Platforms in the Information Society

Nothing is trustworthy. What is "Independence" and what does it actually mean?

The Simplified Informational Past

Wind the clock back 30 years. Most of the information that was released through any of media space outlets, including the content of libraries, was subject to some form of commissioning and editorial process that added cost, effort and some form of “potential value add” to the creation and dissemination of that information.

There were legal frameworks and enforceable means to regulate or limit output, which exist today but have been adapted publicly and by stealth. The media channels of the past were perfectly capable of delivering propaganda and state/owner/editorial bias. However, plurality, diversity and competition, combined with less overt desire, less legislation and fewer efficient tools to exercise total control seemed to add up to a less propagandised and polarised information sphere back then.

Clearly, in any ad revenue-driven model, there always exists a tension between the interests of the advertisers and the objectives of the outlet. “Commercial interest” is a catch all term for the power of money and who is spending or seeking it.

On a basic level, a self-contained and independent newspaper that lived or died on the mix between daily sales and advertising revenue could be said to have been motivated to serve a balance between advertisers and readers, with a bent towards readers’ interests because they are the ones who form the demographic that the advertisers access.

30 years ago, it was assumed that trust could be placed in some outlets and institutions because there were standards, diversity, integrity and a greater separation of state from media. Today, that is proven time and again to be untrue.

At what point does the tail wag the dog? We passed that point over a decade ago.

Present Day Platforms: Rock and a Hard Place

The notionally binary paradigm of so-called mainstream or corporate media versus the alt or independent media is false, but it is perpetuated by players across the board for reasons of simplicity, and the motivations for describing it in a false binary are not all good or bad.

Aside from the physical content of libraries, Western informational content has been shifted towards digital formats. This is an extremely mixed blessing. The majority of internet traffic flows through a small number of infrastructure providers and tech monoliths. These mainstream articles are all circa 5 years old (HBR, Visual Capitalist, NYT, Newsweek) and all expressly point to centralised dominance over internet traffic by just a few monolithic companies.

Let’s consider a simple view of today’s media space.

• Corporations own

• Platforms that host

• Content made by

• Content Providers

Inherent in the above is the agglomeration of what were previously greater numbers of more diverse media outlets into fewer and fewer corporations over time. That is centralisation and concentration of power and interests, irrespective of the “liberating” effect of the internet. The FANGs and media companies are oligopolies but their actions are enabled and approved by governments who have not objected to the concentration of power.

Look at this list of the top 50 websites. The top 15 are stable. Here’s the top 25 tabularised by Zerohedge on a per month hit basis:

The #1 site’s monthly hits is 2.5x the #2 site’s hits, which it owns. #1 on its own is not just a search engine, it’s a brand of the dominant multi-faceted internet monolith, Alphabet, that spans every aspect of information technology. YouTube is just a platform owned by Alphabet. #1 & #2 added together are one or two orders of magnitude larger than any of the others. You can consider this list a little similar to comparing national defence budgets: the US dwarfs the rest of the world’s nations, even when you start adding the non-US budgets up. Except that these budgets aren’t going into weapons aimed at other countries. They are going into tools and weapons that act directly on your brain.

Look at the number of platforms on the list. They all represent the same idea: that the technological aspects of the content platform are where the power lies first and foremost. The platform needs no ability to create content of any kind, it simply needs to be an easy host option for “Content Providers”. It may even take ownership of the content depending upon the EULA/terms.

How many of them exercise any kind of commissioning, editorial or quality control process before content is served? None. After-the-fact “standards” or rules are not part of this. Such standards may never even be infringed and could be totally opaque. None of the platforms are applying a process that seeks to answer, upfront, the question, “is this content/product any good, accurate, truthful, of quality or value?”. They simply want mountains of free-to-them content and will host anything until something gets flagged or detected for possible pull down. They only pay out on content that is “successful”. All the upfront cost and risk of content creation is shifted off the platform on to the creator. Publishing and TV did not used to work like this.

There are no pre-publication content quality controls on any of those platforms. This is profound.

Content Providers - Rats on a wheel?

So, in this paradigm of corporately owned and managed platforms whose business objective is to be a gateway to content provision and access, just exactly how powerful and independent is the Content Provider? This depends upon several factors, but in short, Content Providers are weak and 99% of them are at the bottom of the pile.

