(August 30, 2021 at 12:51 am)Rev. Rye Wrote:(August 29, 2021 at 8:00 pm)Mermaid Wrote: In school if I had used The Blaze, Youtube or The American Thinker as references for my research, I'd have flunked out.
YouTube can actually be good for research, even if it is just as a start. But you need a bullshit detector that actually works. A YouTube video by Russell Brand might cut the muster if you're somehow writing a paper about Russell Brand and/or how his videos represent some larger phoenomenon of some kind, but he's clearly not a good source for information about a pandemic.
Fun fact: I actually wrote a small paper for Business Law class about the ethics of data harvesting. Not a big research paper, just a little two-or-three page reflection piece on the subject. The prompt was specifically about Clearview AI scrubbing Facebook profiles for billions of photos without the consent of the owners of said faces or photos. And I talked about a major problem muddying the waters in the discussion of the ethics, one that I had been made acutely aware of because, a year before, a YouTuber I admired, The Mysterious Mr. Enter, created a long series called Technocracy that was all about the insidious ways tech companies control our lives. I used a lot of examples he included in the video, like how Facebook kept data on all of one man's phone calls and text messages for over a year, or how Target of all stores managed to figure out that a girl was pregnant before anyone knew, even her. Of course, if this was a proper paper where I needed to cite my sources, I could probably do so. Hell, the simple act of finding and pasting the links in shows I just did.
But the only times I actually cited Technocracy were times when I couldn't use any other source because it was talking about his own experiences with these programs. I did so twice: first when he talked about how he managed to get Google to give him all the data they had collected on him. It took them 16 hours to compile 67 ZIP files of 148.93 GB of data they had collected on him. Second when he pointed out that someone had spoofed his email and sent terroristic threats to foreign governments and how trivially easy it was for the government to subpoena Google so they could give them all his information. The teacher saw the bit about the 67 ZIP files and said "Good Find." That said, I wouldn't dare cite The Mysterious Mr. Enter as a credible source on COVID. Especially given some of the dodgy shit he managed to swallow in that category. Especially not to a teacher.
Russell Brand is better than most alternative media. And why is Russell Brand the issue? There are a hundred different sources you can look up that are reporting the same information, like I did after watching his video to make sure he was being accurate.
Would CNN be better? CNN, with Chris Cuomo, who has his sexually inappropriate Governor brother on his show to joke as people were dying in nursing homes thanks to Governor Cuomo. Authoritative media CNN who employs Cuomo, who advises his Governor brother in his spare time about how to discredit women accusing him of sexually inappropriate actions. CNN who had to pay out millions for defaming a teenager by lying about him and deceptively editing film of him to get the world to hate him? CNN who has anchors on talking about how beautiful the missiles being fired by the military are. That authoritative media? How about MSNBC, who was smearing Bernie Sanders and basically calling him abusive towards women for how we acted around his wife?
