You just have to decide what you want to believe.

They lived under *COMMUNIST REGIMES*.

The "Riots" are happening in the ex- Communist parts of Germany!

Thing is that people in the West are afraid to stand up with their eastern brothers

Well, it seems likely to me that the people of West Germany probably are having at least as hard a time understanding the situation as we are. They have much more draconian information control to try to pierce. But beyond that they have the demoralization effect preventing any action from forming.

If you can't be certain what are the actual facts of the situation and you are hesitant about being manipulated, you will be paralyzed by inaction.

For example, if you consider it possible that the protest was actually mostly nazis and you don't want to have anything to do with nazis, then even if you don't *know* it was nazis you will hesitate to support it.

Better to stay silent than risk accidentally supporting nazis.

No, there are many people who could guess the situation because the same shit is happening in their region every day.

And its the same People doing it there as well, at the other end of Germany

Its only far leftys that strongly believe in the Ideology of Diversity that protest the protesters. "Normies" that live in areas full with migrants have a pretty good grasp of the situation

east and west germany are still very different in culture and exposure to foreigners

but the buzzfeed article tim posted is... just... wow...

I wish Tim would use archives.

"there is no point in having fact-checkers in regular media because people don't believe them"

maybe the fact that there apparently ARE NO fact checkers in regular media might be the reason WHY no one believes them...

I agree. I think if even Buzzfeed or others actually started doing good work they would quickly build up a better reputation.

You know what would be wild? If media cut out the middle-man of fact-checkers, and just included links to original source documents, audio, and video.

stop the churnalisim.

If they're claiming X said Y, then just link to a clip of them saying that.

This is shit that kids learn in high school for fuck's sake. Reference the original source material whenever possible.

And the whole fucking point of hyperlinks was to do just this.

That's why hypertext was invented. To link pages together to make it easy to jump around multiple documents and have sources and context available at a click.

We're going backwards though. All this web 2.0 shit made pages pretty with stylish typesetting and complex newspaper-ish layouts, but the content turned to garbage.

Have you ever looked at the info on a Adin Palidin video? It's beautiful.

Oh yeah she's really good when it comes to citing things. She's almost unique in that regard.

she's very thorough and sciency

She makes a 40min video and if you want you could spend a weekend reading deeper.

I wouldn't be able to tell you anyone who does the same level of citation work in a youtube video.

is it really surprising that someone who continually throws in where to find the current reference when talking about things also links to the sources?

@Atkins Regarding sites turning to garbage do you think that correlates with GoogleAds at all?

Yeah, shes a breast of fresh ass innt she.

Well the financial side of things is definitely contributing to the collapse. Media companies tend to have ridiculous overhead and online advertising is so fucking awful these days that it's hard to believe, and thus the only way they can make ends meet is to become as clickbaity as possible and chase anger clicks.

What the average advertiser is willing to pay for an ad impression these days is only a tiny fraction of what they would pay 5 years ago.

And if you're a media company that wants a flashy modern office in downtown San Fran, paying salaries commensurate with that locale then you need a fuckload of clicks and you aren't going to care too much how you get them.

If I ever own a media company that shit is going to have an office in the middle of god damned nowhere flyover country, and as many staff as possible are going to work from home.

You can only drive overhead and salaries down so far though before people stop wanting to work for you. Subscription models don't work and ads pay for shit. So I don't know how to solve the financial side of things.

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/02/28/Public%20Radio%20Station%20Revenues%20FY%202015_custom-a7d8480c5206651de13a27f0263cbd217532fef2-s1600-c85.png

That's where NPR's money comes from.

While NPR obviously has more of a following on the left, I don't see many people accusing them of being fake news or clickbait.

I've been saying for a while that people need to be willing to pay for the news