Content Providers are at the mercy of platform access combined with captivity to their own brand identity. If you make content under an identity that becomes intrinsic to your content e.g. your face, voice, manner, delivery and choice of content, and the platform bars your identity, that’s you and your revenue generating content gone from the platform forever. You then have to find another platform and hope you had backups of and legal ownership of all your cancelled content, then you have to find a way of telling audiences what happened to you and where you went. Then you have to hope the audience follows. Content Providers take what they are given by the platform, until they get some form of leverage e.g. critical mass, whereupon they might be able to renegotiate a better deal, but they could still be cancelled and the following examples are exceptions to the rule due to the huge audiences. Joe Rogan is a recent example and Tucker Carlson is the latest. Don Lemon is not an example of this. Mr Beast is an example, in that what he produces is entirely tailored to getting clicks and views and being uncancellable; Mr. Beast stays well within YouTube’s rules envelope and games your attention envelope.

Amazon Marketplace does for retail what YouTube does for video. Both corporations insert themselves between the Content Provider and the subscriber in a way that keeps them permanently separated. Amazon Sellers don’t get access to their full customer data and YouTube creators don’t know who their subscribers are outside of their YouTube ID, so can’t contact all their subscribers once kicked off the platform. An obvious workaround to this is to encourage subscribers to directly join a mailing list outside of the platform, but this is not in any way “normal” behaviour to request this of one’s YouTube subscribers. This separation serves only the platform’s interests and makes the Content Provider a slave to their granted access to the platform’s users.

Content Providers are a form of piece worker. They produce a single item with no guarantee of payment. They are at the whim of the platform’s algo as to whether their piece is seen by anyone. If enough people see their piece, they may be paid something at the whim of the platform. Normal piece workers are usually guaranteed to get paid per piece provided they produce what was asked of them. Content Providers trade that guarantee for lack of editorial oversight and total creative freedom. Over time, the persistence of content and the ability to tweak marketable elements mean that it’s possible a piece can continue to generate income over longer time frames as/if views build up.

Content Providers in all areas - video, audio, written, visual - are subject to the demands of audience attention span/boredom, churn rate, and relevance such that many will need to or feel that they must produce frequent content on a schedule or minimum rate to increase the chances of income. If one looks at a given channel’s viewing figures, huge variability across the catalogue and generally small numbers are often the norm. One can expect videos served to you by the algo to have higher views, but often looking at the provider’s back catalogue tells a different story.

In summary, the vast majority of Content Providers are subjugated by the platform, by design. This became the de facto state of affairs once viewer behaviours and volumes sufficiently switched to platforms, and the platforms’ power was recognised by their owners and the state.

Independent and Alt Media

Define “independent media”.

1. Small media production, marketing, or distribution companies not affiliated with a ‘major’ commercial company. This includes those which may seek public funding, such as in the ‘independent film sector’.

2. Media companies defining their productions in opposition to the values of mainstream entertainment: see also alternative media.

3. Commercial media companies which are independent of state ownership and funding: for example, in the UK, ITV (Independent Television)—a terrestrial broadcast channel operated regionally on a franchise basis.

Oxford Reference

This three-part definition is broad enough that it loops around and item 3 contradicts item 1. As long as a company isn’t owned by the state or takes money from it, it’s independent. This runs counter to most people’s innate understanding of what corporate/mainstream media is compared to what is considered “independent” now.

When it comes to “independent journalism”, according to Liberties.eu:

Independent journalism, also called independent media, refers to any news media that is free from influence by the government or other external sources like corporations or influential people. This includes television, newspapers, radio and online journalism. It means that journalists feel no pressure to shape or sanitize their reporting, even if it may negatively portray the government or other power entities, even the owner of the news outlet or other individuals. Independent journalism allows unvarnished facts to be shared with the public so that it may use the information to help them decide on important issues, like which politicians or policies to support or which companies are acting ethically and thus deserve their business.

Independent journalism is an essential part of democracy. Free and informed public debate is the backbone of democracy. It allows us to freely exchange ideas and discuss matters and alternative views so that we have the information we need to make good choices at the polls. When journalists are pressured to shape their reporting so that it is in line with a certain government position or corporate interest, they aren’t necessarily free to tell people all facts, or explain the whole situation as they see it.

liberties.eu

Now try and fit the concept of an individual Content Provider into those definitions. The Content Provider doesn’t fit into Oxford’s definitions which are all about the company or corporate level. Any independent journalist is still subject to anything that restricts their access to an audience, which brings us back to their subjugation by outlets and platforms. It’s hard to be a successful independent Content Provider if one can’t be seen, heard or read by a critical mass of people. If anything involved in getting to an audience can affect what one does or how one does it, one’s true degree of independence can be questioned, and rightly so.

