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Anonymous Raises Over $54,000 For Dedicated Your Anon News Website
hypnosec writes "Anonymous knocked the doors of Indiegogo in a bid to raise some crowd-sourced dough to expand its news coverage by establishing a dedicated site instead of tweets and tumblr blog posts and managed to raise 27 time as much money as initially targeted. The initial target was to raise $2000 to fund the site development work as well as pay for initial hosting. Anonymous is planning to host news, reports and blogs from independent online reporters under its, already in use, Your Anon News brand."
I think this is good.
It's not like it won't be biased, but the fact is that we have no high-profile news service that doesn't exhibit a strong pro-corporate bias right now. When OWS was active you had to go to R.T. or Al Jazeera to get anything near to fair reporting on it. Don't forget that Erin Burnett spent the very first minutes of her first CNN show bashing OWS in an unfair way. CNN, despite the shrill idiots that constantly say there is a pro-Left bias there, consistently takes the corporate side on all issues.
We need more high-profile news outlets to balance out that corporate bias.
As an Anon, I cannot support this effort. This is totally contrary to how Anonymous operated, and it's an attempt to put an official channel on the name and idea of Anonymous.
This site will eventually be controlled or shut down, or censored. And people will get the wrong idea that Anonymous has sold out, and that's not true at all. The timing for this is just too canny.
Anonymous does not support it.
If they write the website themselves, and have some sort of advertising for income then 2000 is fair. It doesn't have to be some big corporate conglomerate professional website. Sometimes doing things on a shoestring is a good way to start. Why burn a ton of cash if you don't get the people contributing the way you thought you would?
I took a gander at /pol/ during the bombings on Monday. Peel back the casual racism and horrible jokes and you will find what I'd call "crowdsourced news" -- people were transcribing the police scanner in realtime, verifying sources and continually updating what was or was not consensus on various news items. They knew the Saudi they kneejerked into arresting wasn't involved hours before the media was reporting on it for example.
Outlets are already writing out editorials about the new journalism, where many people were getting their news from tweets and blogs instead of mainstream news. I anticipate this new site will be a simple way of aggregating the thousands of pairs of eyes that witness news as it happens. I'm a bit concerned when it comes to their coverage of "exclusive" news, though -- I doubt that Anonymous will be allowed to sit in the White House Press Room, or interview CEOs and politicians.
Who knows but they need to be careful.. They are now making a money trail and this is Law Enforcement's bread and butter. Even if they try to compartmentalize different divisions there is still occasional cross chatter. Stay frosty.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
For example, in the Rehtaeh Parsons case (Canada), Anon basically showed the RCMP (police) as having put little effort into the case, and have proceeded to dig up evidence and essentially revive the case.
As with the link above, major news outlets in Canada have carried this story, and the reputation of anon seems to be improving in regards to revealing similar issues in gov't or law enforcement.
So long as they can tame the "lulz" area of things, an official news site might be a good/popular reference for some things.