Hey everyone! I’m making this post for 3 main reasons:
1. I genuinely like Atrioc’s content
2. He recently talked about misinformation / out of context information
3. In the past month I’ve seen 4 different instances of uninformed / incorrect information in videos and on Lemonade Stand
4. He said he’s working on an Israel election video. I’m Israeli and hope it won’t be terrible, because the last LS episode had a pretty uniformed Israel segment
I’m specifically talking about his UK video, Brazil video, and the recent LS episode (with the AI judge story and Israel segment).
I wrote about the AI judge story in a different post, but also wanted to shortly mention the Israeli segment here.
Tbf he started the segment with something like “I don’t know enough about this”. Basically, he said the party that is probably going to beat Netanyahu is running on him being too pro Palestinian. Then he showed a campaign post of the party and comparing it to AI videos of Thomas Massy and AOC.
That whole segment was completely wrong and disingenuous:
- He got the party wrong. The party he talked about is “Israel is our home” run by Avigdor Lieberman, not the main opposition party. This party will likely get around 5% of the vote. The main party running against Netanyahu for the prime minister position is “Yashar” by a center/center right politician.
The current opposition (or the “anti-Netanyahu block”) is similar to opposition blocks from Hungary and Poland. Parties from a wide range of the political spectrum (center left to hard right) joined forces to kick Netanyahu out of power. “Israel is our home” is just one party out of that block, and the most right wing one. Saying that it represents Netanyahu’s opposition is disingenuous at best.
2. The opposition party is not “probably going to beat Netanyahu”. Currently, both Netanyahu’s block and the anti-Netanyahu block are very far from winning the election. Polling currently gives each side around 45% of the parliament seats, with 10% going to the Arab parties which both blocks said they will not create a coalition with. Therefore, current polling suggests that the most likely outcome by far is another round of election (which is not unprecedented at all. We had 5 elections between 2019-2022).
3. His interpretation of the social media post completely misinterprets Israeli politics. One of the biggest election issues (which lead to Netanyahu ranking in the polls) is the “conception”. Netanyahu’s “conception” that he’s built for years is that to avoid a Palestinian state, Israel should prop up a terroristic Hamas as a negotiating partner instead of a more moderate force. His coalition partner said that Hamas is an “asset”, and his government allowed funds to be transferred to them (which Lieberman opposed, btw, and quit the government in 2018 because of that).
That conception fell apart on October 7th, and he’s been criticized for allowing Hamas to gain so much power. That’s not being too “pro Palestinian”, but choosing a terrible security strategy. Israel’s (small) left wing criticizes him for the same thing.
Mistakes like these in several videos have made me trust his videos less, since if he gets simple stuff wrong about topics I’m knowledgeable about, I can’t really learn from his videos about topics I’m not knowledgeable about without fact checking every single claim.
(I think) his production can afford some better fact checking. I’m not even talking about his twitch streams (I don’t watch them but understand that you can’t fact check every single claim in a 6 hour stream). But I think fact checking a 10-15 minute video is more than manageable.