What Fake News Looks Like (IBM)
Last night: No, IBM is Not Investing $150 Billion in the US and It Doesn't Even Have That Kind of Money
January: No, Microsoft Does Not Invest $80B in Hey Hi (AI), It's Just Full of BS, Lies, and Over $80B in Debt
The below is fake news (there's plenty more of the same, a smokescreen after terrible results). IBM told a lie, with an element of buzzwords/vapourware. The media then just blindly repeated this lie.
Remember when media actually checked if something was true before printing it? And possibly even published detailed rebuttals to lies instead of just parroting those lies?
IBM does not invest "$150 billion in US over five years". IBM is very deep in debt and it fakes its assets. IBM also costs the US a lot of money (all those government contracts are cushioned by taxpayers).
The Register had a little fun/joke with the term "Indian Business Machines":
If the media carries on like this, it'll be no better than LLM slop. Then it might even became a candidate for replacement by mindless chatbots. An alternative explanation is, this media participates in financial misconduct [1, 2]. Sometimes IBM pays it to do so. One such publisher went ahead with the headline: "IBM plans massive US investment — will jobs come to NC?"
Loaded question! IBM recently fired loads of staff in NC.
As someone put it the other night: "The Mainframe/Quantum part is already developed and built in the USA. These are funds that were already planned to be spent. So nothing new there."
"The rest of the $120b is not specified. So not sure what that entails, but I expect it is projects that were already planned."
"Is this a ploy to please the Trump administration?" another person asked.
Here are some more of the latest sentiments: (emphasis added by us)
As noted at the top, Microsoft too issues those false statements, not just Apple and IBM. Lying seems like a job requirement for leadership roles now. The corporate media helps them lie. This is bad for democracy, which demands an informed population. █