> Telegram and Reddit are not high quality media...
Says who? Back in the day people made a big deal about how Wikipedia was a low quality source of information until it turned out to be by far the best public repository of information humanity has ever seen and one of the best institutions ever built for neutral and informative coverage of various issues.
Reddit is a fantastic resource too. It sometimes gets long-form discussion involving domain experts and is much better at representing multiple viewpoints than any pre-internet media channel (which, given the bias of the major subreddits, is pretty amazing).
They're a media company; that is what they do. The difference is that Reddit is a lot more transparent about what is going on. The real question is what media channels do you believe are not publishing opinions in exchange for money or favours? Because most of them would be. There is no way the coverage of US politics is organic in the major corporations; it is too uniformly unhinged.
Reddit having flaws doesn't make it low quality. The baseline for media companies is well below sea level.
1. Reddit is NOT open about media manipulation. At all. And, no offense, but the idea that even most people can get quality news from that website is ridiculous. For example, the narratives around the reality of the situation on the Ukrainian frontlines are completely and totally wrong on that site. I had to go to Ukrainian media and military sources through Substack and elsewhere to get a non-propagandized sense of things. If you got your news from Reddit, you’d be completely and totally wrong. And I see this in the real world all the time: woefully misinformed people literally repeating word for word arguments they read on Reddit instead of distilling information from a myriad of reliable sources into independent and realistic viewpoints.
2. Again, the situation that we’re in is not natural, it is a reality that was created by political and ideological extremists. You’re talking about insane levels of media corruption as if it is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon, but it’s not. We can change it.
> 1. Reddit is NOT open about media manipulation. At all...
You just linked an entire article with, realistically, some pretty detailed analysis of how the Harris campaign was interacting with Reddit. There are details of what was said, who said it, where it was said, how much was said. Experiments were conducted. Dates, times and strategies are being publicised.
Link me that for the Harris campaign's interactions with CNN or the New York Times. There is nowhere near as much information floating around as far as I have seen - people have to guess.
> had to go to Ukrainian media and military sources through Substack and elsewhere to get a non-propagandized sense of things.
I'm just going to pick this up on the way through - that is not the right move; Ukraine is in an active war! There is little hope their media is reporting things accurately. Countries in war, particularly losing wars, are notorious for presenting a warped view of the war situation.
And there are strong suspicions that the Ukraine media is a wing of the US propaganda machine, one of the things that came up during USAID was the remarkable amount of foreign funding for media that flows through Ukraine [0].
> You’re talking about insane levels of media corruption as if it is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon, but it’s not. We can change it.
It is and you can't. The only thing that has changed in recent years is that there are alternative voices being heard that are alerting people to just how bad the media situation is. I'm not seeing any evidence the quality of the media has changed in the last [insert time period], but wow the amount of transparency has jumped up since around the 2000s.
Says who? Back in the day people made a big deal about how Wikipedia was a low quality source of information until it turned out to be by far the best public repository of information humanity has ever seen and one of the best institutions ever built for neutral and informative coverage of various issues.
Reddit is a fantastic resource too. It sometimes gets long-form discussion involving domain experts and is much better at representing multiple viewpoints than any pre-internet media channel (which, given the bias of the major subreddits, is pretty amazing).