.
Substack isn’t allowed because there’s no way to vet each individual blog and because it is a blog site, there is no inherent accountability like there are with proper news sites.
With a proper news site there are services like Media Bias Fact Check and others that will provide a deeper insight as to who runs the joint, what their agenda is (if any), if they’ve failed fact checks, and so on and so on.
Subatack is a lot like Facebook or X in that anyone can post anything and maybe they’re reliable, maybe they aren’t, but we can’t check every single blog out there.
I get that the rule seems harsh, but it’s kind of like liquor stores that say “We ID anyone under 30.” It just makes the policy easier to enforce.
Maybe if someone updated the TOS over there it would all make much more sense.