'Snowden' Propaganda Reporter Admits He's Just Writing What UK Gov't Told Him

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150615/11565531344/reporter-who-wrote-sunday-times-snowden-propaganda-admits-that-hes-just-writing-what-uk-govt-told-him.shtml

by maaaats • 11 years ago

89 4 11 years ago

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kordless2• 11 years ago

Over the last few years I've been asking individuals from different countries about how they establish trust within their cultures. Some cultures trust quickly, some dis-trust quickly, some establish trust over time based on observations, some establish trust over time through speculation. Some never trust, unless they know you or someone you know. Some seem trustworthy to others they know, and very untrustworthy to those they don't.

I'm an American, so it seems fair I stick to what I know and let people from other cultures chime in here, instead of me speaking for them. Americans tend to (apparently) trust very quickly. We'll smile at you, nod a lot, and talk to you openly about just about anything within minutes of meeting you. We may remain suspicious of you however, especially if you may be sticking around for a while. We'll make intense observations, even at the expense of appearing nosey, in an attempt to justify our initial trust in you. If we observe 'suspicious' actions, we may attempt to investigate further by talking about you with others we do trust. We're not opposed to speaking for your actions, or simply making up a bunch of facts to suit our fears in our mistrust in you, especially if we've discussed you previously with others (which bolsters the fear). When clear violations of trust have occurred we'll demand someone suffer for these violations, even at the expense of removing our own freedom to act later. In short, we hack trust more than most cultures on the planet, which is probably also why we're so damn good at marketing.

I'm thinking we should start working on methods which improve trust instantiation with each other based on the impact the conversation can have on others. In general, most culture's methods of establishing trust sacrifice efficiency. That's fine if you are just grabbing drinks with someone, but if you are reporting to a large number of people, you should be held accountable for your bullshit.

No clue how to implement this, but I suspect it's blockchain related. Been meaning to write more about it, given I had more time to write. :)

joshstrange• 11 years ago

Trust is a very interesting problem to solve. I say that I would really like the ability to "bond" together various filtered news sources and ideally have the ability group stories by topic ("all snowden coverage", "all TPP coverage", etc). I know you can half-accomplish this with RSS feeds but right now the amount of work required to maintain that list would be quite an undertaking. Also a lot of the time I want to "trust" certain sub-blogs or specific authors instead of the entire site and that's not always easy to do. Then there are times I want to be able to compare what I'd consider non-trustworthy sources to what I'm reading. It's a hard problem and I have no clue how to solve it but if you make any progress make sure to Show HN!

kordless2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I'm pretty sure 'god' is just a ring zero awareness of all computing processes. What you are discussing would be the initial 'god' version 1.0. Consensus across race, culture and social standing. Stuff that into the blockchain!

mikevp• 11 years ago

Там нет правда в Известиях, и нет Известия в Правде

'Snowden' Propaganda Reporter Admits He's Just Writing What UK Gov't Told Him

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