- I watched the video and honestly just this one dude standing in this unidentified location for unknown reasons with a patch that maybe looks like a Wagner patch if you zoom in and squint, doesn’t really mean anything.
- I had no particular opinion about the Venezuela elections and no idea that anyone in geopolitics cared, until some of the Lemmy propagandists who also don’t like Ukraine started going HARD that Maduro was the best and totally won and González was a tool of US imperialism and Elon Musk.
- Fact check bot? Where you at? I sorta want to know what’s up with this site I’ve never heard of
Yeah for the presence of mercenaries it’s best to wait for corroboration. But the election in Venezuela has been heading news since the night Maduro abruptly stopped counting votes, refused to release detailed results, and just declared victory. Then the opposition turned out to literally have the receipts.
Yeah it’s been kind of a big deal.
Oh yeah no doubt. I just meant that I didn’t think anyone from any of the great fuckin-with-people states was trying to involve themselves, UNTIL all the vatniks on Lemmy started going nuts about it.
I mean its an open secret that the US likes to meddle in Venezuelan politics with varying degrees of military force. So it makes sense to me that Russia would also want to be there just because of that.
Yeah. Venezuela has a TON of oil which makes it of interest to anyone in the world who likes to go around fuckin with people and taking their stuff.
Venezuela’s oil reserves are the last that should ever be pumped out of the ground in the world. It is thick sludge like bitumen, full of heavy metals and hard to extract and process because it has lots of Sulphur, so it’s corrosive. It is almost as bad as burning coal and produces less high-value light hydrocarbons like gasoline and more bunker fuel that can only be used in tankers and industry…which are heavy polluters.
I’m almost tempted to say that it would be better for those reserves to be under the control of a backwards dictator who won’t be able to develop them or privatize them, but China has its eyes on exploiting those reserves too, not just the US, so even that unethical argument is moot.
They don’t have an MBFC page, which is a bit weird since according to their Wikipedia page they’ve been around for 26 years. I couldn’t find any bias rating info on them anywhere.
The story seems a bit sketchy. IntelliNews attributes the video to Jason Jay Smart – a political consultant and writer for the Kyiv Post. The video didn’t originate with him though. About 6 hours earlier it was posted by ‘The Spot News’ who are probably a fake news organization*. They don’t seem to have a web presence beyond that twitter account. Spot News was used as the source for this article from Defense-Blog that pre-dates the IntelliNews piece.
The earliest post with the video I can find is here from ‘Ukraine News 24 Hours’, who are also not really a news org and just link to a telegram account. They claim that they posted it but, who knows? Most references to the video describe it as “appearing online” without any attribution, which itself is a bit sketch. No one really reputable is reporting this (yet?).
- Edit: by “fake news organization” I mean that they are not a real news organization, not that they are necessarily posting fake news (though they could be!)
Amateur news organization or unaccredited news organization are two better ways of referring to Twitter accounts with two guys and a camera.
At least in the case of ‘The Spot News’, I don’t think that’s what they are and I think it’s giving them more legitimacy than they deserve. I don’t believe it’s a genuine effort to do reporting. They’re posing as a news agency when they’re just reposting stuff they find online. Even in that tweet, they’re reposting a video as if it’s their own.
There are a million of these grifty accounts/sites that claim to be ‘The World’s #1 Source for Global Breaking News’. Two people and a camera can do a lot of things, but they can’t be that. The people and the camera can only be in one place at a time, right?
In just the last 12 hours, The Spot News have “covered” Aerosmith, an attack on Israel, Imane Khelif (with this scummy nugget: “Imane Khelif, who has male hormones and beats women, took refuge in Allah.”), a Kirill Fedorov interview with a Russian soldier, bird-shaped Chinese drones, Eylem Tok’s lawyer, and a Ukrainian attack on a Russian sub. That’s quite the travel budget for a little operation out of Sheridan, Wyoming! They don’t indicate who their “reporters” are. There isn’t one human being associated with that account. These are all hallmarks of news grifters. What they’re really doing is plagiarism.
‘Ukraine News 24’ doesn’t make any big claims about being the world’s top news source and, honestly, I’m not totally sure that they’re even trying to claim that they’re doing journalism even though they’ve identified themselves as a “media and news company.” It seems more like news activism and 99% of what they seem to do is curate and amplify news about Ukraine (with attribution). There’s no problem at all with them doing that. They don’t seem to do any original reporting though. I was too harsh in equating those two but I think pointing out that they’re not really a news org is appropriate because their name is kind of deceptive (intentionally or not).
If the video is fake or more verification by other outlets doesn’t show up, I’ll certainly take the post down.
Personally I don’t think it’s wrong to have it up; there is enough bullshit in the “factual” news that I think it’s okay if people see this interesting thing while still being aware of the context that maybe it is a weird mistake or means nothing at all. I was just - maybe for the first time - sort of actually wanting the bot to tell me more about this news source.
As a general rule, to me the model of “let me take the information and figure out for myself and based on comments whether I think it is well founded enough to take seriously” is better than “the mods and MBFC bot will keep me safe, anything untrustworthy should come down, anything that does stay up I can just accept uncritically because it’s had a stamp of being definitely trustworthy”.