As an aside, it should be noted that there is both an overlap with and a distinction between independence and “alt media”:

1. (community, alternative, underground media, press) Non-mainstream media forms such as graffiti, street theatre, fanzines, pamphlets, and community newsletters—especially when used by minority groups for campaigning on particular issues.

2. (radical media, press) Newspapers, magazines, radio stations, or online media which are not corporately owned and which circulate political messages felt to be under-represented in ‘mainstream media’ (seen as geared towards maximizing profits and supporting a ‘free-trade’ agenda).

3. (alternative) A marketing category—particularly associated with cinema, music, and writing—that defines its product as being other than mainstream—either because its form is more challenging, or it expresses non-conformist values, or both.

Oxford Reference

This definition serves to label possibly anything that isn’t “mainstream” or conformist as “alt”. Clearly, this begs the question of who determines what is mainstream? This brings us back to the power of platforms, which are now fully focussed on directly managing perception and dictating what is acceptable, mainstream, and to be conformed to, even if that is an ultra minority view that is powered up and heavily promoted in the mainstream media.

Independence is an imperfect notion and perfect independence is probably an impossible achievement for all but a few. No one is independent if they need to generate a revenue stream from somewhere. They are, by definition, dependent upon a revenue stream.

The power and perception of Deplatforming

The power of deplatforming is self-evident once one understands the monopoly powers of the FANGs and the handful of other platforms that host most of the world’s content.

This has given rise to competing platforms and models, with Rumble and Odyssey being just two examples in the video space. However, Content Providers on those platforms haven’t become freer, they are just subject to whatever those platform’s rule are for the time being. There’s zero guarantee that their rules and commercial interests will remain unchanged.

The notion that deplatforming is good for the independence of media is flawed and naïve. The reality of the internet is that anyone can set up a website and use various means to serve audio, video and text to anyone with internet access. Then that person has to deal with two fundamental questions of cost and technical skill. Internet hosts charge in part on bandwidth. A popular vlogger hosting their own video on a totally independent site is going to be facing hosting costs that they simply have no visibility of via an existing platform like YouTube. If they are technically incompetent they will be facing charges for website creation and maintenance, which again are costs obfuscated and minimised by platforms. Deplatforming is therefore just a one-sided weapon that can only be combatted by those with means, options, some skill and a sufficiently loyal and interested audience. Apart from cutting access to audiences, deplatforming carries the risk of exposing a Content Provider to the full, unscaled costs of independent content hosting, or the opportunity cost of alternate platforms.

The grotesque abuse of power that the tiny minority of dominant platforms have exercised via deplatforming has done three things: driven competition in the platform space; re-fragmented the media space; driven up information price on a piecemeal basis.

There are competing platforms with different models emerging, but none of them feature on the above list of top 50 websites and won’t for a long time. Rumble is a free to access platform with an advertising model that claims to be devoted to completely free speech, which also has Locals and is developing Rumble Cloud Services. Odyssey is similar as a video model, with the difference that use of the Lbry blockchain implies that distributed content can’t be deleted by the platform and the controls over what gets seen are different to YouTube (a little more on the how here). Both are miniscule compared to the incumbents, but Rumble is listed and showing consistent growth. Just because there are alternative platforms, the power of deplatforming by the incumbents isn’t diminished on grounds of effort and lost income.

Once deplatformed or cancelled, the Content Provider is out in the wild, looking for a new home. This movement forces audiences to track more people across more platforms, which is a form of fragmentation that is increasing over time. It goes without saying that managing more bookmarks or apps isn’t exactly hard work, but nonetheless there’s a user laziness that has built up via the agglomeration of content across so few platforms until recently. Self-promotion and marketing following deplatforming is essential just to tell people where one went and may be totally alien to the Content Provider. It may not be effective or possible if one is small, has no resources or ability and no access to one’s previous subscriber base.

