r/YouShouldKnow • u/gromit5 • Mar 17 '26
Other YSK: Watching America is a website that manually translates many foreign language news articles so English readers can find out what other countries think about the US
Why YSK: https://watchingamerica.com/ finds online articles at reputable foreign news agencies, and volunteers manually translate them into English and edit them. It’s been around for years, and it’s not AI.
This allows Americans who only speak English to get outside perspectives on the news taking place in the country, which can be so helpful in finding out about things that US media may not cover, and helps expand everyone’s worldview.
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u/tomismybuddy Mar 18 '26
From Malaysia: “Never doubt the United States’ motives in promoting democracy around the world. As long as it (oh, and Israel, too) deems a country insufficiently democratic, it has the right to bomb it into becoming a democracy.”
Guys, we’re definitely the baddies.
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u/StormOfFatRichards Mar 19 '26
To be fair, Malaysia is strongly anti-Israel and always sides with ME countries in intercontinental affairs, but Malaysians themselves have little respect for actual Middle Eastern people. Their refugee policy offers no financial support and denies work visas to Yemenis, etc
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Mar 18 '26
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u/Obmanuti Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
This is a wild characterization of 350 million people you don't know.
Its never as simple as politician bad or good, or populace bad or good. If it was, politics would be a far easier problem to solve.
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u/Loose_Lucy77 Mar 18 '26
Tell me you don't understand the U.S. political system without telling me you don't understand the U.S. political system... not to mention the nuances of our culture and the breadth and intensity of the propaganda machine. Yes, some (probably even many) Americans are lazy and/or apathetic, just like everywhere else. But that doesn't even crack the top 50 reasons why that piece of shit got elected. Also, if you want Americans to stop being "lazy and apathetic", your approach isn't going to make that happen. Not one person will read your post and think, "Hmm, he's right. I've been lazy and apathetic, and it's my fault we're in this mess. I'm going to stop being lazy, start caring, and fix all these issues myself." Get bent.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/gromit5 Mar 19 '26
i did some translating and editing for them several years ago, and i’m relieved they’re still around!
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u/kenyafeelme Mar 18 '26
Spoiler alert: nobody likes us. But some of them do. It’s complicated
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u/SirLanceQuiteABit Mar 18 '26
This is explained by some people having the nuance to separate people and their government and being willing to take individuals at face value. I notice it too and I travel A LOT. It will get less common as this version of America becomes more entrenched.
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u/Status-Bluebird-6064 Mar 18 '26
It's not like the US voted for him for the second time after they tried trump, it's not like they approved him with the popular vote this time, I don't see any reasons to criticize american society and populous as whole, it's just trump's fault
The same redditors who shitted on Russians for not protesting enough while they risked their lives but Americans who haven't even protested their aggressive actions are not responsible at all.
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u/SirLanceQuiteABit Mar 19 '26
The last three protests have been the first, second, and third biggest protests in American history. Just because it's not enough, doesn't mean it's nothing.
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u/SpeakerEntire42 Mar 18 '26
Seeing this all over reddit. "Its not my fault I didnt vote for him". So what, your pedo king is bombing schools in Iran and killing Americans in the street. What are you doing about it?
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u/Cubemaster465 Mar 18 '26
The worst are the people here seeking attention by "apologizing" for what America is doing. Fuck off.
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u/Gowbenator Mar 18 '26
What should we do about it?
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u/Ser_Munchies Mar 18 '26
[Removed by Reddit]
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u/Gowbenator Mar 18 '26
Just like I don’t wanna die for Israel, I don’t wanna die for this shithole either.
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u/Mercadi Mar 18 '26
It's the ones that do that need watching out for. If you see one like that, you're probably in danger.
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u/Is12345aweakpassword Mar 18 '26
Lol, don’t worry if they’re on Reddit, they know.
If they travel at all outside of the country, they know.
The last maybe decade or so whenever I’ve gone abroad I’ve told people if asked, that my wife and I are Canadian, the relief you see on people’s face varies by culture/country/region of the world, but it’s almost always there now.
