Not a comment about who's right or wrong in this war, but it is fascinating that we have entered the age of the Internet being a place where warfare is fought. There have always been people posting web content about conflicts but now with Gaza and Ukraine, it seems that the nations fighting are actively looking at the internet as the fourth field of battle.
Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
"Manufacturing Consent" was written in the 80s mostly in response to newspapers, but the ideas have been adapted to the Internet for some time (and talk radio, and cable news, etc.). I'm old enough to remember this from the Iraq war. Yeah, we didn't have microblogging back then, but there were Email campaigns, blogs, message boards, chat rooms, etc.
And let's keep in mind that the term "Public Relations" was explicitly chosen as a Newspeak-term because Edward Bernays realised that the actual term for a war time methodology, "propaganda", was too loaded.[0] And honest.
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
Quite often I default to the word propaganda when talking about anyone's PR campaigns in my own personal battle with trying to undo this. I ratchet it up when talking directly to marketing/PR people. Pretty much every time I'm just looked at as yet another crazy person.
My brain just came up with the phrase "You can't spell propaganda without PR", which I think is clever. But I'm going to put it into a search engine now and see that it's not original...
That once again, as always it seems, no one is talking about the Panda Gap.
Literally the raison d'etre of PR | propaganda is to distract, to replace, to (in modern terms) throw a dead cat on the table and have everybody talk about that.
> Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools", or "having better stuff than your neighbors is a virtue, failing to do so will lead to dangerous ostracization."
Very tame "Our blender spins twice as fast as the competition" marketing might be arguably free of ideology, but that's a decreasing minority.
>I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools"
I disagree. This isn't peddling an ideology, it's using an existing ideology (or stereotype) in order to peddle a product. A company with a marketing campaign targeting men isn't going to refuse to sell power tools to women, they're just designing their marketing campaign in a way they think will maximize sales overall, using existing biases and ideologies that potential customers already have. Normal companies don't care about ideology unless it helps them make more money, which is their true goal.
What you have described is, in fact, a mode of perpetuating ideology. If what you awere saying were accurate, it would absolve all capitalistic endeavors of reinforcing ideology, even the essential ideology of capitalism inherent in those endeavors.
That’s not how this works. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan would say.
A woman may never consider buying power tools because of the imagery of the propaganda surrounding power tools. Or the salesman may undermine, intimidate, or otherwise obstruct her attempts to purchase one. But regardless your point falls apart because the ideology of capitalism underlying the power tools on the shelf subsumes the ideology of the advertising.
That subsumption, however, does not in any way contraindicate those ideologies present in the advertisement’s framing. It only demonstrates that money is more important than the other ideologies being peddled.
> the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology
Marketing often includes the peddling of an ideology as a foundation for the product buying, especially for big-ticket items. (One buys the product that fits and signals one’s ideology.) To me, this makes marketing even more insidious as we often focus on the product rather than the message. Think Ford, Tesla, Apple …
I think one of the big takeaways for me was aside from deliberate manipulation of media by the government and willing media partners, that journalists also self censor in a way because they are operating in a professional environment and within a certain Overton Window.
Maybe it's not what I should remember most, but it did help remind me that when your livelihood is based on what you say you will be much more measured, regardless of the subject.
Probably why people look to social media or Substack for more independent people who have a longer leash, less on the line, and more to gain, since that's where you get your interesting although many times wrong takes (e.g. Ivermectin for Covid, or Lab Leak Theory)
Yes, they’re not new. But it is ridiculously easy and cheap today to do propaganda than even 30 years ago. We’re connected to the outrage machine 24/7 now because of internet/social media/smartphones, vs say 1980.
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
Indeed and one reason i don't watch or pay attention to news media(TV, online, etc) especially political news. What to believe is real / the truth and with the advent of AI, Deep fake voices and deep fake videos the Internet becomes an even worse place for deciphering truth.
I do think the economy is different. You've always been able to just hire a bunch of thugs to stage an event to shape the narrative, like old-school cold war style. That takes money and effort and a modicum of skill and the risk of being caught with your pants down is not negligible.
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
This seems reasonable, but it runs into a little problem. If you engage in political discussion anywhere on the internet, the first thing you'll find is that people, if they have formed an opinion, have exactly 0 interest in changing their mind. If you already hold a genuine and internally formed view on e.g. the Israel - Palestine conflict, then even if somebody sat you (or me) in front of 24/7 propaganda for the other side, they'd be unlikely to ever change either of our minds.