The pre-emptive answer to this is to have a presence on multiple channels all the time. The Duran consists of Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou giving their weekday commentary on some current affairs. What The Duran lists as channels and sources for support is very long and includes multiple instances of everything, including payment platforms¹ because the payment platforms are as essential as the content platforms and the same agglomeration paradigm applies.

The price of some information - specifically “independent information” - to the user is actually going up on a net basis but this is not being discussed. The internet may have, for a time, driven down the price of information. This price drop can be seen in the struggles of the print media who largely failed to adapt collectively and spent years presiding over dwindling sales revenue and trying to increase advertising revenue. Finally, outlets began moving to the subscription model. Over this period, power of advertisers has radically increased because sales revenue has dropped. Peter Oborne left The Telegraph for precisely this reason. But there is more to the question of cost than meets the eye.

What is the cost of information?

Has good information ever been free? That depends. Good information implies greater degrees of access, accuracy, actionable value and/or presentation ease than free information. Inherent in that is some degree of competitive knowledge advantage. Yet there is still a lot of information available for free out there, and ways to bypass some paywalls. But in historical, conventional terms, public libraries are free and full of curated, high quality information that precedes and even exceeds the internet. You won’t find a single pointless, badly produced vlog in the shelves of a large, municipal library and you will be able to access a national stock of books and resources that were produced to the highest standards. Library membership in some countries also confers news, periodical, journal and magazine access that one might otherwise pay for. Libraries don’t bombard you with algorithmic recommendations to keep you in the library forever.

Has paid information always been better than free, or been at a minimum level of “good”? No. It totally depends on the information and one’s needs. What today’s information consumer must consciously do is get smart about their information needs and consumption habits in order to get the highest value and quality for money.

Information, free or otherwise, has one inalienable cost: the time it takes to consume. If the volume of information available increases exponentially while the standards of production rapidly drop to zero, your quality-to-time equation needs to be consciously and deliberately balanced otherwise you’re just wilfing your life away across the internet and masses of junk. This takes discipline and all content platforms are designed to exploit that lack of discipline in pursuit of their standard metrics of Monthly Active Users and minutes watched.

We are now saturated with information and huge amounts of it are low quality, yet we are not trained in how to effectively manage ourselves and our access to this information.

The Independent and Alt media model is fragmented and collectively expensive

To demonstrate this claim, let us consider Matt Taibbi.

There is no question that Taibbi is a seasoned, capable, recognised and highly skilled journalist. He has tackled serious, complex and anti-establishment issues throughout his whole career while working across a range of roles and outlets, some of which he had a hand in starting. Irrespective of what some messaging tells us to think about Taibbi as a result of the Twitter Files, his track record speaks for itself.

His regular publishing model is based around Racket News on substack, which declares 374,000 total subscribers. As for paid subscribers:

Today, Taibbi is flush. He is no longer affiliated with Rolling Stone, but his Substack newsletter, TK News, is one of the most popular on the site, boasting more than 30,000 paying subscribers. Which means, at $50 a pop, he easily can clear $1 million annually, making him a member of the one percent.

What happened to Matt Taibbi - NY Mag Intelligencer 2021

The cheapest subscription is $4.17/month totalling $125,000/month in subscription revenue assuming 30k subscribers.

On this model, Taibbi is on the clock to produce enough total output per month to keep his paid subscribers happy. This is different from being paid substantial sums to work on a piecemeal basis i.e. per story, or being a fully or partially salaried or otherwise retained employee or associate. Given the free choice, what would Taibbi write about and how? Would he rather have the time to just do forms of primary journalism and deliver each masterpiece complete or serialised for a total price that he thought fair, or would he rather also put out various forms of commentary on aspects of current affairs and the media itself? How much of the content of Racket News is there because of Taibbi being directly beholden to the subscription model?

Most of Racket News’ output is locked. This tells you both that there are a lot of paid subscribers and that Taibbi’s stock is high. The “pay me if you like” stance represents in some ways almost the opposite. Taibbi’s background, back catalogue and skillset gives him clear value and he expects to command that in the market and rightly so, but he’s still charging the minimum $5/month or $50/year. The Twitter Files articles are all free, in keeping with how they were originally published. Off the back of that, Taibbi has become a main character in the accompanying melodrama and his musings about that are variously free and subscriber-only. It can be seen that some key articles that tell you what Taibbi’s really bothered about are free because he thinks society should know about the Censorship Industrial Complex, instead of the anti-noise that the mainstream press has screeched in order to delegitimise the Twitter Files’ content, meaning and value.