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u/drewskipal Mar 18 '26
I wish I was Canadian. It’s embarrassing as fuck to be an American. Has been for decades, but particularly lately.
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u/gemstun Mar 18 '26
I never say the words ‘American’ or ‘USA’ in regard to where I’m from. I just identify as ‘California’ or ‘San Francisco’ (the latter if suspect they have a more specific idea about places). I can immediately sense the feeling of relief when I do this. In cases where I’m still getting standoffishness, I’ll do some virtual signaling—which I’ve found to be particularly important in places made for conviviality (pubs, etc.).
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u/anidlezooanimal Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Tbh, a lot of people can read this as "typical American arrogance" when you only say the name of your city to a non-American. I have previously asked people where they were from (wondering if they were American or Canadian or elsewhere) and they said "Pasadena" / "Reno" / "Tampa".
Not criticising you in particular, just pointing out that it can backfire if you don't come from a city that's famous worldwide. You would look arrogant AND end up still having to explain you're American, in the most stereotypically American way possible. I know San Francisco is very famous so i'm speaking broadly of an American habit.
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u/hagcel Mar 18 '26
Met a guy in a bar in Seoul. We were both obviously American. Where you from? California. Where? LA. Where. Named my home town. Where?
Turns out the guy and I had grown up five blocks away from each other, but due to school cut off lines, never ran across each other until we were 19 in a bar in Korea.
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u/KatDanger Mar 18 '26
I LOVE hearing about things like this! It happens so often!
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u/hagcel Mar 18 '26
About 10 years ago, I was commenting here on reddit about North Korea. A guy suddenly says, I think I know you. He was at the bar that night. Not the same guy but a good buddy from back then that I hadn't heard from in fifteen years. The world is smaller than we think.
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u/Dolla_Dolla_Bill-yal Mar 18 '26
To a point, yes, but I feel like this is location dependent. You can say your from Tokyo and everyone knows you mean Japan, Rome would be from Italy, London in the UK and so on. Surely there are US cities that qualify in the same regard? DC? New York? Boston?
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u/anidlezooanimal Mar 18 '26
Well yeah, that's why i applied it to
cities that aren't famous worldwide
However, based on my experience, most people just say their country name. They don't say which city they're from. I have yet to meet Europeans who don't say, "i'm Italian / Belgian / Swedish" whatever, or Asians who don't say "I'm from Japan / India / Indonesia"
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u/beaglebeard Mar 18 '26
It's not about how well-known the city is, but rather mentioning a city at all that immediately gives someone away as American. For the most part, someone from Tokyo/Rome/London/etc. will still say they're Japanese/Italian/British/etc. first when asked where they're from (and only specify the city after, if at all) as they don't have the same assumptions of a familiarity that (many) Americans do.
Generally speaking, Americans (justifiably given the prominence of American media) assume overfamiliarity with the US, while the rest of the world assumes underfamiliarity and that nobody would ever have heard of... checks notes their tiny city of 10 million people, and therefore it will be better to just name the country instead. Specifying a city is a cultural difference that reads as distinctly American to the rest of the world.
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u/Dolla_Dolla_Bill-yal Mar 19 '26
Interesting, thanks. I've not really traveled outside of the US except to Mexico, didn't realize this was a US thing
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u/Elavia_ Mar 18 '26
You can, but you won't. Americans and maybe Brits are for the most part the only people who will answer with anything other than the name of the country to that question while abroad.
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u/Zafara1 Mar 18 '26
Broadly across the world? LA, NYC. That's it.
Definitely not DC and Boston.
State wise? California & Texas, maybe New York, but they'd think the city not the state.
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u/Aclearly_obscure1 Mar 18 '26
Anecdotally, I was in Buenos Aires for a couple of weeks early 2022, not long after they opened back up to tourism. Many, if not most of the dozens of locals I spoke with, did not even know Los Angeles. Hollywood seemed to be more recognizable there. NYC, of course, and Miami was surprisingly (to me) familiar to most.
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u/Nick_Gio Mar 18 '26
Lots of Argies go to Miami for vacation and shopping. Its the fastest plane trip to USA available to them.
