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This ain't it at all. Hoaxing the NYT would be notable for the same reasons The Rape On Campus story out of Rolling Stone was notable. There are supposed to be fact checkers, multiple sources, teams of lawyers, etc vetting a story. There is supposed to be a rigorous institution in play here, with the pretense that it can course correct for any particular individuals biases or short comings.
Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter. Doing it to score cheap political points is especially gross. It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.
And this whole, "How dare you" attitude, and this pretense of "truth seeking". I mean... maybe. But like I said, it puts an asterisk. I know this is a guy who wages information war. I need to be weary of that.
Perhaps you're a man of principle, and 'thou shalt not lie on the internet to people who aren't the MSM' is the hill you're willing to die on. I laud your moral character.
I do not believe that most of the people who care enough about the culture war to know who Libs of Tiktok (regardless of their feelings about her!) is are principled observers passing judgment as opposed to partisans waging the culture war. I also maintain that Trace wouldn't have faced nearly the same level of backlash, and certainly not from the same people if he had owned some libs instead. You and Gattsuru can split hairs about whether any example I could provide is exactly comparable, but given that his complaint with the last example I gave was that Trace was not directly involved, and as far as I know Trace has only trolled one person, I've been given a bar that's literally impossible to clear.
On the contrary. You talk about the Sokal hoax elsewhere; I'm prepared to bite that bullet and say fuck those pseudoscience humanities journals that provide nothing of worth. If they can't distinguish an actual paper from technobabble, why should they exist?
Okay, let's split some hairs - scientific journal is an institution, probably has an annual budget of literally tens of thousands of dollars that it can pay ramen-eating graduate students to review papers with, whereas libsoftiktok is an influencer with 3 million subscribers (I wonder how much money she makes across substack, twitter and tiktok, but I digress). The difference is that your uncle is some innocent dude trying to (presumably) browse some memes, whereas LoTT is actively curating, creating and distributing content with a direct political goal. She's waging the culture war on a daily basis. Once you switch from consuming content to generating it, you're playing by the rules of a different game.
Before you ask whether a twitter account with 10 followers is playing by different rules, no, they aren't. And no, I don't have a line in the sand I can give you to delineate the two. But I think it's pretty clear with the audience she had that she had crossed the line.
What makes you think people aren't doing that, aside from making a believable new twitter account which takes a significant amount of effort? I assume most people here are lying some substantial amount of the time, rules against it be damned. I'm just not allowed to say so.
He should know better, not because he's wrong, but because letting the other party know that you're pissed means they win.
As for 'knowing this is a guy that wages the information war' - you should be wary of everyone on the internet, not just Trace, and in terms of trustworthiness he's probably in a pretty high percentile. Most of the people here are waging the culture war on a daily basis. Do you think people writing weekly screeds about the Jews aren't waging the information war?
I doubt we'll see eye to eye, but thank you for the reasonable and measured reply.
Dollars are sort of important things.
The joke was that LoTT could very well have more of them than ye olde gender studies journal, although I had difficulty finding either her net worth or the ballpark budget of a humanities journal.
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I'm thinking you meant "wary", but I have to admit that "weary" is somehow even more accurate.
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And in a world where millions of people don't treat a twitter anon as a source for reinforcing/building their beliefs then that may hold some weight. But that is not this world.
Once we are at that point then any influencer is as fair game as the paper of record. They have to be. Whether it is a "fitness" guru getting exposed as using steroids or a culture warrior being exposed as only posting material which hurts their outgroup true or not.
If someone is treated seriously by people as an information source then they must be able to be exposed if their information is bad or suspect.
You're stuck in a pre-social media mindset here. The world has changed and the sources of information people take seriously has changed with it.
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