Propaganda only seems to work in two situations. The first is on topics people know nothing about. Each time the US invades some places most people couldn't even find on a map, support for it rises in accordance with the propaganda. But as people learn more, and gradually form their own values, that support tends to rapidly decline. And there are also long-term consequences, because people will remember being lied to. My views on the US war machine and geopolitics in general seem unlikely, at this point, to ever change. And they were largely formed due to the Iraq War. Irrefutable [1] and Undeniable [2] are two 21 year old articles I still go back to on occasion.
The other situation is when it's true. During the Cold War we spread endless propaganda about things like having stocked store shelves. This is doubly effective in the same way that lying propaganda is doubly ineffective. Because not only does it create a desired perception, but once people gradually find out it's really true, it also tends to turn them against their own government who invariably misrepresents such situations. Again, people don't like being lied to.
The purpose of propaganda, in its broadest definition, isn't to change minds. It is to leverage the existing contents of a mind in a way that makes you perform a certain action that is desired by the propagandist.
The belief that holding strong opinions protects against propaganda is dangerous. Strong opinions is where propaganda inserts its levers.
People also seem to discount the effects of internet operations by enemy states. For example, in 2022, the FBI blamed the state of North Korea for a string of hacks on US health systems. The "meatspace" equivalent would've been North Korean operatives infiltrating dozens of hospitals and destroying records or supplies. If that had happened, there would've been a bigger response from the government than "Mind your physical security, hospitals." But it's the internet, so who cares (besides the people immediately affected)?
Even in the old days, if your operation was caught, you could always claim that it was an enemy false flag. (And if it was your false flag and you were caught, you could always claim that it was an enemy provocation.)
Go to the Wikipedia pages of these events and click on "Talk" at the top or see the history of those pages. The amount of people fighting over this information war is mindblowing.
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
My understanding is, historians know that the source material is 90% bullshit (texts written to appease an ego of some lord, chronicles of war against "subhuman" enemies, religious scriptures), they just know how to find the remaining 10%.
That's much more oriented to network security, spectrum and hardware, stuff like that. For an American military organisation engaged in internet influence operations you'd want to look at the signature reduction program. Something like 50,000 people strong at this point, insane amounts of resources going into that.
The internet created a whole stratum of people who don’t use tv, radio and newspaper anymore. It’s not that we entered internet warfare, we just exited absolute control of large mass media. Now every TLA has to deal with it somehow.
Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
The Internet as we think of it is already a military project. Why do you think so much emphasis is put on countries that assert sovereignty over their own information space?
I think we’ve been here for a while, and I don’t think you make an overt branch to fight covert wars, you just roll it into the NSA or ops for some (all?) other branches of the military.
> Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
My first semester of college in Fall of 1999, I wrote a paper about cyber warfare and the summary was that the superpowers were already doing it, and the only thing expected to change in the future was the resources that were online and susceptible would increase the scale of cyber war.
Wasn't there something with the Canadian military fighting (what they called) misinformation on social media during the pandemic? Seems like it's already ongoing.
Canadian government was the source of misinformation on social media during the pandemic! Literal curfews were in place with propaganda machine saying how good idea it was.
For purposes of conversation and allowing for a moment your idea is true, to what purpose was the curfews imposed? Who benefited? How? Why were the curfews necessary to achieve those goals?
The only people who can tell you the actual purpose of an action taken are the people who actually took that action. Everyone else can only speculate.
How curfews can slow the spread of a virus, I have no idea. If you want to slow a virus's spread, you do it by isolating people and preventing them from mingling. A curfew doesn't do that; it just forces them to mingle during a shorter number of hours in a day, which if anything helps the virus spread by increasing the density of people mingling. The allegation that it was just governments trying to look like they're doing something useful is not an unreasonable charge. Any idiot can tell you that preventing someone from going on a bike ride in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is not going to help stop a pandemic, but this is exactly what several governments did.
When you propose that a conspiracy happened, you propose that the purpose of something was different from the stated purpose. So what purpose were you proposing?
>When you propose that a conspiracy happened, you propose that the purpose of something was different from the stated purpose.
Yes, but this doesn't mean that you know the actual purpose.
>So what purpose were you proposing?
I'm not proposing anything; I didn't propose a conspiracy happened, the OP did. I'm just explaining that the conspiracy theorist doesn't have to allege a specific purpose.
