I feel we may be going around in circles with this; I think I’m not describing my interpretation well enough, but I think I understand what you are meaning when you say that journalism is full time — it’s not exactly how I would use the term, but I understand what you are saying. I completely agree with you that the work of a journalist is non-trivial. I also agree with you that a professional journalist deals with large volumes of information, and, to be able to process those large volumes of information, it would generally require one to work full time.

[…] That’s the point of the entire “it’s a real job” argument. Journalists are doing a lot of legwork once and we’re all relying on that job to acquire a lot of our information instead of all of us doing the same legwork again. The two problems we’re facing are 1) that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism, and 2) that we’re no longer just getting neatly processed info that has gone through a journalistic process, we’re also getting a firehose of misinformation from many individual content generators over the Internet.

Those are both hard problems to manage.

I agree that they may be hard problems to manage perfectly, but I don’t agree that citing sources won’t put a dent in the issue. Take your first problem:

that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism […]

Say you have an article that says “A young man stole a car.”. Just as a very basic example, language like “young” is an opinion — it’s not an exact definition of age and is left to the reader for how they interpret it. Such interpretations open the door for emotional bias. I think it would be a different story if the article actually cited the age, or simply stated the age with a citation for where they know it from.

If a journalist phones a couple of sources, hears from them the same thing they are seeing somewhere and publishes that information, then the fact-checking has been done once and reaches thousands or millions of people.

If the way the information is disseminated requires those thousands or millions to do the fact-check themselves using the same process, then that is entirely impractical, which was my original point. Crowdsourced fact-checking is always going to be less reliable and exponentially more work than properly verified broadcast news sources. Even if many of them share their fact check, we have plenty of data to suggest the reach of that correction will be much smaller and it will still require a lot of private effort to correct the original info.

Sure, but would it not be better if they had also just cited the transcript of their contact with those sources? I understand that the news outlet can just fabricate a source, but at least a source will give readers an official starting point for investigation rather than just blind continuous skepticism. I’m of the opinion that a sketchy source is better than no source at all.

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[…] I’m not concerned with who is doing the work, I’m concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.

The only impracticality that I can currently see is the example that you gave earlier ^[1]

[…] I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media […]

But just because it may not be practical for an average person to verify a source in all cases doesn’t feel like a valid argument for why sources (that the news outlet has already verified) shouldn’t be provided. Say a news article is reporting on a claim that an interviewee made in an interview that they conducted. Say that the interview interview footage is posted on its own. If the news article is commenting on a claim being made by the interviewee, is there any reason why the interview shouldn’t simply be directly cited? It would remove a lot of burden from the reader if all they have to do is click on the link to the video and scrub to the timestamp to hear the claim for themselves. Yes it would be impractical for each reader to contact the interviewee for themselves to verify that the interviewee did actually say that; however, I think that it sometimes is less about a skepticism of reality, but more a skepticism of reporting bias.

[…] This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we’re breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.

It’s a wip 😜 I think it’s still a good idea, but it depends on how it’s done. I agree that I may be fragmenting a bit too much. I need to work on maintaining context. I think it’s also important to never fork the conversation if one branch depends on the other branch. That’s the issue that’s happened here, I think.

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Besides public disclosure documents?

Do you have a handy source for those as well? Please don’t interpret my prying for sources as sealioning — I’m very curious to read more about this, and I want to make sure that what I find is actually what you are referring to.

Reddit admins accidentally outed them before they started masking their traffic.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1

Very interesting. Thank you for the link! When digging into this a little more, I came across this Reddit post ^[1], which pointed me to this research paper ^[2] authored, in part, an associate of Eglin AFB ^[2.1].

Thank you for the source 😊

[…] without making a dent on the issue.

“the issue” being misinformation and disinformation that’s not defamation?

[…] You can’t start a legal process against every single tweet and facebook post (let alone every message in a Whatsapp group you can’t even see in the first place). […]

Imo, theoretically one could, but I think that it would be impractical, or at least prohibitively expensive.

[…] If what you’re saying is a savvy reader can fact-check an article if they know how… probably yes, in most cases. There are also probably warning flags and markers in most pieces to tell a savvy reader whether they should be following up in the first place. […]

An example that I would add would be the mere presence, or lack thereof, of citations. If nothing is cited, then, imo, it’s not great journalism.

[…] I assume you mean the first option […]

Yes.

[…] I will not cite my sources. […]

I only recommend that you do, based on my own personal opinions.

I’m convinced OP is a bot. […]

I’m not. What made you so convinced?

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