So, if I want to get Taibbi’s output I have to either stump $50/year or play smart with a periodic $5/month. A question worth asking but that VST cannot answer is how much primary journalism and how much secondary journalism/commentary does one get for the subscription fee? What I don’t get is multiple views or variety. I get what Taibbi wants to tell me and what he’s interested in. Nothing more, unless he takes requests, which he largely doesn’t.

So here are the key problems of the substack direct subscription model:

1. You pay relatively high prices for one writer’s focus, efforts and interests;

2. You have no idea when their next output is due;

3. The writer has to commit to some agreed delivery frequency to manage expectations and maintain subscriptions;

4. You are the only arbiter of quality and value after the author, unless other forms of review are occurring in the writer’s process. This might matter a lot more than you think for writers less skilled than Taibbi. In fact, the more professional a writer is, the more subscription income they command and the more likely they are to spend some on editing to maintain high quality, which is a key differentiator;

5. $4.17/month sounds cheap for a subscription, but it only gets you one thing;

6. Throw a few more subs into the mix at the same price and it suddenly adds up.

Now, just through substack alone, we are into a highly fragmented, increasingly expensive information model. This is the antithesis of what newspapers, periodicals, journals and magazines used to be about: affordably priced and delivering a multi-faceted and broad view of curated information with some implied standard of quality across the board.

If we compare to any mainstream, corporate media outlet, especially newspapers, what are we getting from them? Free or lower subscription price, broader content, but clear and obviously co-ordinated propagandistic output. Through three topics - (anti-)Trump, Covid and Ukraine - one can categorise all media output into “corporate captured and state affiliated” or “possibly not”. That’s how bad the media landscape has become. The NYT and WaPo are both paywalled but nothing more than state stenographers. The UK’s Guardian, Independent and BBC News are “free” but they are state stenographers as well.

This has set up an extremely dangerous and positive feedback cycle that is detectable across society. If you are unwilling or unable to pay, you are guaranteed to consume disproportionately masses more propaganda than used to be the case, unless you are seriously savvy about how and what you consume, and where and how you tactically pay for information and news. This may always have been true to an extent but it is reaching extremes now because the price of publishing anything on the internet has dropped on two counts: the actual price; the price of accountability.

The declining price of publishing means anyone can post any junk, so you have more to wade through and self-curate.

There is no accountability for the mainstream media, which is free to print and tell barefaced lies for years on end e.g. Russiagate, and those lies work on people throughout society. To escape this, one must curate other sources and incur other time and monetary costs.

At the same time, the state has fully co-opted news and content platforms beyond ways that were understood in the pre-internet and early internet era. This has happened because technology itself has made information and digital control monopoly easier for those with capital or power.

Thus, the cost of free and mispriced information on society in the long run is potentially very high as people are herded into information panopticons of junk, time traps, noise, distractions and propaganda, provided cheap or free in saturating volume. Even paywalled news is provably the same, co-ordinated propaganda, which is a more sophisticated trap (“how can this be propaganda if I’m paying good money for them to research and write it?”). The capable and trustworthy “independents” see the opportunity to gain from direct audience subscriptions but then set an inordinately high net base price of information because of the structural inefficiencies of direct subscriptions and their minimum pricing. That minimum floor pricing power comes from the platform - in Taibbi’s case substack - which is another demonstration of the platform’s power over Content Providers and subscribers. The difference is that Taibbi could take his mailing list and move to a WordPress site with a payment engine bolted on, or medium.com, and change the minimum price. But then that’s less convenient for him and he loses the video and audio features recently added to substack (part of the power of that platform). So convenience as a service again inserts itself as a lever wielded by the platform.

What are some alternatives?

There are two obvious answers to all of this:

1. the creation of more independent news outlets in some form, that capitalise on the minimisation of publishing costs, spend on key points of process that add quality e.g. editing without bias or agenda, bring more journalists together in one place, and are transparent with their editorial interests and process.

2. Your personal investment in information and attention discipline, discernment and rigour such that you are effectively able to identify and constantly prove trustworthy sources that have real utility to you, while becoming extremely efficient at buying effective information.

