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I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page.

I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true. However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments." I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times. Her response: "That's comforting." I was shocked. And yet, that is the reality we now live in. Many, many people are acting, and thinking, exactly like her.

dragonwriter 10y ago
Note that when confronted about false stories (which were sourced from white aupremacist propaganda) he retweeted, the President-elect, while still a candidate, responded fairly similarly, so, yeah, it's definitely an attitude that is becoming quite normalized.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  It's that combined with the echo chamber effect of their algorithms. I've watched a diverse group of smart and average people across political spectrum this election. Most of them consistently shared unsubstantiated claims or biased media. As expected, their media was always presenting evidence for their side and agsinst the other. Corporate media always did that for maximizing ratings and ad impressions. However, there's a difference. People often had these discussions face to face with other views visible or at least some consequences for bullshitting. Now, the like-minded naturally group together with Facebook making the others (esp moderates) largely disappear from the feed. Showing them what they wanted to see with convenience of scrolling past opposing beliefs reinforced the echo chambers and false beliefs. That few counterpoints are displayed reinforces it further by creating illusion of false consensus for their side. All the resulting upvotes and shares reinforce the algorithm's effect. I speculate such things are why the divide seemed so much stronger in this election than before. They need to bump into each other more for the necessary conversations to occur. The tech increases isolation instead. The effects will only get worse over time.
  - grzm 10y ago
    It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments as they're doing nothing to reinforce the polarization, anger, and frustration we find so vital to drive engagement, page views, clicks, and time on site. "The effects will only get worse over time." I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. My imagination (and knowledge of history) are too limited. Anyone have some good examples? Or know of projects that are working on similar topics?
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      "It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments" Lol. Believe me, a few people on social media agreed and I can't see their stuff any more. ;) "I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. " Similarly having a hard time. This particular one got reversed temporarily each time new mediums were invented. Then, the people using such tactics mastered them for the new mediums. Helps when the start rolling in money then use it to ensure the dominance. The social media has more potential to counter this than ever if they just adjust the algorithm to bridge the groups a certain percentage of time. They can mostly create a comfortable experience for the ad revenue but should make sure articles citing at least half-ass sources float into opposing feeds while letting bullshit stuff Snopes counters fall lower. That simple change, applied to everyone, might have a significant effect on the situation at least for moderates or rational people likely to effect change.
- hogrammer 10y ago
  The Democrats are just as bad. Hillary opened the first debate with the false news that women only make 73 cents for every dollar men make. The Left also insists that 1 in 4 women are raped in college, and that a massive international sex-Slave business accompanies every Super Bowl.
- jbkrule 10y ago
  Just wondering, was this sentence intentionally written in an extremely complicated way? It took me a while to figure out what it was saying.
  - croon 10y ago
    6 commas in one sentence is indeed a lot. I'm still unsure what it means.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    No, that's pretty typical of my writing that isn't edited down. Usually, even for HN comments, I'm a little better at editing before anyone else sees it, though.
spenvo 10y ago
It's not just on Facebook. I have a close family member who was genuinely excited by Assange insinuating Clinton's camp murdered a DNC staffer (without offering any proof to that effect), simply because it would lower her chances of winning.
- pryce 10y ago
  Just from a cultural perspective, I feel like worldwide we are again celebrating that "my team at all costs!" mentality that was so prominent during the 1980s. This is not to say that the opinion landscape in other decades didn't have problems; but they were somewhat different in nature.
  - distances 10y ago
    I was a bit young in the 1980s -- do you mean the capitalism vs. communism divide, or something else?
hammock 10y ago
I don't really go on Facebook. Can you give an example of the type of fake news story you're talking about?
- JacobJans 10y ago
