
QAnon Website Shuts Down After N.J. Man Identified as Operator - weare138
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-11/qanon-website-shuts-down-after-n-j-man-identified-as-operator
======
phobosanomaly
Since the website is down, I clicked on one of the links qagg.news.

I'm actually surprised at how well-designed the site is to vacuum in the human
mind.

As someone who is well-aware that the Qanon stuff is bullshit, my first
thought on opening the link was 'fascinanting,' and I wanted to explore more.

Unfortunately, I could see how someone could get sucked into this.

Most people don't objectively assess the world around them, they rely on
heuristics. If your heuristics are based on information relayed to you by
those around you, rather than a mainstream average of the interpretation of
what's going on around you (from reading NYT, WaPo, a more educated friend-
group) in your community, why wouldn't you fall for this?

At some point, I hope there is a shift in the high-school curriculum to make
sure that every American gets a class that at least somewhat resembles this
syllabus:

1\. Introduction to bullshit 2\. Spotting bullshit 3\. The natural ecology of
bullshit 4\. Causality 5\. Statistical traps 6\. Visualization 7\. Big data
8\. Publication bias 9\. Predatory publishing and scientific misconduct 10\.
The ethics of calling bullshit. 11\. Fake news 12\. Refuting bullshit

[https://www.callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html](https://www.callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html)

There is a lot of anti-news sentiment on HN. Unfortunately, when people ignore
the news, don't live in a more-educated area like SV, and rely on their
community for their interpretation of the world, this kind of thing seems like
a very natural extension of that.

We tend to get off in the weeds on discussions of bias and such, but we really
should be concerned about what happens when you totally divorce from reality
by utterly abandoning information about the world around you from a mainstream
source.

------
retox
What is the journalistic value in doxing a private citizen?

~~~
Barrin92
revealing who uses the conspiracy theory and benefits from it financially (the
author of the site runs a patreon account) is quite obviously in public
interest.

Not to mention someone who operates a website on the internet with 10 million
monthly viewers, a business model, and a self-declared 'patriotic movement',
is not a private citizen, but a publisher and a political activist.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Why does antifa.com redirect to joebiden.com?

~~~
shadowgovt
Why does antifaleadership.com redirect to donaldjtrump.com?

~~~
Fjolsvith
It sounds like Antifa is equal opportunity. /s

