Last week, two seemingly unrelated things caught my attention.
The first, on June 26, was the latest expose from Project Veritas, called American Pravda, in which hidden camera footage showed that CNN is deliberately pushing the fraudulent / hoax story which is best characterized as “OMG Russians”. The videos, which are still being continuously released, show that multiple high-level people at CNN including on-air personalities, producers, and executives, believe that OMG Russians is fake news, and is simply being constantly pushed because it generates good viewer ratings.
The second, from June 22, was an incident at VidCon, a conference for youtube bloggers and content creators which was put together by the likes of Hank Green, for totally apolitical purposes. At VidCon, a panel intended to discuss the problem of harassment on the internet ran into a problem when it decided to involve Anita Sarkeesian in it. The panel opened with Sarkeesian accusing a member of the audience (Sargon of Akkad) of “harassment” just for being present at the event, and and eventually degenerated into calling him a “garbage human” from her position on the panel.
Hanlon’s Razor as applied to fake news
Nothing is particularly surprising about the first incident. Everyone who’s been paying attention ought to have known for several months now that OMG Russians is fake news from start to finish. CNN is trash, and almost nobody doesn’t know that by now. What’s more interesting is all the media entities to which I would apply Hanlon’s Razor: the ones which aren’t terminally corrupt, and simply want to report the news as they see it, despite any potential biases they may have, or any political positions their staff may have, who nonetheless uncritically believed all the obvious nonsense about OMG Russians. As Hanlon’s Razor says: they’re not evil, they’re just stupid.
I am a big fan of Hanlon’s Razor, so I believe that that describes most of the mainstream media (MSM). CNN is doing bad journalism out of malice; they have bad intentions. I believe most people in media want to do the right thing, and are just misguided; they have good intentions, but they can’t tell the difference between sense and nonsense. In particular, I think this applies to formerly genuinely prestigious publications such as the NY Times, which is now the Failing NY Times, and the Washington Post, which I think is now the crappiest publication in mainstream media.
VidCon and Social Media
What made the second incident interesting to me is the aftermath and the reactions to it. Sarkeesian and Sargon both posted reactions on their respective outlets (Sarkeesian’s here, and Sargon’s here). But most interesting was VidCon’s response, which came across as floundering, politically correct, somewhat confused, but well-intentioned. It was clear that they wanted to deal with this issue, but they simply had no clue how, because they didn’t understand what was going on (self-admittedly; they said as much in the statement):
[…] a broader context, which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in…
This incident at VidCon is just the latest manifestation of a problem that has been afflicting every major internet platform recently. Vidcon, video games, and all the social media outlets have repeatedly suffered from a plague of “hate speech” and “harassment” that they are unable to deal with. Facebook is cracking down on “hate speech”. Twitter has a perennial problem with “hate speech” and “harassment” that they seem unable to deal with, which has even been blamed for their financial troubles. Reddit has repeatedly fiddled with its algorithm in order to suppress /r/The_Donald, which it regards as a bastion of “hate speech”, but also has faced backlash from both sides over issues like the Ellen Pao fiasco with /r/fatpeoplehate. Youtube is cracking down on “sensitive content” what has been termed the “Adpocalypse”.
[Update, July 16: Somebody has pointed out to me that one of the abusive activities Twitter can ban you for is “aggressively following, liking, or Retweeting Tweets”. Some might say that this could also be referred to as “using twitter”. Again, this indicates to me that Twitter doesn’t really understand what the problem is or how to fix it.]
The connection
It is my contention that all these subjects are all connected by the same underlying cause. That is: there is a seemingly unsolvable problem with hate speech and harassment, for the same reason that prominent news outlets have been pumping out think-piece after think-piece about absolute nonsense, that sometimes lead to embarrassing retractions and well-deserved mockery.
That problem is the TOTAL IDEOLOGICAL HOMOGENEITY of all these media entities. There isn’t a single real conservative in a leadership position in any of them. Everyone is somewhere between moderately and extremely far to the left. Some are politically active and have deeply held political views, and some aren’t political at all and merely passively accept the general left-wing philosophy, but there’s no significant diversity of opinion or mindset or worldview.
For example, it would only take one conservative editor at each news outlet to put an end to them churning out articles about myths like the “gun show loophole” or the “wage gap”, and so on. Those articles would just cease to exist (or at least take on some meaningful rather than hysterical form) with the addition of just a single conservative editor.
And to be clear, the problem isn’t that everyone involved is a radical leftist. Most of them aren’t. But the problem is that those who are radical leftists, face no real push-back at any point. The dispassionate and vaguely agreeing majority simply goes with what the radical leftists come up with, and that ends up setting the tone in the long term. Non-political administrators, such as Hank Green, end up getting pushed around by the likes of Anita Sarkeesian.
Many conservatives would be of the opinion that most “hate speech” is just something that happens when right-wingers and left-wingers meet on social media, and “harassment” is something that happens when a radical leftist meets any normal person who doesn’t buy their crap. I get the impression that people at social media outlets genuinely don’t understand why anyone would oppose something like the minimum wage or mass immigration, and when it’s suggested by one of the minority of radical leftists that such a thing is motivated by “hate speech”, that seems perfectly reasonable to them. So they wind up with incredibly restrictive policies and “speech codes”, as the result of genuinely wanting to deal with the problem, combined with not understanding what the problem is.
Finally, it’s important to note that this isn’t just a “liberal bias” thing. You’d see something similar if there was total ideological conformity in a rightward direction. I don’t think we do see that right now, because there aren’t any major institutions of public significance which are uncontestedly controlled by the Right right now. The problem is also unusually bad right now because the Left is aggressively hostile to free speech generally, while the Right is having a free-speech vogue at the moment, which would tend to depress the damaging effect of ideological conformity if it were to exhibit. Being in an echo chamber, even if the unchallenged ideas happen to be good ones, is always a toxic effect — and will lead to fake news.