  Here's a classic example, though the original website is down, so I linked to the Facebook Debug tool: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwtoe5news.com%2Fus-election%2Fpope-francis-shocks-world-endorses-donald-trump-for-president-releases-statement%2F https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%...
  - appleflaxen 10y ago
    Did you notice that you are replying to a person with no facebook account to a link that requires a facebook login to view? Maybe that's unavoidable, given the topic, but it's not visible without logging in.
  - takeda 10y ago
    Is there a way to take maybe a screenshot for people who don't use facebook?
    - JacobJans 10y ago
      https://s13.postimg.org/f09sy4vgn/Screen_Shot_2016_11_16_at_7_26_21_PM.png https://s13.postimg.org/f09sy4vgn/Screen_Shot_2016_11_16_at_...
      - takeda 10y ago
        Thank you. Wow, politics do lie, but Trump took it to a new level. Seems like this will be a new standard from now on.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
sparkzilla 10y ago
My site, Newslines, addresses the fake news problem in a simple way. Our objective over the next few years is to create a news search engine by summarising all of the world's news into timelines. All of the news our crowdsourced team summarises goes through an editorial check before it is posted to the site, so it is extremely difficult to put fake news on the site. During the summarization process we also strip out all the commentary and bias, resulting in what we hope will be an unbiased news archive of the topic. We have had good results so far, for example, our newsline of "Mattress Girl" [1] is the most unbiased account of her case on the web, despite being curated made from exceptionally biased sources. If you like what we are doing please join us. [1]http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/ http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/
codyb 10y ago
Had the same thing happen where I pointed out something was false to an acquaintance who shares frequently and he said "well we each play our part, thankfully there are people like you" or something to that affect. The idea that it was my job to screen the bullshit... I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed.
- icpmacdo 10y ago
  >I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed. Same. Now its just a messaging platform now, its great
  - renaudg 10y ago
    Ever tried messenger.com ?
    - icpmacdo 10y ago
      Yes. Rarely ever visit facebook.com . Unfollowed everyone before they released messenger.com but now use that primarily. The only other benefit of FB now is party invitations.
JoshMnem 10y ago
I've had similar experiences on Facebook. Facts don't matter. Even when linking to proof that something is fake news, the fake news doesn't get removed or addressed. This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  This has me deeply, deeply concerned. The election is one thing, but what happens if/when elected officials start screwing with something like Social Security, resulting in a generation of people who had their tax dollars deferred, but saw no benefit when they retired? In a post-fact world, I'm not convinced that the people will take action against such a thing.
  - eric_h 10y ago
    The fact that "post-fact world" is even a thing is frightening.
    - weaksauce 10y ago
      The fact that "post-truth" was picked as the word of the year for 2016 is very frightening.
      - grzm 10y ago
        Citation? Edited to add: /s
        weaksauce 10y ago
        sure: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/post-truth-named-2016-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/po... and https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...
kordless 10y ago
These people are in dissonance and don't understand they need to do the work to get out of it because it's too damn easy to get the work for free off the Internet. Those who know better, do better.
ttflee 10y ago
For people in China where Facebook is not accessible, however, the same things happen in WeChat, especially in its Moments timeline which more or less resembles the one from Facebook. Fake `news', rumors, (unreliable) hints for health/food and click-baits are just more than popular. WeChat did provide a process to flag inappropriate articles, but people around the age of my parents just won't stop forwarding.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  I keep thinking China is right to block Facebook, but you're right they have their own implementation of the problem anyway.
- kebinappies 10y ago
  The flag can only stop a small amount of them. The real problem is that people unaware that they are reading fake news and share them to more and more people. This is doing a lot of harm.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
Sounds like a problem with your friends, not Facebook.
- lbebber 10y ago
  Not at all, unless he has 16.000 friends.
Johnny555 10y ago
I've been "unfriended" more than once for doing this -- people don't like being called out for spreading fake news, especially when the fake news supports their own personal worldview.
pixelcloud 10y ago