One recent example of the development of independent news outlets is Bari Weiss’ The Free Press that is built off the substack platform and features several contributors including Walter Kirn (Taibbi’s podcast partner), Michael Shellenberger and Douglas Murray. It’s on the up and currently it runs on the “donate to us if you want” model using Donorbox instead of substack’s default of stripe. So Weiss has done a deal with substack to bend its platform and it’s lowered its payment processing costs by using Donorbox. Expect FP’s optional pricing model to change in future as its subscriber base grows. This also shows us what substack is growing to become: a literal online newpaper publishing platform.

However, the FP’s (or anyone’s) supposed independence doesn’t change one thing: that censorship and propaganda both exist in the form of silence or editorial interest. Search FP for “Covid” and you get one result. Search for “vaccine” and you get zero. This particular aspect of the zeitgeist isn’t on the FP’s radar. This may not be “censorship” or “propaganda”, it may just be editorial slant that limits interest, or it could be a resource limitation. It’s not possible to know without directly questioning FP and the same question could be levelled at any journalist.

“Why don’t you write about X?”

“Coz I’m not interested in it.”

That doesn’t make the journalist less of a journalist.

Another old example is Zerohedge.com. A mix of aggregator portal and editorial, zerohedge updates daily from multiple sources. It is denigrated by Wikipedia as a right wing site and accused of publishing conspiracy theories, yet the two references Wikipedia cites to justify this claim are both provably false as evidence to back the claim. The first reference is a Zurich University paper entitled “Conceptualizing “Dark Platforms”. Covid-19-Related Conspiracy Theories on 8kun and Gab” which states:

In this study we define conspiracy theories as proposed explanations of events or practices that make reference to the secret machinations of powerful individuals or institutions (Goertzel Citation1994; Keeley Citation1999; Uscinski Citation2019).

It only references Zerohedge in this way:

Another website that appeared regularly on both platforms was the far-right finance news website, ZeroHedge, which was cited 620 and 770 times on 8kun and Gab, respectively. ZeroHedge is infamous for making controversial commentaries on socio-political issues; during the pandemic, its Twitter account was suspended for propagating conspiratorial claims that blamed the Wuhan Institute of Virology for creating the novel coronavirus.

The above is not evidence of Zerohedge’s publishing of “conspiracy theories”. The paper does not cite a specific conspiracy theory that Zerohedge published. What can be factually stated (but isn’t stated in the paper) is that Zerohedge was one of the first platforms to publish information about Shi Zhengli AKA “Batwoman”, her work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Covid, her connections to the US and the possibility of the lab leak from WIV, all of which has been consistently and increasingly demonstrated as the most likely origin of Covid in multiple forms of official US documentation. Scanning the paper one finds that it is YouTube that is the most frequently referenced citation on 8kun and Gab, yet the paper seems to disregard that platform deliberately:

our study shows that low-credibility sources are much more prevalent on dark platforms.

This label of “low-credibility sources”, in the context of Covid, is now shown to apply to the FANGs, including YouTube, who all peddled false Covid narrative and actively shut down truthful and valid speculative sources for deliberately partisan political reasons.

Wikipedia then cites this Politico article as evidence, which is nothing more than a 2020 justification for pro-Covid narrative control by government in collusion with tech content platforms, which said of Zerohedge only:

In February, Zero Hedge, a popular fringe website known for its conspiratorial posts, was banned from Twitter for violating the company’s anti-harassment rules for publishing the private information of a Chinese scientist who it said was responsible for the pandemic.

Again, Politico fails to demonstrate anything specifically “conspiratorial” about Zerohedge, deferring to a CBS article which states:

The financial website Zero Hedge is now barred from Twitter after publishing an article relaying a conspiracy theory that a Chinese scientist might be to blame for the coronavirus outbreak.

Zero Hedge on Friday wrote that Twitter had notified the site that it had violated the social media platform's "rules against abuse and harassment." That followed a report by BuzzFeed that Zero Hedge had shared the identity and personal information — including the email and phone number — of a Chinese researcher it claimed might know about the source of the virus. 

CBS references Buzzfeed’s claim that Zerohedge effectively doxed a Chinese scientist and blamed him directly for the pandemic. Unfortunately, Zerohedge directly addressed Buzzfeed’s claim here and showed that Buzzfeed had lied. Zerohedge did not dox anyone. It showed publicly available information in the form of research papers, open job adverts and public contact information that related to the WIV, as can be seen in its original article.