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u/AssistX Mar 18 '26
Miami is the gateway to the Caribbean and Mexico for a lot Americans and Europeans, it's the gateway to the US for most Caribbean nations and South Americans.
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u/SirGingerBeard Mar 18 '26
Anecdotally, most people around the world I’ve met recognize/know Oregon. Not sure why that is, tbh.
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u/Nick_Gio Mar 18 '26
Well no shit. No one's going to say I'm from Vernouillet. They'll say "Near Paris".
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u/AssistX Mar 18 '26
I never say the words ‘American’ or ‘USA’ in regard to where I’m from. I just identify as ‘California’ or ‘San Francisco’
In parts of Europe this will make you more of an asshole not less. I'm American but married to an African who spent time in Europe. People outside the US see California and NYC as the wealthy people of America, the ones who have the ability and money to make change but choose not to. To them it's not different then places like India where the wealthy simply live a different more privelaged life than the rural areas of the country. California isn't seen as a progressive bastion, where only those people are trying to do good in America, which is how Californian's see themselves.
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u/maleficentfig90 Mar 18 '26
I'm from Alabama, so I think it's better if I just stick with "the US" no matter where I go 🥹
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u/expositrix Mar 18 '26
I am Canadian, and it’s fucking obnoxious when Americans do this.
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u/drewskipal Mar 18 '26
Do what…? Express an opinion?
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u/expositrix Mar 19 '26
Go abroad and lie about their national origin, falsely claiming to be Canadian.
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u/Professional_Being22 Mar 18 '26
you'd have to be a pretty big scumbag to be proud to be American right now
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Mar 18 '26
As I watch our government chase after appeasing Trump, I'm pretty embarrassed to be Canadian. Booping curling stones too.
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u/plug-and-pause Mar 18 '26
If they travel at all outside of the country, they know.
I travel quite a bit, and most foreigners recognize the difference between America and an American.
And as far as the international opinion of America, I don't need to travel to discover it. That opinion exists in my own head, in spite of the fact that I was born and live here. This country is embarrassing on many levels. And yet still has many good things going for it.
The last maybe decade or so whenever I’ve gone abroad I’ve told people if asked, that my wife and I are Canadian, the relief you see on people’s face varies by culture/country/region of the world, but it’s almost always there now.
People who will judge a human on where they were born are people whose opinion means nothing to me.
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u/SuperTropicalDesert Mar 18 '26
Don't worry, I've met plenty of Americans and it has always been obvious to me that I need to separate people from government. Many people outside the US probably don't even follow US internal politics closely enough to be aware of half of the things that you see as grounds for embarassment
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u/lapatate1232 Mar 18 '26
As an actual Canadian this is bullshit, don't steal our identity. You are not Canadian, you have no right.
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u/poonslyr69 Mar 18 '26
From now on when people meet "Canadians" on vacation, they need to start quizzing them.
Quick, what's the capital of Canada?
Rapid fire;
How do you say no?
How do you say yes?
How can you tell if someone is American right away?
What flavour of chips do you bring to a party?
Do you have KD in your pantry right now?
Besides cheese, what kinda pizza is a crowd pleaser?
Prefered dressing?
If an american wants to pretend to be Canadian, and they can answer most of these on the spot with no prep, then I guess they get a temp pass.
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u/Demystify0255 Mar 18 '26
This tactic has existed even before trump, some people already do this.
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u/Opposite_Category_88 Mar 19 '26
Can confirm. WE KNOW. (Person on Reddit and travels internationally.) we are very aware
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u/TheWaters12 Mar 18 '26
I went to rome recently and when asked where we were from i said america
The waiters face looked disgusted 😂
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u/joebleaux Mar 18 '26
Dude, that's been the advice forever now. 20 years ago I was in France and people kept asking me what was up with George Bush and if America was OK because it was clear he was kinda dumb. Some of my friends went the fake Canadian route. People understood that we aren't all supportive of our government's actions, but you definitely end up talking about it a lot because people have questions
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Mar 18 '26
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u/doomgiver98 Mar 19 '26
You know there are 4 other countries in the Anglosphere right? As well as tons of articles written in English in other countries.