You assume people ever cared about facts. People are more emotional than they are rational when it comes to things that are outside of their control. While someone might be perfectly rational and logical in their life (e.g. they pay their taxes, they go to work, they make smart choices in their day to day lives), when it comes to things that are outside of our control (politics, economy, death, etc). We have always been pretty irrational and easy to manipulate.
- aswanson 10y ago
  Feelings don't care about your facts. It's actually amazing that a breed of primates made it this far when you consider how irrational we really are with regard to so many things: who we cede power to, how we judge truth and falsity, etc.
  - flukus 10y ago
    We didn't get this far despite our irrationality, we got this far because of it.
    - cghendrix 10y ago
      Interesting. Care to elaborate?
      - flukus 10y ago
        We're here, so there was some advantage to our irrationality. Hating outsiders helps our children survive for example. I'd argue a lot of our best inventions required a certain amount of irrationality to create.
        steve_b 10y ago
        I think you may be begging the question. You might be right that we're here because of our irrationality, but using your conclusion as its own argument isn't very convincing.
prawn 10y ago
It's come down to "the end justifies the means". And I'm not sure there's a way to stop it given the core buttons being pushed: confirming bias, bringing audiences to companies, giving people attention. Facebook could probably give people a public rating based on the accuracy of the information they shared, and shame the worst offenders, but neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established. I don't like the idea that you can play a straight bat but be overrun by hustlers.
- tottenhm 10y ago
  > neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established. I'm on the fence about that one. On the flip-side: 1. If they don't police it, then Facebook as a whole gets a reputation for disinformation. (When I look at Facebook, I personally ignore most shared articles because they're mostly crap, and I don't want to look at them. I only care about the personal goings-on of friends, and the signal-to-noise gets worse over time.) 2. If you take someone who doesn't care about truth, they're not going to introspectively seek-out a metric which might report "You're misinformed and stupid!" BUT If you're self-righteous about the truth, then you might want some objective metrics which say, "Look I don't spread misinformation or live in an echo chamber! But Cheryl does! Look, Cheryl, I'm smarter than you!" That might provide some basis for a viral dynamic.
  - prawn 10y ago
    True on the latter. A bit like the verified tick on Twitter being a desirable thing. Social networks could open additional features for someone with a better record. Remember on your first point though that it might not be a factor for the majority of people. Can also reach people through ad networks, or social networks, etc.
aswanson 10y ago
There was a paper published about how being presented with disconfirming evidence causes people to double down on their belief in a lie if it has an emotional connection with them.
- caf 10y ago
  It would be good to see if that study can be replicated.
  - aswanson 10y ago
    "In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger." http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07...
    - caf 10y ago
      I'm aware of the studies - I remember reading of them at the time - and find them fairly convincing. It's just that since that time we've become more aware of the "replication crisis" in science generally, and it'd be nice to see independent researchers confirm Nyhan's findings.
      - aswanson 10y ago
        Anecdotally, it's replicated by several individuals I've run into (it seems to be the exceptional person that can process incoming data that conflicts with their worldview) and pretty much every other commenter has had similar experiences on this thread. Not scientific, of course...but...
- Tempest1981 10y ago
eternalban 10y ago
We don't really have an independent press anymore, and blog-sphere can be trivially gamed by interested and powerful actors. Have we as a civilization ever witnessed such a pervasive disinformation culture? I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not. So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us. (Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.) [1]: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushner-really-want http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushn... That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. I think a lot of people develop acceptance of fake news from their camp because they just assume the other camp is doing it as well and see it as leveling the playing field.
- DougN7 10y ago
  When I put on my rose-colored glasses and look back at the past (1950s??) it seems that lying was very much looked down upon. Not so much any more. Seems like it's 'anything goes that you can get away with'. Is this because we're not teaching ethics in school? Decline in churches? Apathy from feeling helpless?
ern 10y ago