It’s worth reading Zerohedge’s original Peng Zhou article and its response following its Twitter ban. To all intents and purposes, as of 29/01/2020, Zerohedge was basically on the money regarding the origin of Covid. It wasn’t down with the official wet market story, which it correctly labelled a “farce” and “bat soup”. Research published in April 2020 admitted the virus was definitely worked on/developed in WIV and very, very likely released accidentally or otherwise, from WIV. Find us another outlet that made that call at that time and presented the kind of evidence Zerohedge’s own editorial presented. Zerohedge was literally three years ahead of the corporate press and nothing it printed can be denigrated with the label “conspiracy theory”. US official documentation proves a wilful conspiracy to illegally circumvent GoF moratoriums and prove that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in WIV using NIH/NIAID money.

What are the consequences for Wikipedia, Zurich University, CBS News, Buzzfeed and Politico all operating at demonstrable levels of falsehood? Zero. And because there are no consequences, no hedge is required by them, to the point that, as Zerohedge itself points out, Buzzfeed is caught out by its own writing:

I’ve reached out to Twitter for clarity on this but it looks like ZeroHedge may have been suspended following my piece about them doxing a Chinese scientist and accusing him of weaponizing the #coronavirus https://t.co/B3XXRCjJpQ pic.twitter.com/RLCR3Eg6q0

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick)January 31, 2020

As for Broderick's statement that Peng was "accused falsely" we wonder how he knows this: did he speak to Peng? Did he get any comments? Did he get an official denial? No, he did not: as he writes, "BuzzFeed News has reached out to the scientist, whom it is declining to name." So, it actually turns out that it is Buzzfeed that is once again presenting a false statement as fact, something Buzzfeed has been accused of doing over and over and over.

Going back to CBS News, it said:

The crackdown on Zero Hedge also comes as the coronavirus has fueled anti-Chinese sentiment around the world, with hoaxes touted by conspiracy theorists shared widely online.

In the last two paras, it said:

Launched in 2009, Zero Hedge publishes news and commentary about the financial markets, with many articles reflecting a right-wing or libertarian viewpoint. In November, it wrongly reported that the head of the Ukrainian gas company in focus in President Donald Trump's impeachment trial had been indicted by Ukraine's prosecutor general.

Bloomberg News in 2016 reported that Zero Hedge's three main writers at the time were Colin Lokey, who quit the blog; Tim Backshall, a credit derivatives strategist; and Daniel Ivandjiiski, a Bulgarian-born former analyst who is currently listed by Wikipedia as its main editor and publisher.

So, it references a crackdown on “anti-China” sentiment, which it implies is Zerohedge’s primary or key motivation. This claim is wrong, based on the original ZH articles and utterly fails the backtest given the US goverment’s official sentiment towards China today. Then, it states that after 11 years of output, the only error made by Zerohedge that CBS is aware of is wrongly reporting a Ukrainian indictment against Hunter Biden. The “factcheck” on this states:

One of the first websites to push the erroneous “indictment” claim, ZeroHedge, initially claimed in its headline that the allegations made by the Ukrainian members of Parliament were actually from a “Ukrainian Indictment.” It later changed the headline to say that the claims were those of a “Ukrainian MP.”

All CBS had to say about what it, Politico, Zurich University, Buzzfeed and wikipedia all claim to be a website that pushes conspiracy theories, was “it made a minor error once”. Where have you heard that recently?

Watch from cued time 01:22 for 90 seconds to hear Lee Fang tell you.

Hasan alleged that Taibbi had not only swapped CIS as CISA in his testimony before Congress, but had “deliberately & under oath misrepresented” the truth, and undermined the “thesis” that the government had facilitated EIP’s requests to Twitter. 

Taibbi has admitted mistaking CIS for CISA in a single tweet in one of his many threads, but his testimony to Congress was entirely different. Hasan deceptively conflated this quickly corrected tweet with Taibbi’s testimony. 

But the evidence shows that Taibbi’s congressional remarks were correct. CIS and CISA collaborated with EIP on moderation requests, with both organizations directly appealing to Twitter for censorship, making Taibbi’s overall point and particular argument completely accurate.

House Democrat Threatens Twitter Files Journalist with Prosecution and Imprisonment, Lee Fang

“Independence” is not certainly knowable, only utility and historic accuracy

As an information consumer you have to face facts, irrespective of whether you’re actually looking for any facts.

