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The Five Filters of the Propaganda Model

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  • 287 Posts
  • 139 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 18th, 2023
  • Five@slrpnk.netOPtoPodcasts@slrpnk.net•The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron - Factually! with Adam ConoverEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    ‘AI’ in the sense of machine learning algorithms is very old technology, and has seen revolutionary applications at every step of its development. Eliza was created in the 1960s and demonstrated that if the test of a computer’s artificial intelligence was whether it could fool a human that it was sentient, the value of that test depended very heavily on how willing the human correspondent was to ‘fill in the blanks.’ The results of those experiments show that the average person is extremely willing to fill in the blanks even when the technology is full of gaping holes.

    In the podcast, they’re talking specifically about ChatGPT-style technology, its flaws, and the willingness of people to ‘fill in the blanks’ in a new dimension – to assume LLM technology is a truckload more graphics cards or a nuclear reactor away from what sci-fi writers mean when they say ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – and that is evidently false.

  • Five@slrpnk.nettoWorld News@lemmy.world•Marxist lawmaker Dissanayake has won Sri Lanka's presidential election as voters reject old political guardEnglish
    4·
    5 days ago

    ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising.

    Manufacturing Consent has this to say about Disney news media:

    Ben Bagdikian notes that when the first edition of his Media Monopoly was published in 1983, fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position.

    Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates-Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world’s major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time Warner, has integrated the leading Internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most U.S. citizens. Bagdikian concludes that “it is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling questions about the individual’s role in the American democracy.”

  • Five@slrpnk.nettoWorld News@lemmy.world•More than 60 reported killed in northeast Sudan dam collapseEnglish
    11·
    1 month ago

    Dave M. Van Zandt rates Al Jazeera English as “Credibility: Medium” and “Factual Reporting: Mixed”; this is depite the news outlet being recognized worldwide as one of the best in the world.

    On Dave’s page, he lists two stories out of the enormous corpus they’ve produced in the last five years as evidence of his biased assessment.

    The real issue Dave has with Al Jazeera, as evidenced by his pattern of bad, unscientific, and arbitrary classifications of middle-eastern journalism, is that their journalists occasionally do investigative reporting critical of the Israeli government. He has repeated the indefensible opinion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

    Dave’s personal credibility gatekeeper site, MBFC, is a flak organization is to center corporate news that is favorable to power, and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is the fourth filter of the Propaganda Model.

  • Five@slrpnk.nettoWorld News@lemmy.world•Zelensky: Diplomacy 'not at the expense of 30% of our territory'English
    21·
    1 month ago

    I’m quite certain if I ignored the warning, I would earn a ban. The difference isn’t between the World and ML mods, it’s between me trying to play nice with their inconsistent bullshit rules, and the people getting banned from ML not respecting the predictable bullshit rules of that instance.

    It’s obviously more than a disagreement about how to define ‘spamming.’ The MBFC bot is now the most downvoted account in Lemmy history, and it is now more unpopular than the most popular Lemmy account is popular. It appears in every !news, !world, and !politics thread where it is experienced as spam by the vast majority of users.

    But the harm it does is greater than merely taking up pagespace. It distorts the discussion in favor of MBFC’s author’s right-wing views, and gives the World mods the pretense of neutrality when removing left-wing voices from their communities. The MBFC has been widely discredited. For example, Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources Noticeboard rates sources as generally reliable (green), no consensus (yellow), mostly unreliable (red).

    Giving this joke of a resource an institutional place in the flagship communities of the Lemmy’s largest instance are an embarrassment to the entire Threadiverse project. Due to WP’s policy of neutrality, it’s even more damning when you look under the hood and read the specific criticisms that lead its policy of not linking MBFC in its pages. I am being threatened by the mods for reposting excepts from those criticisms in reply to the MBFC bot spam.

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