I am using a standard line "It's fake. In general you should consider anything you see on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp or the Internet to be false by default." Engaging in refuting online garbage constantly is a painful waste of time, and keeping silent or blocking it just allows it to fester. I'm hoping that this makes a difference, and I've used a trivial and non-threatening example of fakery (fake supermoon pics) to plant the idea that nothing online can be trusted, within my social circles.
- Theodores 10y ago
  I should add to the Urban Dictionary 'Is that a Facebook joke? - said in response to any sub-par attempt at humour.' This is my standard line for those that spend too long on Facebook and believe that nothing in the mainstream media should be read under any circumstances whatsoever lest the propaganda lead to brainwashing. My snarky response to someone's effort at being funny by repeating some drivel they read on one of their friend's pages is a bit miserable but it condenses everything I feel about how Facebook is a waste of time and quite dangerous for one's personality makeup. There is no need to have the discussion about why I am not on such things, opportunities arise for me to use the 'Is that a Facebook joke?' expression of sentiment.
bradballer 10y ago
I have the same experience as you. Most people just don't care and they only care about the topics that they can talk to their friends, without researching for even a bit to prove it.
kebinappies 10y ago
It's time for startup to develop a Chrome Extension to detect fake news on Facebook.
- peterkshultz 10y ago
  I've thought the same thing, but the people interested in using such an extension would get their news from places other than Facebook. Self-selection bias greatly reduces the efficacy of such an extension.
  - renaudg 10y ago
    They could get their news from Facebook too, they would just more likely subscribe to more reputable pages and have less hoax-sharing friends.
    - mmariani 10y ago
      Then they would claim that reputable sources too are biased against their beliefs and they'll come up with their reputable sources. Paranoia is some people nurse and profit from—unfortunately.
- amelius 10y ago
  I think it is time for Facebook to develop the "thumb down" button, or some other way to flag fake news.
- wojt_eu 10y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bs-detector/dlcgkekjiopopabcifhebmphmfmdbjod https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bs-detector/dlcgke...
  - throwaway101416 10y ago
    It has to be per story without party bias. It's a really hard problem to solve.
agumonkey 10y ago
So the average people mostly wants to live in a reinforcing bias, and not "truth" ?
malthaus 10y ago
Are they changing their mind based on those news? I assume those kind of people don't read news to educate themselves, they use 'news' to confirm the beliefs & thoughts they already have and will likely never change.
tempestn 10y ago
Check out the most recent Last Week tonight. Features clips of President Elect Trump making almost identical comments. In March he claimed a man who rushed the stage at one of his rallies had ties to ISIS. When confronted with the fact that the source he'd linked to was a hoax, his response was, "What do I know about it? All I know is it was on the internet." [1] Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly: Bill: "You tweeted out that whites killed by blacks - these are statistics you picked up from somewhere - at a rate of 81%. That's totally wrong; whites killed by blacks at a rate of 15%." Trump: "Hey Bill. Am I going to check every statistic? I've got millions of people... you know what? Fine. But this came out of radio shows and everything else." Anyway, worth watching the whole show. It's funny, in a painful way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s
- lake99 10y ago
  This extreme partisanship is one of the reasons I'm wary of John Oliver. For example, Politifact, despite its biases or subjectivity, has documented examples of practically every major politian making untrue statements. Including the current POTUS. We need a systemic approach to dealing with lies and untruths of the people who weild power. If you make it partisan, the liar/politican will just block you out, and so will their followers.
  - leonroy 10y ago
    John Oliver clearly has a political leaning but I don't believe he states anything untrue as fact.
    - lake99 10y ago
      That was not my point. Where exactly did I say he does that? He commits glaring omissions in favour of the people on his side.
      - 10y ago
bhrgunatha 10y ago
post-truth is the OED's word of the year. "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...
apatters 10y ago
If you get angry enough or you feel threatened enough the facts don't matter, all that matters is winning. America went from a melting pot to a tossed salad to a powder keg.
js2 10y ago
From "How politics makes us stupid": Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse. Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. … "Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...
BlackjackCF 10y ago
People will almost always take the shortcut/easiest way out. Facebook for news = the fastest way to get news. Doesn't mean it's going to be accurate, but do people care? Apparently not.