As for the curfews, my theory is that it was just plain anti-science stupidity, plus wanting to look like they're doing something, like many political decisions. If you disagree, please explain how someone riding a bicycle outdoors in a rural area with no other humans around somehow spreads a virus. Only countries with truly stupid leadership even had restrictions like these (i.e., UK, they're the only one I know of actually).
I think the person you replied to named the purpose as "giving the impression that they were doing something", which is shockingly often the case with politicians: They'll do what they believe will get them voted for again.
I don't think it is necessary to insult people as 'conspiracy nutters' on here. If you don't want to discuss something with someone, just give them a downvote and move on. No need to be uncivil.
I’m sorry, I did not mean for this comment to be a political point, but rather an observation on how technology is used in mass atrocities. I was hoping to raise a point which I find interesting, which other may or may not agree with. I’ve gotten a couple of excellent replies here raising interesting counterpoints.
After posting this, and reading the replies, I’m actually less convinced about my original point. That is, I’ve learned something.
I believe you, but it's too fine a distinction to make a difference on the important point. Your account has obviously been primarily (even exclusively) focused on this one topic for quite a while now. That's not allowed on HN because if we did allow it, HN would dramatically shift towards becoming a current-affairs site, which is not its mandate.
This is not to say that the topic doesn't matter. Of course it matters, a great deal—more than almost anything that gets discussed here. But that not only doesn't change the above point, it makes it even more important.
As I said the last time I replied to you, I appreciate that your comments have mostly not been breaking the site guidelines in other ways. But the "primarily" rule applies regardless.
I don't want to ban you as you've been here a long time and have used the site as intended in the past. But I have to go quite a long way back into the past before that becomes visible. This is not ok.
One nerd to another, I'm rooting for you here, and just want to write a note real quickly that it's very easy to get sucked into this topic. The dopamine circuit we're playing with is a quirk of homo messageboardicus. A couple days ago I did a bunch of conscious things to keep me away from this topic on HN, and with a day or so of detox I've regained my original perspective that this is a deeply cursed species of HN thread. There's lots of other stuff to talk about!
I got very lucky, and the very next day someone started an argument about the futility and/or propriety of user-mode TCP/IP stacks and WireGuard. I wish for you a similarly irresistible nerd snipe for whatever nerd topic lights you up. Good luck!
That would be cross browser support for MathML, or other tools to get math expressions typeset on the web. Those discussions only pop up like once every six months though.
I’m actually way more of a lurker here. There are e.g. once a month a submission about Bayesian Analysis (and a guaranteed once a year submission about Kalman Filters) which I religiously read but hardly ever contribute to (unless a frequentist is advocating for IQ tests or other psychometric devises; then I for sure contribute; but that can lead to flame-wars easily). Every so often there is a back end engineer with an “opinion” on the front end stack which I sometimes answer for, however that often be a flame-y subject, for some reason I’m less tempted to be sucked into flamewars when the subject is actually aligned with my expertise.
It seems you've been triggered by the mention of the g-word. But when we calmly consider what the commenter is saying:
Israel is using information age technology to commit and propagandize their genocide
It's plainly not an unreasonable proposition, nor does it seem to be intended to engage in battle or provoke. They're simply describing a perfectly horrible situation that happening on the ground (that some recognized experts in the field do consider to be a form of genocide per the UN definition of such) and the fact that modern information technologies seem to be a part of the mechanism that is bringing it about.
The post expresses an opinion, but it definitely wasn't flamebait.
I wasn't responding to any proposition, but rather to the pattern of how the account is using Hacker News over a long stretch of time. That's what the word "primarily" refers to, and it's the most important thing to understand.
Of course I replied to a specific post because any reply has to do that; but I was responding to the account's use of HN over time. That's the issue here.
I wrote the GP in haste and can see how this point wasn't obvious. On the other hand it should quickly become obvious to anyone who clicks on the link I provided (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), which is the purpose of providing the link.
Citing international law, Ms. Albanese explained that genocide is defined as a specific set of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,” she said.
Furthermore, “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,” she continued.
Clearly there are opinions at odds with your opinion.
> the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,
Hilarious considering every conflict has been started by Palestine. Ceasefires broken by Hamas on multiple occasions. And there’s no settler colonial process happening now or in the past.
But let’s continue to blame Israel when Hamas kills people trying to get food or supplies. Or blame Israel when Hamas fires its own rocket at a parking lot and claims 500 dead. Let’s blame Israel for trying to wipe out a terrorist organization that’s sole purpose is to wipe out the Jewish population and wipe Israel off the map.