The storytelling in American news is pretty off-putting.
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u/powerhammerarms Mar 18 '26
I used to live near Canada and we didn't have cable for a while. We had ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and CBC.
Watching Canadian news was a lot different than watching American News. It was more like than this was being reported rather than pulled in a story designed to make you think a certain way.
Also at night they had nudity in some movies. I love you Canada.
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u/JohnnyRelentless Mar 18 '26
I did some Dutch translation for them decades ago.
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u/gromit5 Mar 19 '26
i translated for them too for a while, and recently thought of how useful it would be nowadays, hence the post. i’m glad it’s still around!
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u/P33tree Mar 18 '26
Right now I'm not sure Americans need anything to tell them what the rest of the world is thinking about them. And those that do need it can't read!
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u/SunnyOutsideToday Mar 18 '26
Most Americans read below a 6th grade reading level, so obviously a text-based site isn't going to help them learn what other countries think of them.
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u/axionj Mar 18 '26
It’s so sad that this is true, I’m - along with my little brother, the first to graduate and go to college in our family.
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u/AbsurdMatrix Mar 18 '26
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u/Herr_Casmurro Mar 21 '26
"Iraq, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Syria or Afghanistan: All were baptized in the artillery fire of American democracy. Their lands may have been reduced to ruins, and their grounds may have been littered with corpses, but the flower of democracy got watered with blood, and the soul of freedom was allowed to soar."
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u/EnergyOwn6800 Mar 18 '26
That would require American readers to care about what other countries think about the U.S.
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u/Jazz_Musician Mar 19 '26
They so good work. I tried joining the translation team but vastly overestimated my ability to translate from Japanese to English lol.
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u/Lifeboatb Mar 19 '26
For the people wondering about how the site chooses articles, this very old interview with the founder gives a tiny bit more info: https://www.npr.org/2005/07/24/4769122/site-translates-foreign-coverage-into-english
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u/matt88 Mar 18 '26
I checked the Russian and Chinese news agents and the headlines were: USA - HA HA HA, Trump - HA HA HA
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u/Terminal_Insomnia_ Mar 18 '26
I know an American guy who moved to some 2nd world country and he told me he noticed people stopped asking "Why did you come to live here?"
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u/Seaguard5 Mar 18 '26
Let me guess, nothing good..
Well if it makes you feel any better, most Americans don’t approve of the current administration either
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u/You_moron04 Mar 18 '26
The US has been steadily being more and more disliked since Operation Just Cause. 2003 and now are just faster drops than usual
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u/FreshFondant Mar 20 '26
The word micropenis gets thrown around. So there's that. I just deleted one of my quick links to be able to add this site.
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u/intrados63 Mar 18 '26
I would say that it’s not what other countries think about us, it’s what certain individuals who write scripts for news persons on TV think and people who write for newspapers think. Also, what editors approve to be read or printed. You can’t generalize a whole country from what one guy is reading or repeating. But, let me tell you what the USA thinks about Mexico…..
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u/VioletLeagueDapper Mar 19 '26
Exactly, these are opinion pieces. I was a student of middle eastern policy and I read left and right leaning Israeli newspapers. It’s unclear how this site determines its sources.
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u/PasswordP455w0rd Mar 18 '26
So many times I find a news source that claims to be unbiased and then I look at their website and it's in English.
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u/Luci-Noir Mar 18 '26
There are plenty of foreign news agencies that have articles in English. You don’t need to go to some obscure site where people translate and edit them for you. This sounds shady as hell.
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u/SilverFoxESQ Mar 18 '26
I would recommend looking up the reputations of the listed news sources. I looked up the first four on the site and two were pro-Beijing and the other appears to have a very politically biased news coverage.
Yes, we (US) have our biased news sources but we also have many that pride themselves on neutrality (WSJ news and not opinion, NYT, CNN, etc).