dragonwriter 10y ago

Note that when confronted about false stories (which were sourced from white aupremacist propaganda) he retweeted, the President-elect, while still a candidate, responded fairly similarly, so, yeah, it's definitely an attitude that is becoming quite normalized.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
It's that combined with the echo chamber effect of their algorithms. I've watched a diverse group of smart and average people across political spectrum this election. Most of them consistently shared unsubstantiated claims or biased media. As expected, their media was always presenting evidence for their side and agsinst the other. Corporate media always did that for maximizing ratings and ad impressions. However, there's a difference. People often had these discussions face to face with other views visible or at least some consequences for bullshitting. Now, the like-minded naturally group together with Facebook making the others (esp moderates) largely disappear from the feed. Showing them what they wanted to see with convenience of scrolling past opposing beliefs reinforced the echo chambers and false beliefs. That few counterpoints are displayed reinforces it further by creating illusion of false consensus for their side. All the resulting upvotes and shares reinforce the algorithm's effect. I speculate such things are why the divide seemed so much stronger in this election than before. They need to bump into each other more for the necessary conversations to occur. The tech increases isolation instead. The effects will only get worse over time.
- grzm 10y ago
  It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments as they're doing nothing to reinforce the polarization, anger, and frustration we find so vital to drive engagement, page views, clicks, and time on site. "The effects will only get worse over time." I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. My imagination (and knowledge of history) are too limited. Anyone have some good examples? Or know of projects that are working on similar topics?
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments" Lol. Believe me, a few people on social media agreed and I can't see their stuff any more. ;) "I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. " Similarly having a hard time. This particular one got reversed temporarily each time new mediums were invented. Then, the people using such tactics mastered them for the new mediums. Helps when the start rolling in money then use it to ensure the dominance. The social media has more potential to counter this than ever if they just adjust the algorithm to bridge the groups a certain percentage of time. They can mostly create a comfortable experience for the ad revenue but should make sure articles citing at least half-ass sources float into opposing feeds while letting bullshit stuff Snopes counters fall lower. That simple change, applied to everyone, might have a significant effect on the situation at least for moderates or rational people likely to effect change.
hogrammer 10y ago
The Democrats are just as bad. Hillary opened the first debate with the false news that women only make 73 cents for every dollar men make. The Left also insists that 1 in 4 women are raped in college, and that a massive international sex-Slave business accompanies every Super Bowl.
jbkrule 10y ago
Just wondering, was this sentence intentionally written in an extremely complicated way? It took me a while to figure out what it was saying.
- croon 10y ago
  6 commas in one sentence is indeed a lot. I'm still unsure what it means.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  No, that's pretty typical of my writing that isn't edited down. Usually, even for HN comments, I'm a little better at editing before anyone else sees it, though.

spenvo 10y ago

It's not just on Facebook. I have a close family member who was genuinely excited by Assange insinuating Clinton's camp murdered a DNC staffer (without offering any proof to that effect), simply because it would lower her chances of winning.

pryce 10y ago
Just from a cultural perspective, I feel like worldwide we are again celebrating that "my team at all costs!" mentality that was so prominent during the 1980s. This is not to say that the opinion landscape in other decades didn't have problems; but they were somewhat different in nature.
- distances 10y ago
  I was a bit young in the 1980s -- do you mean the capitalism vs. communism divide, or something else?

hammock 10y ago

I don't really go on Facebook. Can you give an example of the type of fake news story you're talking about?

