1y ago

Veritasium's new video on Jumping Spiders is having its sponsor Better Help on blast in the top comments. Should we hold content creators to account?

Should we stop supporting them with our eyes for taking sponsorships from shady companies?

Edit: I took my first step and unsubscribed from the channel and I will continue to withhold my viewership to those that don’t take better care of the viewers.

Likely doesn’t matter, but I’m on a roll of not giving my money to companies that are immoral so why not do the same with my eyes.

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137 comments

I don't watch any video that's sponsored by Ground News, and I complain in the comments
- What's wrong with ground news?
  
  To begin with, they operate with some very shady definitions of left and right.
  Any political coordinates centered on American view of left and right are super skewed and already biased. If you consider Democrats to be "the left", boy something is wrong with that.
  And when this happens, what you think is "unbiased news" is really just two flavors of right-wing propaganda, one a bit more extreme than the other.
  When capitalists are doing minor successions to be just a bit less evil, this is not "left", and whatever is between that and fascist dictatorship is not the enlightened center.
  TL;DR Ground News is one of the places that teach you the position between American Left and American Right is actually neutral and balanced. It is very much not.
  
  that's every mainstream news in the US. All of them.
  
  Yes.
  
  I've notice a tremendous amount of ground news links on social media that weigh the stories wildly, and improbably inaccurately. I don't know if it's early results vs results over time, trolling, or what, but I genuinely do not trust their analysis anymore.
  Examples include trump lovers supporting the rule of law (that's just convicted their guy) or liberals doubting biden (apparently 90% of likely biden voters were somehow reconsidering?) - I don't buy their spiel.
  
  There's no such thing as unbiased news. News is informed by all kinds of biases at every moment, many of which are completely innocuous and harmless, even good.
  For example, most news sources refer to people in stories as men or women, and use gendered pronouns. Gender is a social construct, so recognising it implicitly in an article is a bias. An unbiased news source would refer to everyone as they/them and never present a gender identity as fact. It would always refer to people as people. Well, except for the fact that personhood is a social construct too. And so is humanity. They'd have to call everyone beings or entities. And that's bad. An unbiased news source is bad. The news should have the bias that it presents people's gender identities as facts.
  What Ground News presents as unbiased stories are usually center-biased stories, not unbiased stories. And the lie that centrism is unbiased is dangerous. Every story on Ground News is equally biased, because everything is a bias. Their bias rating is a dangerous lie. Because encouraging people to see the most common view as unbiased causes people to go along with whatever view is common, even if it's bad. Even if, for example, the government has been taken over by Nazis. Bias confirmation machines like Ground News are always dangerous, but they're especially dangerous when fascism begins to be normalised, which is the struggle we're currently facing.
  
  This is a silly take. You can't ignore all news because all news has some form of bias. You should try to map out your sources to an even spread across the spectrum. Media literacy shouldn't entail just reading from what you find agreeable. That will inevitably lead to an epistemic bubble.
  
  I have an even spread across the spectrum. I read antirealist news (left wing), socialist news (center), and even capitalist news (far right). That's a great diversity of sources.
  Or by "whole spectrum", did you mean it would be a good idea for me to read Nazi news as well?
  
  By spectrum I mean what you just described. I'm confused now. Didn't you say one comment above that you don't read anything from ground news?
  
  Wait, really? Ground news has antirealist sources and describes all capitalist sources as extreme right wing? Okay, if that's true, you've changed my mind and ground news is awesome. Can you show me that it's true?
  
  I have no idea what you're arguing for any more. In one comment you say you read across the spectrum but then you follow up with another comment and complain that ground news is not left enough or something. It makes no sense. I don't know who or what you're arguing for.
  
  You weren't paying attention to which spectrum I described, were you? I was making a snide and witty comment with a light dash of sarcasm. You need to keep up.
  
  they don't write the stories though, so can't control the pronouns. I do appreciate their effort to try make sense of the news with an alignment reading, but I agree with you that it encourages centrism in the long run
  
  Yes, but why aren't they marking all the news sources that implicitly push the idea that gender exists as biased in that way? Why do they ignore certain biases and not others? The answer is that they're conflating bias with controversy. If something is uncontroversial, they're saying it's unbiased. That's bad.
  
  I guess they level a political narrative over that of social narratives. As someone who's not LGBT (but obviously will always vote for the rights of others), it's the political one I care about most to read, and I'm guessing a majority of their readers too.
  
  It's not an LGBT thing. I'm using gender as an example of a thing we can all agree is a social construct so I can make my point about bias without having to get any more controversial with it. But if you really want a political example, here is the same point but more political:
  Every news source that refers to the existence of the United States of America is biased. The USA is a social construct, it doesn't have objective existence. And many groups have objected to its existence, as it's a genocidal state illegally occupying stolen land. Any news article which refers to the USA as though it were a thing that exists is implicitly pushing settler colonial narratives. This is a clear bias. Ground news should be labelling any article which refers to the USA as biased.
  
  Anything, if you examine it, is just a social construct. The news sometimes wield these constructs to create false narratives to constrict our views/rights, but more often than not, the news is simply trying to convey a set of events from its perspective using a shared grammar that the majority of its audience will understand.
  We cant push the frontier without having a base.
  
  Yeah, now you're starting to get it. Everything is a social construct and all news is biased in favour of certain constructs. What Ground News does in judging some sources as less biased is dangerous nonsense.
  Course, antirealists don't believe in a reality, so I'd say they're the only group which is capable of less bias than the human norm. And they're all anarcho communists.
  
  I worry that so many calculations for everything would be very tiring quickly. I don't think I could do it.
  
  Then choose to wilfully accept good biases into your life, and don't strive for the imaginary, impossible ideal of "unbiased"
  
  Ok so we can't use ground new because of bias. Where do you suggest we go to get our news then. I agree that there will always be some bias but surely a system that gives you news from so many sources will be less biased than sticking to just one or two sources
  
  surely a system that gives you news from so many sources will be less biased than sticking to just one or two sources
  Not really. Suppose I show you one article that says vaccines don't cause autism. Now suppose I show you that one article, and 99 articles that say they do cause autism. Which one is giving you a more accurate view of the facts? Obviously, including more lies and misinformation will not reduce the amount of bias.
  
  The point is to show different biases through their source’s own interpretation of facts, not to deliver unbiased news themselves.
  Put another way, Ground News is kinda saying “here are some cold days, hot days, and in-between days. This is what we experience.” You’re sitting there saying “they’re liars! Have you forgotten 0 degrees kelvin and the center of the sun?!?”
  We haven’t forgotten but it’s not the point. Moreover if they changed their scale to show the modern left is not really left wing at all, then they would not be representing what we’re seeing, and critically, they would not be shareable as a demonstration of bias in news. Because most people would dismiss them as propaganda without really digging in.
  
  Well see that's the problem. They're lying to gain mass appeal. They're calling liberals leftists and participating in the move of the Overton window in America towards fascism. That's bad. You figured out the problem all by yourself, you didn't need me to explain it for you.

137 comments