What do you want information for? What are the effects and costs of bias and propaganda on you and your informational objectives? How can you know if an outlet or source is trustworthy? Is independence important?

These questions matter, but so does admitting to yourself that it is impossible for you to fully judge the degree of independence of any source or outlet.

Taibbi is affected by the subscription model, which could have a direct effect on the nature of some of his output, and he is only interested in what he’s interested in, so even if he’s the most independent journalist in the world, he won’t be covering your ten personal favourite topics anytime soon (that’s your fault for being interested in cats, dogs and 8 kinds of tropical fish above all else). The same applies to Bari Weiss’ FP and Zerohedge, which used to be obviously dependent on Google Ads, but now runs a tiered finance-oriented subscription and merch line.

Two positive things you can take away are:

• Matt Taibbi’s work, including Twitter Files, passes the back test. He is worth reading and he is the quality journalist he was, up until very recently, recognised to be. How you pay for that and what amount you’re willing to pay is up to you;

• Zerohedge doesn’t fling out “conspiracy theories”. It’s editorial output largely passes the back test and much of its curated/aggregated content (fully credited) is of value for discussion and perspective on many relevant, big ticket issues that drill down to affect everyday life in the end. Zerohedge content is practically all free and it is ahead of the curve. On that basis, Zerohedge appears to utterly contradict some of the points in this article. VST leaves it to you to work out this paradox for yourself.

“Trust but verify” is ALWAYS your responsibility

One persistent truth is truer today than ever before, which is that nothing and no one is trustworthy. “Trust but verify” is not someone else’s responsibility. It is the responsibility of the information consumer and always has been. This is more true today - when producing and circulating lies at the speed of light and weight of corporations and governments combined is easier and cheaper - than it has ever been.. Your attention is currency and if you waste it through your own lack of information discernment and discipline, that’s your fault. The hard test of this is Covid. Most people now claim that “It’s not my fault because I was lied to by…” and then reel off various corporate or governmental sources which were never truthful or trustworthy. When faced with the reality of a control group who knew otherwise about Covid because they referenced other sources that proved to be true - including lay accessible regulatory documentation - these shirkers of responsibility curl up in a ball and try to kill the undosed messenger.

Remain suspicious of the power of platforms

Trust must be constantly earned. substack, rumble, Odyssey etc might all look nice. substack might be favoured by growing numbers of writers including those at the highest levels like Taibbi and Hersh.

If you now think that the entire point of this article was to denigrate substack (or other burgeoning platforms) and lump it in with the FANGs you are wrong and have missed the point.

In these times, failure to recognise platforms for what they are - in practical terms, not in promises spoken today and reneged tomorrow - is a fundamental failing for the Content Providers, Content Consumers and anyone who considers themselves an expert, pundit or authority (including regulators). The Twitter Files prove that platforms are the power over, not the “enabler” of citizen information power. They aggregate content into their monopolies, then hold users and creators captive by manipulating perception through corrupt control of information. This is ultimately toxic on a long enough timeline, unless platforms are truly open, free and can operate right up to the edge of legal conformance at all times without fear or favour. We have been poisoned in the information space for decades and continue to be at exponential rate. No matter what you think now, substack as a platform has all this potential for bad and in some ways, like through fragmentation and information floor pricing, it is already proving this point. It also fits nicely into the model of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as VST pointed out previously here.

The information curve is used to distract you from legislation

What tools lie in store to be wielded against troublesome platforms?

We already know what’s coming, because we have been told and shown. The US hegemony has structurally undermined “net neutrality” in numerous ways by allowing private corporations to achieve tight oligopolies that cover the fully integrated vertical value chain of information flows. At the same time, we are allowing increasingly draconian legislation such as the Online Safety Bill and RESTRICT Act to be entertained, passed or morphed until it passes. This is madness and stupidity on a wholesale level.

We citizens are literally allowing the ruling class to implement the means to cancel and deplatform whole platforms.

We citizens are behind the one information curve that matters most - the legislative curve. All other information curves function to keep your attention and knowledge away from the legislative curve. That’s what the Covid narrative was about. If you cannot learn that lesson from the last three years of hard evidence enshrined in persistent legislation, this entire article will have been just a time-wasting distraction regardless of the fact that it was “free”.

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