JacobJans 10y ago
Here's a classic example, though the original website is down, so I linked to the Facebook Debug tool: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwtoe5news.com%2Fus-election%2Fpope-francis-shocks-world-endorses-donald-trump-for-president-releases-statement%2F https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%...
- appleflaxen 10y ago
  Did you notice that you are replying to a person with no facebook account to a link that requires a facebook login to view? Maybe that's unavoidable, given the topic, but it's not visible without logging in.
- takeda 10y ago
  Is there a way to take maybe a screenshot for people who don't use facebook?
  - JacobJans 10y ago
    https://s13.postimg.org/f09sy4vgn/Screen_Shot_2016_11_16_at_7_26_21_PM.png https://s13.postimg.org/f09sy4vgn/Screen_Shot_2016_11_16_at_...
    - takeda 10y ago
      Thank you. Wow, politics do lie, but Trump took it to a new level. Seems like this will be a new standard from now on.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]

sparkzilla 10y ago

My site, Newslines, addresses the fake news problem in a simple way. Our objective over the next few years is to create a news search engine by summarising all of the world's news into timelines. All of the news our crowdsourced team summarises goes through an editorial check before it is posted to the site, so it is extremely difficult to put fake news on the site. During the summarization process we also strip out all the commentary and bias, resulting in what we hope will be an unbiased news archive of the topic. We have had good results so far, for example, our newsline of "Mattress Girl" [1] is the most unbiased account of her case on the web, despite being curated made from exceptionally biased sources. If you like what we are doing please join us. [1]http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/ http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/

codyb 10y ago

Had the same thing happen where I pointed out something was false to an acquaintance who shares frequently and he said "well we each play our part, thankfully there are people like you" or something to that affect. The idea that it was my job to screen the bullshit... I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed.

icpmacdo 10y ago
>I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed. Same. Now its just a messaging platform now, its great
- renaudg 10y ago
  Ever tried messenger.com ?
  - icpmacdo 10y ago
    Yes. Rarely ever visit facebook.com . Unfollowed everyone before they released messenger.com but now use that primarily. The only other benefit of FB now is party invitations.

JoshMnem 10y ago

I've had similar experiences on Facebook. Facts don't matter. Even when linking to proof that something is fake news, the fake news doesn't get removed or addressed. This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...

edgyswingset 10y ago
This has me deeply, deeply concerned. The election is one thing, but what happens if/when elected officials start screwing with something like Social Security, resulting in a generation of people who had their tax dollars deferred, but saw no benefit when they retired? In a post-fact world, I'm not convinced that the people will take action against such a thing.
- eric_h 10y ago
  The fact that "post-fact world" is even a thing is frightening.
  - weaksauce 10y ago
    The fact that "post-truth" was picked as the word of the year for 2016 is very frightening.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Citation? Edited to add: /s
      - weaksauce 10y ago
        sure: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/post-truth-named-2016-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/po... and https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

kordless 10y ago

These people are in dissonance and don't understand they need to do the work to get out of it because it's too damn easy to get the work for free off the Internet. Those who know better, do better.

ttflee 10y ago

For people in China where Facebook is not accessible, however, the same things happen in WeChat, especially in its Moments timeline which more or less resembles the one from Facebook. Fake `news', rumors, (unreliable) hints for health/food and click-baits are just more than popular. WeChat did provide a process to flag inappropriate articles, but people around the age of my parents just won't stop forwarding.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
I keep thinking China is right to block Facebook, but you're right they have their own implementation of the problem anyway.
kebinappies 10y ago
The flag can only stop a small amount of them. The real problem is that people unaware that they are reading fake news and share them to more and more people. This is doing a lot of harm.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

Sounds like a problem with your friends, not Facebook.

lbebber 10y ago
Not at all, unless he has 16.000 friends.

