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Getting good information is becoming impossible these days as every media outlet has bias views. The decisions we make are based on the information we get thus getting good information is imperative! The point of this thread is to discuss media issues and perhaps find some sources which are relatively reliable and identify those which are malignant liars. A source which I have been using and have found it to be relatively good is democracynow.org and I hope people here can bring your own sources so we can have a good discussion and identify some relatively reliable sources of information.
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Hayastan or Bust. -
Re: Media
Some of the bad sources we have discussed and identified in this forum include Lragir and Eurasianet.org. Both of these sources are obvious western propaganda tools used to defame anything Russian and the Armenian government. We can add others to this list along with bias sources in the other camp as well. By identifying good and bad sources we can improve the quality of information we use in decision making.Hayastan or Bust. -
Re: Media
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2015 0:37:56 PDT
After battling ISIS, Kurds find new foe in Facebook
By Christopher Livesay
Oct. 7, 2015
>From the comfort of a cafe in central Stockholm, the fighting in Iraq
and Syria couldn't seem more distant.
But with the help of free WiFi, a group of Kurdish Swedes are taking
on the Islamic State on the cyber battlefield.
Ara Ahmed, 20, manages a Facebook Page called the Liberty Lions.
`We share news about the war going on there. At one point we had over
10,000 followers,' says Ahmed, who immigrated to Sweden from Iraqi
Kurdistan when he was 15.
Written in English, the page's mostly Western audience was growing
steadily. But this summer, he received warnings from Facebook for
violating community standards. And it wasn't for something you might
expect, like posting bloody images from a warzone.
`It was a clip from Jon Stewart,' he says, referring to The Daily
Show. `He explained Turkey intervening in the war against ISIS. But
actually their fight was against the Kurdish militia, the PKK.'
In typical tongue-in-cheek form, Stewart reviews the news that Turkey
had joined coalition air strikes on ISIS this past July. In the next
clip, a reporter says that most of those strikes have been against the
pro-American Kurds.
`So they're stepping up their fight against ISIS by taking out the
people most effectively fighting ISIS,' quips Stewart. `Brilliant
strategy. Certainly no one will see that coming.'
The bit got a lot of likes on Ahmed's page.
`It reached about 200,000 people with 1,000 shares after one day,'
says Ahmed. `The next day, I log into Facebook and I get a warning
that my post violates the standards of Facebook. I don't understand
why.'
The answer may lie in a secret document, reportedly leaked in 2012 by
a disgruntled Facebook employee. It was the company's violations list,
which was not public. And it affects users worldwide. Most of the
violations are for things you'd expect, like images of self-harm or
sexual violence.
But several stand out for how specific they are to Turkey and the
Kurds. For instance, users are flagged for posting maps of the
disputed area of Kurdistan, and for insulting Ataturk, the founding
father of modern-day Turkey.
Even more severe, accounts are automatically suspended for depicting
fighters from the PKK, a militant Kurdish separatist movement
considered a terror group by Turkey and the US.
For 30 years, the PKK has waged an armed struggle with the Turkish
government, seeking greater autonomy for Turkey's Kurdish minority of
more than 14 million people. Combined with neighboring regions in
other countries, the population of Kurds adds up to close to 28
million, according to the CIA Factbook, making Kurds the world's
largest ethnic group without a state of their own.
Recently, the PKK has also been among the most effective ground forces
fighting ISIS, as Stewart pointed out on the Daily Show.
At one point, a one-second image of PKK combatants appears in the
clip, and thus in Ahmed's Facebook post. It seems that's all it took
for administrators to shut it down. Shortly afterward, Facebook took
down the entire Liberty Lions page.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to be interviewed for this story. But
in a written statement she said, `there is no place for terrorists on
Facebook. We work aggressively to ensure that we do not have
terrorists or terror groups using the site, and we also remove any
content that praises or supports terrorism.'
Robert Faris, research director at the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard, says Facebook has a number of policies that
dictate when it takes down content.
`This one is a particularly bright line. They have decided that all
PKK content is going to come down. PKK has been declared a terrorist
organization by the United States and other governments,' he says.
Facebook employs language experts, Faris says, who moderate pages for
content that goes against Facebook guidelines, like references to the
PKK. It's a moderator behind each decision to take a post down they're
prone to make mistakes. It's a subjective process, though Facebook
tries to make it as objective as possible.
`They have gone to great lengths to try and explain to the world the
criteria that use for taking content down,' he says. `Part of me is
sympathetic to what they have to try to do and part of me is not, in
that they have signed up for this voluntarily and they are making a
lot of money doing it. It's a really difficult job to try and figure
out what goes up and what goes down. They have to navigate political
pressures and political sensibilities around the world.'