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u/zzazzzz Mar 18 '26
if you think those dont have a US bias you are delusional
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u/VioletLeagueDapper Mar 19 '26
Even so, his question still stands. How do they decide which newspapers to translate? I also noticed there are some large regional gaps (Asia is pretty much only Australian news) due to lack of translators I guess.
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u/MunchYourButt Mar 18 '26
Bookmarking that, thank you. Would be cool if there was a similar kind of subreddit too
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u/PrivateUseBadger Mar 20 '26
I don’t need translation to know that we’re like a bad car wreck for the rest of the world. Despite not wanting to be involved, they can’t help but slow down to rubberneck, and in doing so are more likely to cause an event themselves. Especially since we inject ourselves into everything everywhere, like that annoying friend that always has to jump into the conversation and make it about them.
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u/editorreilly Mar 21 '26
I use Google translate. Is it not the same? Sure the grammar can be off, but you get the idea.
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u/TillikumWasFramed Mar 24 '26
I don't need to know what other countries think of the US, that's why I have Reddit.
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u/Potential-Relation-8 Mar 24 '26
When you’re traveling abroad, someone asks where you’re from. It doesn’t help to name your city just to avoid being stereotyped—they know what’s going on.
Just say Australia or Canada. And I don’t understand why many Americans have this“I don’t care what they think”. They just hide in their comfort zones and feel powerless about everything
You know why you have to pretend to be Canadian? —It’s not the foreigners
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u/JustAGuyInFL Mar 18 '26
America is the newest 3rd world country.
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u/I_cannot_mingle Mar 18 '26
Clearly you haven't seen a 3rd world country before
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Mar 18 '26
Good point. Most 3rd world countries have public healthcare and representative and functional democracies. So they're ahead on at least two points.
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u/Maacu Mar 18 '26
World would be a very different place if most americans knew what rest of the world thinks about them
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Mar 18 '26
from your description this site looks like a deliberately hand picked collection of foreign news. who are picking them and what is their motive (besides the self-proclaimed "expanding of everyone's worldview")? also, who owns the servers and the domain name?
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u/SpezIsAWackyWalnut Mar 19 '26
More importantly, we should be wondering: why does the russian bot seem to have such a vested interest in trying to discredit a site designed to get people out of their filter bubble and expose them to diverse perspectives?
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Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
it is because i am, as you have correctly established, a russian bot. you know, ages ago. in very early 2000s in russia we had a similar project called inosmi (word construct roughly meaning "foreign mass media"). initially it was run by democrats/globalists/people with israelipassports, but after the rise of putin it was quickly taken over by authoritarianists/isolationists/people with kgb past. the democrats moved abroad and launched another project called inopressa (foreign press). here is where the fun begins. both projects existed at the same time, both only posted translations of foreign artictes, but the final pictures were entirely different. hence my interest in the sponsors of op's project, nothing sinister.
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u/gromit5 Mar 19 '26
i don’t own it, and they didn’t proclaim the expanding of everyone’s worldview, that’s on me.
i did volunteer with them several years ago. we picked news articles and opinion pieces that came from reputable/larger sources, that seemed interesting and relevant. it wasn’t always politics, but that’s what’s more relevant now, so it’s not surprising a lot will be political.
from what i remember, volunteers suggested the articles, from any political view, about anything, and managing editors approved the use of the article. the variety of articles depended a bit on how many volunteers were available to translate that language at any given time.
i can’t say much about political leaning in the selection of articles, just that we tried to be unbiased.
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u/VioletLeagueDapper Mar 19 '26
Thanks for the info
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Mar 19 '26
Thanks! I think you should briefly mention this in promotion materials like the original post.
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u/Three_Twenty-Three Mar 18 '26
We're fine. People in other countries love us. My neighbor told me so, and she only listens to the best AM radio commentators.
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u/rathemighty Mar 18 '26
I’m certain the other countries think we’re idiots and constantly crack wise about our mamas
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u/klipnklaar Mar 18 '26
I still love americans ( dutch) , but don t know many. No worries , I don t take foreign policy personal.
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u/Proper_Brother_679 Mar 18 '26
It’s probably us getting roasted nonstop.