Johnny555 10y ago

I've been "unfriended" more than once for doing this -- people don't like being called out for spreading fake news, especially when the fake news supports their own personal worldview.

pixelcloud 10y ago

You assume people ever cared about facts. People are more emotional than they are rational when it comes to things that are outside of their control. While someone might be perfectly rational and logical in their life (e.g. they pay their taxes, they go to work, they make smart choices in their day to day lives), when it comes to things that are outside of our control (politics, economy, death, etc). We have always been pretty irrational and easy to manipulate.

aswanson 10y ago
Feelings don't care about your facts. It's actually amazing that a breed of primates made it this far when you consider how irrational we really are with regard to so many things: who we cede power to, how we judge truth and falsity, etc.
- flukus 10y ago
  We didn't get this far despite our irrationality, we got this far because of it.
  - cghendrix 10y ago
    Interesting. Care to elaborate?
    - flukus 10y ago
      We're here, so there was some advantage to our irrationality. Hating outsiders helps our children survive for example. I'd argue a lot of our best inventions required a certain amount of irrationality to create.
      - steve_b 10y ago
        I think you may be begging the question. You might be right that we're here because of our irrationality, but using your conclusion as its own argument isn't very convincing.

prawn 10y ago

It's come down to "the end justifies the means". And I'm not sure there's a way to stop it given the core buttons being pushed: confirming bias, bringing audiences to companies, giving people attention. Facebook could probably give people a public rating based on the accuracy of the information they shared, and shame the worst offenders, but neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established. I don't like the idea that you can play a straight bat but be overrun by hustlers.

tottenhm 10y ago
> neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established. I'm on the fence about that one. On the flip-side: 1. If they don't police it, then Facebook as a whole gets a reputation for disinformation. (When I look at Facebook, I personally ignore most shared articles because they're mostly crap, and I don't want to look at them. I only care about the personal goings-on of friends, and the signal-to-noise gets worse over time.) 2. If you take someone who doesn't care about truth, they're not going to introspectively seek-out a metric which might report "You're misinformed and stupid!" BUT If you're self-righteous about the truth, then you might want some objective metrics which say, "Look I don't spread misinformation or live in an echo chamber! But Cheryl does! Look, Cheryl, I'm smarter than you!" That might provide some basis for a viral dynamic.
- prawn 10y ago
  True on the latter. A bit like the verified tick on Twitter being a desirable thing. Social networks could open additional features for someone with a better record. Remember on your first point though that it might not be a factor for the majority of people. Can also reach people through ad networks, or social networks, etc.

aswanson 10y ago

There was a paper published about how being presented with disconfirming evidence causes people to double down on their belief in a lie if it has an emotional connection with them.

caf 10y ago
It would be good to see if that study can be replicated.
- aswanson 10y ago
  "In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger." http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07...
  - caf 10y ago
    I'm aware of the studies - I remember reading of them at the time - and find them fairly convincing. It's just that since that time we've become more aware of the "replication crisis" in science generally, and it'd be nice to see independent researchers confirm Nyhan's findings.
    - aswanson 10y ago
      Anecdotally, it's replicated by several individuals I've run into (it seems to be the exceptional person that can process incoming data that conflicts with their worldview) and pretty much every other commenter has had similar experiences on this thread. Not scientific, of course...but...
Tempest1981 10y ago

eternalban 10y ago

We don't really have an independent press anymore, and blog-sphere can be trivially gamed by interested and powerful actors. Have we as a civilization ever witnessed such a pervasive disinformation culture? I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not. So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us. (Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.) [1]: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushner-really-want http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushn... That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. I think a lot of people develop acceptance of fake news from their camp because they just assume the other camp is doing it as well and see it as leveling the playing field.
DougN7 10y ago
When I put on my rose-colored glasses and look back at the past (1950s??) it seems that lying was very much looked down upon. Not so much any more. Seems like it's 'anything goes that you can get away with'. Is this because we're not teaching ethics in school? Decline in churches? Apathy from feeling helpless?

ern 10y ago

I am using a standard line "It's fake. In general you should consider anything you see on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp or the Internet to be false by default." Engaging in refuting online garbage constantly is a painful waste of time, and keeping silent or blocking it just allows it to fester. I'm hoping that this makes a difference, and I've used a trivial and non-threatening example of fakery (fake supermoon pics) to plant the idea that nothing online can be trusted, within my social circles.

