• 23 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’d argue most major news networks are propaganda parading itself as news. CBC may be more of an exception since they have government funding, though they do still have advertisers and to some degree lose some element of control because of that.

    Things like cellphones and internet are a big proponent of most Canadians lives, and the antics that Bell and Rogers gets up to are rarely reported on, or if they are reported on, there is a lot of omissions. It’s no surprise why considering Bell and Rogers own a lot of the news networks.

    I’d say a good chunk of Canadian and American news is pretty heavily controlled by mega corporations.


  • I can throw out a view examples of content that I have seen deemed as “hateful” in local subreddits that I personally don’t think fit under the purview of “hate speech”.

    • Comments removed that were speaking about drivers from a particular city being bad. The city has one of the highest insurance rates in Canada due to high collision rates. It however also has one of the highest immigrant populations of East-Indian people so I will often see any comment vaguely mentioning this cities poor driving being deemed “racist” simply because it could be a racist implication despite the bad driving comments having no race component and being backed by stats.
    • Comments that are against PRIDE movements. Now again I am not meaning blatantly homophobic comments like “Gay people suck”, I mean comments like “I don’t agree with this content being taught in schools”. In many subreddits both of these comments will get removed and result in bans. Which I’d agree is valid for the first comment, but not the latter.
    • With COVID-19 specific topics I saw some pretty heavy handed moderation as well. It’s been a bit so I don’t have any specific example, but I saw people who would be presenting simple opinions who were trying to have good faith discussions/debates have their comments removed and get banned. Again, I am not talking about the blatant “don’t get vaccines, they cause autism” clowns. During COVID I actually was working for a public health clinic and worked in vaccine clinics. So don’t get me wrong on which “side” of things I stand on, but it was always disheartening to see people who had differing opinions, or who were hesitant about things get mobbed by people, comment removed, and banned. People who could have had reasonable conversations and eventually maybe formed different science-based opinions instead get shut out and pushed off to fringe communities.

    Now don’t get me wrong, I am a moderator on some communities on reddit and I know content-moderation in general is a hard topic. Knowing someone’s intentions behind a comment can sometimes be murky and that is often part of the issue. I come from a viewpoint where I think it is important for people to see comments that they may disagree with or may even offend them. Of course there is no need for posts that just flame someone, or attack specific immutable characteristics, but I think there is harm from being too isolated from different viewpoints as well.