<story><title>Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations</title><url>http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fidotron</author><text>Of course, this place isn&amp;#x27;t immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies.&lt;p&gt;One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn&amp;#x27;t need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>selmnoo</author><text>The fascinating thing is, you can&amp;#x27;t stop the ads on HN from the big &lt;i&gt;big&lt;/i&gt; players, because it&amp;#x27;s effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&amp;amp;A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur&amp;#x27;s game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money&amp;#x2F;bribing them -- no, that&amp;#x27;s an amateur&amp;#x27;s game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they&amp;#x27;ll fill in the blanks). But money&amp;#x2F;bribing&amp;#x2F;soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don&amp;#x27;t get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can&amp;#x27;t report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you&amp;#x27;ll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.</text></comment>
<story><title>Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations</title><url>http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fidotron</author><text>Of course, this place isn&amp;#x27;t immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies.&lt;p&gt;One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn&amp;#x27;t need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waterlesscloud</author><text>There should be a word for requests for data citations that are really just disguised admissions of having no meaningful response to a point.</text></comment>