Theodores 10y ago
I should add to the Urban Dictionary 'Is that a Facebook joke? - said in response to any sub-par attempt at humour.' This is my standard line for those that spend too long on Facebook and believe that nothing in the mainstream media should be read under any circumstances whatsoever lest the propaganda lead to brainwashing. My snarky response to someone's effort at being funny by repeating some drivel they read on one of their friend's pages is a bit miserable but it condenses everything I feel about how Facebook is a waste of time and quite dangerous for one's personality makeup. There is no need to have the discussion about why I am not on such things, opportunities arise for me to use the 'Is that a Facebook joke?' expression of sentiment.

bradballer 10y ago

I have the same experience as you. Most people just don't care and they only care about the topics that they can talk to their friends, without researching for even a bit to prove it.

kebinappies 10y ago

It's time for startup to develop a Chrome Extension to detect fake news on Facebook.

peterkshultz 10y ago
I've thought the same thing, but the people interested in using such an extension would get their news from places other than Facebook. Self-selection bias greatly reduces the efficacy of such an extension.
- renaudg 10y ago
  They could get their news from Facebook too, they would just more likely subscribe to more reputable pages and have less hoax-sharing friends.
  - mmariani 10y ago
    Then they would claim that reputable sources too are biased against their beliefs and they'll come up with their reputable sources. Paranoia is some people nurse and profit from—unfortunately.
amelius 10y ago
I think it is time for Facebook to develop the "thumb down" button, or some other way to flag fake news.
wojt_eu 10y ago
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bs-detector/dlcgkekjiopopabcifhebmphmfmdbjod https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bs-detector/dlcgke...
- throwaway101416 10y ago
  It has to be per story without party bias. It's a really hard problem to solve.

agumonkey 10y ago

So the average people mostly wants to live in a reinforcing bias, and not "truth" ?

malthaus 10y ago

Are they changing their mind based on those news? I assume those kind of people don't read news to educate themselves, they use 'news' to confirm the beliefs & thoughts they already have and will likely never change.

tempestn 10y ago

Check out the most recent Last Week tonight. Features clips of President Elect Trump making almost identical comments. In March he claimed a man who rushed the stage at one of his rallies had ties to ISIS. When confronted with the fact that the source he'd linked to was a hoax, his response was, "What do I know about it? All I know is it was on the internet." [1] Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly: Bill: "You tweeted out that whites killed by blacks - these are statistics you picked up from somewhere - at a rate of 81%. That's totally wrong; whites killed by blacks at a rate of 15%." Trump: "Hey Bill. Am I going to check every statistic? I've got millions of people... you know what? Fine. But this came out of radio shows and everything else." Anyway, worth watching the whole show. It's funny, in a painful way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s

lake99 10y ago
This extreme partisanship is one of the reasons I'm wary of John Oliver. For example, Politifact, despite its biases or subjectivity, has documented examples of practically every major politian making untrue statements. Including the current POTUS. We need a systemic approach to dealing with lies and untruths of the people who weild power. If you make it partisan, the liar/politican will just block you out, and so will their followers.
- leonroy 10y ago
  John Oliver clearly has a political leaning but I don't believe he states anything untrue as fact.
  - lake99 10y ago
    That was not my point. Where exactly did I say he does that? He commits glaring omissions in favour of the people on his side.
    - 10y ago

bhrgunatha 10y ago

post-truth is the OED's word of the year. "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

apatters 10y ago

If you get angry enough or you feel threatened enough the facts don't matter, all that matters is winning. America went from a melting pot to a tossed salad to a powder keg.

js2 10y ago

From "How politics makes us stupid": Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse. Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. … "Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...

BlackjackCF 10y ago

People will almost always take the shortcut/easiest way out. Facebook for news = the fastest way to get news. Doesn't mean it's going to be accurate, but do people care? Apparently not.