While Israel is quite restrained. We will keep calling it genocide even tho ACTUAL genocide is happening every day in Iran and China and Africa. It’s fun to ignore what’s happening elsewhere so we can focus on Israel and making up things that aren’t happening.
The issue, in this case, isn't opinions nor the other discourse in the thread. Rather, it is the account's comments over a long stretch of time.
The question "has an account been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle?" is one of the most important criteria we use in HN moderation. When it is the case, we ask an account to stop and/or end up banning it.
This rule has many advantages. One is that it's a reasonably objective call to make (and for readers to verify) regardless of the specific views a user is arguing for or against. Another is that it allows for a certain amount of political and ideological discussion (as long as it doesn't break the site guidelines in other ways, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I have read the guide, although i appreciate reaffirming it as the source of truth. What’s hard is from a glance at the posters history their comments don’t seem to break the guidelines, but instead fall into the camp of spirited (albeit strongly so) opinions. Are there specific comments made that weren’t in the spirit of the guidelines? It feels “primarily for ideological purposes” is hard to counter in a discussion because “ideological” itself is a murky term at best.
The point is the pattern (I think the person you are responding to is incorrect about flamebait), you'd go look at the topic of their most recent comments - if the vast majority of interactions are to argue X then that seems to fall under 'idealogical battle'.
Moderation replies have to go somewhere! Did you miss my several explanations about how I wasn't responding to the specific comment, but to an overall pattern? Here they are:
I don't see how I could have been much clearer, so if you read those posts and still have a question that isn't addressed, I'd be curious to know what it is.
That is a 14 year old HN post linking to a dead article, the comments on which say things like
> This is not the 'hacker news' ranking algorithm, this is the ranking algorithm distributed with 'ARC', which is the basis for the HN algorithm, but definitely not equal to it. The biggest missing ingredients are flagged posts dropping off quicker and posts that contain no URL dropping off quicker but there are quite a few other subtle tweaks.
A lot of people have both mechanisms to record what's happening, and share it.
It's been that way with Syria conflict, too, though. A lot was shared in twitter/youtube during that one.
One thing that's seemingly a bit new is how much ordinary Israeli soldiers are sharing their behavior, empowered by their self-righteousness, I guess. Videos from shooting unarmed deaf people up close in their homes, to all kinds of calls for atrocities, actual assaults on international humanitarian aid trucks and violence against the drivers, cheerful mocking of starving people, dedicating videos of them blowing up peoples homes as gifts to their spouses back home in Israel, looting and stealing, wanton destruction of property (like going around and breaking things in someone's gift shop), burning people's houses down, etc. There's so much of this.
Entire 130k strong Israeli telegram channels are dedicated to collective cheering on and mocking of dead and suffering people: https://t.me/s/dead_terrorists Total dehumanization.
Those warned us that we westerners are not immune from getting manipulated into engaging in, and turning a blind eye to mass atrocities against entire groups of people. Even to attempts at their eradication. It was a lesson about the west and humanity.
I believe Telegram channels in them self are an enabler in this. Some sort radicalizing, dehumanizing
Radical elements can find each other and (dis)organize between themself and instigate such actions between military groups outside the chain of command.
Telegram is used to for this in other current wars.
The holocaust came of age in the dawn of the information age if you count the radio as information technology, albeit a very one-sided information technology where you had the government giving everyone cheap radios that were only marked to tune to German and Austrian radio stations, unless you dared to go out at night to get an antenna up to receive others. [1]
Just look at how that's evolved into what's now referred to a "talk radio". Only, you have multiple stations available so you can choose your particular firebrand to listen.
This also applies to the Rwandan genocide. A lot of it was perpetrated via mass media, especially radio. But you can also claim that there were Industrialized genocides before the Holocaust, but what sets it apart is just how much it was defined by industrialized processes.
The Gaza Genocide is similar, the use of AI for target selection (or rather generation), the social media campaigns, using drones for killings, etc. We haven’t seen a genocide before which uses information technology to the extent it really defines whole processes of the genocide.
Germany pioneered a lot of modern propaganda techniques in WWII:
The first television broadcast on earth was of Hitler, and his chief propagandist, Goebbles, continues to have significant influence on modern propagandists. For instance, Biden's publicly compared the tactics Trump used in the 2020 "Big Lie" campaign to those of Goebbles. Of course, there was also the Hitler Youth, which was a pretty successful social engineering campaign.
