
Elon Musk's latest company: Pravda - azhenley
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999367582271422464
======
mncharity
A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism
whose quality has been less than wonderful.

And there doesn't seem a good existing mechanism to deal with that. Individual
journalists with an axe to grind, which if you don't follow their work, you'll
not know to take with a grain of salt. Large misinformation campaigns, which
the press happily falls for, and afterwards doesn't report on or learn from.

When the Zuma defense satellite deployment failed, it was very quickly clear
that Northrop Grumman was at fault. But they ran a congress and press
campaign, pointing at SpaceX, generating a press "frenzy" (WSJ's word). It was
bizarre to watch the press, from NYTimes front page on down, simply getting
the story wrong. For days. Oh, the NYTimes got "facts" right - as in "people
are blaming SpaceX" \- but with little hint that that was bogus. The campaign
was successful in avoiding a public story of "Northrop just burned up a
billion dollars!" And afterward? No negative feedback for any of the
participants. Some quiet little corrections, some of which required reading
between the lines to even recognize as such. No articles about the reporting.
No backlash. No postmortems. No sign that next week any of them will do any
better.

And Tesla is apparently the largest short on the US stock market. With the
press coverage you'd expect from that.

So perhaps Musk encountered a societal failure mode, didn't see anyone else
successfully addressing it, and is doing a trial balloon on one possible
approach. Hopefully this will at least raise the visibility of the issue.

~~~
ubernostrum
_A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism
whose quality has been less than wonderful._

Tesla, at least, has been "encountering" problems of its own making.

Financial troubles, production troubles, safety troubles with its "autopilot"
feature and workplace safety issues for manufacturing employees have all been
reported, and I'm unaware of any evidence that such stories were lies
fabricated from whole cloth. Rather, those stories seem to be fact-based.

If Musk doesn't like the facts, he has the power to change them (by remedying
the problems at Tesla). But instead he seems to be in favor of forming his own
propaganda outlet to attack those who report the facts.

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dragonwriter
That's a stunningly bad idea; it amounts to rating how well articles feed into
public (or, rather, the sites users) preestablished biases, which is the only
basis most users will have to rate the “core truth” of most news stories.

At best, it's useless, at worst it contributes to further suppressing any news
story that challenges widely accepted narratives.

~~~
kankroc
While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some
journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic.

I'd see this as a useful tool for smaller local newspapers.

~~~
dragonwriter
> While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some
> journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic.

That's true of most topics; having the lay public vote on credibility ratingd
does nothing to address this, though (and probably makes it worse on issues
where the truth clashes with the popular misconception.)

------
Jeff_Brown
This good idea does not go far enough.

There's a clear need to crowdsource judgment. The judgment could be much more
expressive than "this is true". A hypergraph database would allow collection
of arbitrary metadata -- "this helped me understand plate tectonics", "this
contradicts that", etc. And it would enable more targeted search: not just
"show me true things", but, say, "show me articles about voting that are
highly discussed among the economic faculty at Michigan State".

I've written about this here: [https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-
why/blob/master/noise-vs-s...](https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-
why/blob/master/noise-vs-sunlight.md)

I also wrote a language -- very, very close to natural language, but machine-
readable -- designed to facilitate such higher-order queries:
[https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-
text/b...](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-
text/blob/master/Hash/why-use-hash.md)

------
azhenley
Someone dug up the filing of the corporation in California by one of Musk's
associates:
[https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999372255237832704](https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999372255237832704)

------
mkempe
How many Americans know what "pravda" means in Russian, as well as what
"Pravda" was in the Soviet Union?

~~~
desdiv
Americans read/watch the news and every news article about this I've read so
far ₁₂₃₄ correctly pointed out the Soviet connection.

₁
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/23/tesla-s...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/23/tesla-
spacex-ceo-elon-musk-media/638253002/)

₂ [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/musk-
file...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/musk-filed-for-
pravda-business-months-before-scorning-the-media)

₃ [https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-
already-...](https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-
exists-1826271755)

₄ [http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tweets-what-does-
pr...](http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tweets-what-does-pravda-
mean-2018-5)

------
matte_black
Getting sick and tired of Elon Musk, and his petty Donald Trump style rants.
_Focus_.

