“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.
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.
Again though, my point is if I wanted to push a political agenda, and do so in a way that would be time consuming to verify, I could do so by making/buying an HTML and CSS template, buying a couple domains for pretty cheap, getting chat-gpt to write me some fake articles to add content to the site, and then posting them as sources in something like Politics.
If I did that, the way to verify would be looking up the authors name, and seeing if it makes sense. Either the author won’t exist online and then you can remove it to be safe, or they will but they don’t work at “HDR News”, or “HDR News” won’t turn up in any other results because it’s made up.
There isn’t any inherent accountability to any website, it’s very easy to buy a domain and host a static site for free, and like I said, the barrier to entry is higher sure, but if someone wanted to do a disinformation campaign successfully they’d be better off pretending to be a real news website and not a blog anyway.
If instead someone posts a substack blog that’s just an opinion piece, it would be fairly easy to see that, just by opening the link and looking, the same as if someone posted a NYT opinion piece. How many news sites post editorials or opinions that you don’t want as a source too? Again, looking at the modlog those seem to be removed about as frequently as people post any substack article, opinion or otherwise.
And yeah, you can’t have a list of every single substack blog to reference/memorize, but you honestly can’t do that with websites either, since like I already said it’s not hard to buy a domain and host a misinformation news site.
The analogy you gave with “we ID anyone under 30” also doesn’t really fit. By outright banning substack its more like “We don’t serve anyone under 30.” In order to be what you said, the rule would have to be something like “substack is allowed but has a stricter standard required to be accepted as a source”, which I think would be very fair.
If this were something like tumblr, then yeah obviously it shouldn’t be accepted as a source. But since multiple reliable journalists do use substack as their host, it’s a lot less justifiable to outright ban it. All that does is lead to a bias towards corporate media which can afford web developers and hosting costs, and away from small, independent journalists that may be willing to report something that doesn’t get as much coverage, or gets biased coverage, by other, larger sources.
Oh, the Russians do that all the time and get rumbled for it, because news sites have an accountability level that blog sites do not.
See:
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/g-s1-2965/russia-propaganda-deepfakes-sham-websites-social-media-ukraine
https://www.cybercom.mil/Media/News/Article/3895345/russian-disinformation-campaign-doppelgnger-unmasked-a-web-of-deception/
Exactly, so if one of those articles was posted, how would you tell it was disinformation? You’d look at the article, see the name of the outlet/website, Google it, and it would either pop up with results saying it’s a Russian disinformation campaign, or would have no results online if it was new since it was just created and hasn’t been reported on.
Now imagine the same scenario, but it’s a link to a substack based article. In order to check if it was disinfirmation, you’d look up the name of the outlet it claims to be, and it would either pop up with results about it being misninformation or have no results about it online.
In either case the effort to check if it’s disinfo is basically identical and the same amount of effort.
If instead of straight up disinfo you’re worried about too many blogs being posted that aren’t news, then all you’d need to do to check if it was news or not was just read a bit of the linked article, same as if you wanted to check if a random NYT article, for example, was an opinion piece or not.
So again, my real question is what about substack specifically makes the actual process of moderation more difficult?
If a substack article is posted it’s not too hard to verify if it’s legit, and you can even be more strict about what constitutes a valid substack link compared to what constitutes a valid “regular” news link, which I think makes sense to do. The number of substack articles posted doesn’t really seem like an issue either, since like I said barely any seem to be posted and removed each week. And either way if a substack blog is posted you either need to know and recognize the URL, which at that point you should also know whether the URL is for a blog or actual reporting that just happens to use substack, or if you don’t know the URL you need to open the link to check anyway, so why not spend maybe an extra minute to see if it’s legit first?
In most cases, it’s easy enough to spot the disinfo with a simple google search or a domain registry check.
We had one in World that was an African news site, and my initial reaction was “Oh, cool, we don’t have enough African representation!”
But then looking at it, it was a TOTAL cipher. No history, nobody linking to it, nothing.
But the weird part was, the news DID check out, it was legit, verifable reporting.
It was only when I searched exact phrases that I saw they were just copy/pasting from other news sites with zero attribution.