Ars Technica

Ars Technica has a reputation of being an unbiased news site. This is and isn't true. Generally speaking, when it reports on strictly technical or business news in the tech world (like a recent press release from a company or the hiring of a new CEO), it takes a "just the facts, ma'am," approach.

The heavy bias starts to show itself when it reports on political news or developments in terms of regulating Big Tech abuses, especially in terms of hate speech and adult content. Because Ars Technica is hardcore Techno-Libertarian and is a mouthpiece for the goons of Silicon Valley, it has a very sophisticated algorithm in the comments to shut out anyone supporting regulation of Big Tech. For example, under an article about, say, legislators considering adding age-verification to protect minors from seeing certain sites, Ars Technica's clique of readers, admins and moderators will spam the comment with enough downvotes to collapse it from view.

Just to show you how unbiased and sick this site is, when posters try to ask the community on the forums as to why a post was collapsed, they not only get verbally attacked, they get told in condescending fashion that the only reason why they were downvoted is that they said something "wrong." In the screenshot posted, you can see one forum poster sounding like a character out of Orwell's 1984, saying, "I've got comments of mine downvoted to oblivion. You know what I did? Sucked it up and accepted what I said was not acceptable - learned from what I said and continued to comment." Others similarly made comments along the lines of getting brigaded as being a "learning experience," as in, "You were shamed and humiliated for having the wrong opinion; learn how to think like everyone else so it won't happen again."

That is not the worst part. Ars Technica's commenting system is designed to screen out "wrongthinkers." If you're a new member who posts "wrongthink" from the gate, Ars Technica's staff and readers will downvote your post to such an extent that you get forced into a quandary where you lose your posting privileges until you can get enough upvotes. It's okay, though. You can just have fun watching the shady Ars Technica staff, their friends and goons dogpile in your absence as you sit back helplessly, unable to respond.

In the last screenshot, you can see the types of comments that are wrongthink and which Ars Technica tries to memory hole by mass downvoting. Someone had the temerity to suggest that any type of CP should be banned. I guess that's what the arrogant SOB in the last screenshot (aka "Tridus") meant by "Frankly, our society today goes far too hard in the direction of coddling every uninformed opinion and treating it as if its valid." It's a "misinformed opinion" to support legislation of sexual images involving minors.

By the way, don't hold Ars Technica blameless for any of this. I've been on the web a long time. A sneaky thing that so many of these tech sites do is put on a "front" of unbiased reporting, only to attack people they disagree with under cover of anonymity. "Unbiased" news sites don't allow the kind of brigading of posters on one side, or enabling of a sophisticated algorithm that both collapses posts and immediately flags new accounts guilty of wrongthink. These people are the staff members themselves, contributors or friends of the site. They're not "the public." Not by a longshot.

It's a little cringey when they delve into the liberal arts but they will give you an honest opinion and not a retread of the liberal art grapevine.

arstechnica.com is hands-down my favorite tech news site! Sure, at times it's bit over my head and the writing is more geared towards developers and uber-nerds, but I appreciate the scholastic writing style, and the fact that they take such pride in their savvy. They definitely do not dumb-down the prose for the common man.

Bottom line is, between ars and techcrunch.com, I always feel like I have a handle on what's going on in the industry. And that way I can make my friends feel stupid (one of my favorite pastimes).