But critics insist that this rule is not applied to other groups or
figures more commonly associated with terrorism.
`You know there's nothing banning the image of Bin Laden, or Al
Baghdadi, or the image of Hitler. Why is this the one issue in the
world that I can't talk about?' says Thoreau Redcrow, a researcher at
Nova Southeastern University, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He
concentrates on Kurdish guerrillas and is an advocate for Kurds.
After finding his own Facebook account blocked several times for
posting his work, he tried an experiment to test the `terrorist'
designation.
`The social scientist in me decided 'OK, well, I'll sign up pages and
test some of these theories,' he explains. `I would post a picture of
a burning Turkish flag. And when I logged in eight hours later, `Op!
You've violated Facebook guidelines. Do not do this again.' And then
I'd say, `OK, I'm going to post a map of Northern Kurdistan, with a
guy giving a peace sign and saying `glory to Northern Kurdistan.' And
then there you go, you've violated guidelines.'
We asked Facebook if this is their standard protocol regarding Turkey
and the Kurds. Again, they wouldn't respond.
Turkey is infamous for cracking down on its critics, with more jailed
journalists than almost any other country. When it comes to social
media, no other government makes more requests to remove content from
Twitter. Last year, Turkey blocked Twitter and YouTube in the run-up
to local elections.
Redcrow notes that while those sites were taken down, Facebook has
always stayed up and running in Turkey. He suspects it's in no hurry
to jeopardize its access to nearly 40 million Internet users.
Meanwhile, Kurdish rights activists are increasingly nervous that
their pages will get taken down and their voices silenced.
Back at the café in Stockholm, a woman using the alias Evine eagerly
shows me a picture on her laptop. It depicts the funeral of a Kurdish
fighter with the YPG militia ' a group that is not a designated terror
group and is collaborating with US coalition air strikes against ISIS.
Facebook still took the picture down, she says.
`I look at this picture and I don't know how a grieving mother can
violate the community standards of Facebook,' she says. `Why are we
being censored to show our pain to the world? This is just a mother
that is going in front of the casket of her son. Nothing else.'
Hayastan or Bust.Comment
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Re: Media
It is exceedingly difficult to find good sources of information. I find myself having to read news from bias sources and then having to decipher the content. To get the truth about a topic like Syria for example we have to resort to sources other then western media while keeping in mind that those other sources will also have their own agendas. I started this thread hoping to get a good discussion on this topic and to find more sources of information that are not direct mouthpieces for the powers that be. We are seeing a huge crackdown on free press everywhere and this is a dangerous sign of things to come.Hayastan or Bust.Comment
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Re: Media
Watch how the media portrays us as terrorists and the genocidal Turks as victims. This is the reason why Armenia has no choice but to stay tight with Russia. Most of the related material is in the first half of the video.
December 20, 2016 4:38 pm
The Rachel Maddow Show’s Distasteful and Misleading Introduction
The first six minutes of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC editorialized a prescripted hit piece on Armenians instead of reporting on the devastating assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey by a Turkish police officer. We thought she was smarter than that. This is unfair and irresponsible journalism.
Join the Armenian Assembly of America by contacting Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, and MSNBC to voice your objection to the distasteful and misleading introduction of her segment.
Armenian Assembly Co-Chair Anthony Barsamian wrote immediately to Rachel Maddow:
“Your editorial piece did little to calm Christian hatred within Turkey, especially as it relates to the vulnerable minority Armenian community.”
“We are deeply disappointed and surprised at your lack of knowledge and sensitivity towards these issues.”
If Rachel Maddow wanted to show the full story of Turkish terrorism, there are a few other points she should have highlighted:
Is it not a Turkish militant who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II?
Is it not Turkey that has a history of state-sponsored terrorism targeting ethnic minorities in their own nation, especially towards Kurdish and Armenian civilians?
Is it not in Turkey where Turkish Armenian journalist and activist Hrant Dink was murdered?
Is it not Turkey that lets ISIS terrorists through its borders, leading to more attacks by the day?
Is it not Turkey that profits from ISIS terrorists and purchases their illegally obtained oil?
While Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan “strongly condemned this act of terror” on the “barbaric assassination of the RF Ambassador in Turkey Andrei Karlov,” Turkey and Azerbaijan are distracting the world. Turkey and Azerbaijan are distorting the news to deliberately distract the world from their own violence-prone policies.
Write to The Rachel Maddow Show now and share the truth.
Click here to watch the 12/19 episode of The Rachel Maddow Show.
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