“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.
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."