On the computer side of things: IBM mainframes were famously an enabling technology for the holocaust and german war machine.
Its not at all, even if you mean “social media age”, and not “information age”, it's just one of the first (there are other disputed candidates, e.g., in Ukraine) that are getting first world attention other than after-the-fact.
The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in which Facebook’s role was widely discussed (largely, in the first world, after the fact) was probably the first social media age genocide, if you don't restrict it to ones with immediate first-world attention at a significant level.
I’m thinking in terms of processes and propaganda. While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings. The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones to carry out killings with targets selected by AI.
> While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings.
No, its not. Heck, the Holocaust used information technology for target selection.
> The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones
The genocides in the former Yugoslavia used most of the weapons of then-modern warfare, which may not have included drones but certainly involved plenty of weapons systems that incorporate "information technology" in doing the killings.
I am so sick of the claim that if you criticize Israel you must have something against Jews.
Jews are a loosely-defined, globally-distributed cultural group. Israel is a specific, concrete sovereign country. It is a bit like saying if you criticize Venezuela then you must hate "Latinos".
I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
There are plenty of reasons people care more about Israel's actions than those of any random country that have nothing to do with the fact that Israel is populated mostly by Jews, including:
1. It has historical and cultural ties to Western countries, so Westerners feel naturally interested in what goes on there (see also: why people care more about what's happening in Ukraine than in other armed conflicts around the globe),
2. Israel has a much higher degree of influence over American politics than any other foreign country, which bothers people,
3. It is largely propped up by U.S. aid, so Americans feel responsible for it,
4. Because of point 3., it is one of the only global problems that Americans have a realistic chance of solving by protesting.
> I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict. Though since it's hard to find a protest that isn't pushing for that maybe your right on point 4.
> People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
If I have no conscious negative feelings towards Jews, don’t treat any of the ones I know differently from anyone else (other than maybe asking them curious questions about their culture/religion), and generally don’t have any negative reaction when I find out someone is Jewish, how would you even measure or define this apparently asymptomatic anti-Semitism?
> Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict.
I do not mean that and I think it’s very unlikely the protests will cause that, and to be clear, I think the maximalist demands being made by protestors (“from the river to the sea”, etc.) are too radical, but again, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily motivated by antisemitic feelings. Perhaps sometimes they are, but it’s by no means a logical necessity.
What I think is possible to achieve by protesting is forcing Israel to back down from its own right-wing maximalist posture towards Palestinians and be open to agreeing some kind of lasting peace or at least easing up on the atrocities they’re committing (and I am mainly thinking of the atrocities they’ve been committing since long before Oct. 7th: the indefinite blockade of Gaza and the creeping settlement Swiss-cheesing the West Bank).
But the difference here is that for many in the West, they are seeing their own participation in it (ie USA, UK) with the Germans giving morale support for it. All those American Boeing-made missiles ripping apart and burning alive those little hungry toddlers camping outside in their cold tents… it tends to make people reflect a little more.
I have a different theory. There are tons of wars and conflicts in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia vs Yemen, Iran vs Irak, Pakistan vs India, civil war in Syria, civil war in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, and everybody else is fighting ISIS. It’s not like the US/West are not involved or that the conflicts are any less bloody or that the parties have "better reasons" to kill each other. And still, they receive no where near as much attention and criticism as Israel/Palestine. I also don’t think the reason is antisemitism (at least in the West). I think the reason is that the West has to view everything through the lens of the culture war: it’s white vs brown and white is evil, therefore Israel is evil.
Israel has created its own perception of itself to the world. They gave up all sense of humanity to go on a revenge spree and now they don’t know when to stop because the whole world sees them as monsters so they probably think it couldn’t get any worse.
Changing the convo to talk about some other wars than Israel / Gaza is just another kind of deflection technique to avoid responsibility.
If it isn’t the antisemitism card, it’s the deflection card.
I really appreciate the attempt here, but these people are convinced and refuse to yield to logical questions, e.g. What is the evidence for a genocide? Gaza Ministry of Health says there is a genocide. You mean Hamas? The people who organized and filmed themselves murdering and kidnapping women, old people and children. Why do they have credibility? The UN also says there is a genocide. The UN cites Hamas. The BBC, NYT, HRW... ...also cite Hamas. It's Hamas all the way down. Well, it's the best source we have. Israel is biased, and committing genocide...
Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.