16 ms·

Fake News on Facebook? In Foreign Elections, That’s Not New

139 points by dragonbonheur 10y ago

adnzzzzZ 10y ago
Maybe people wouldn't believe fake news if there were any respectable legacy media outlets left. When the media does everything it can to slowly erode trust (http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...), it's no surprise that things like this will happen. And I find it funny how legacy media now turns the blame on Facebook instead of looking at itself and changing its behavior. This is such a bad move (as expected by people who don't know what they're doing) that will only empower alternative media even more and further diminish the legacy media's influence over people.
- hartator 10y ago
  Yes, it's new narrative that has been pushed. It's not like the NYTimes was saying wikileaks was a Russian cover up for the past month. Without any real proofs. Now, the issue is stupid people reading fake news, without anything to back it off. Next week will be something else, we get it. Probably for "fake news", they don't have to look far.
  - Natsu 10y ago
    It's silly to say the emails are fake. Many of them can be corroborated and a lot of them are authenticated with DKIM from Google's servers. Donna Brazille embarrassed herself by saying that message was altered, the DKIM hash quite clearly covered the message body.
- panic 10y ago
  When people expect to get news for free on the web, it's hard to see how quality journalism can survive.
  - brookside 10y ago
    Exactly, some people here start melting down when a lightly paywalled WSJ link is posted.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - visarga 10y ago
    Maybe it's better to learn to deal with fake news, in this hyperconnected society. The old days of paper news and TV are long gone. Every politician I know has a FB and Twitter accounts from where they emit their bullshit. They make videos and post them online. That's why we don't need press conferences and coverage any more. And news can't be paywalled any more because anyone can write about anything, including rewording articles from other sources. The problem with FaceBook is that it is built in such a way as to create a separate view into the network for each person. By contrast, on reddit, everyone sees everything and debates anyone in comments, not just their friends. So the bubbling effect is much more pronounced on FB. People form cliques that drink their own kool-aid. Maybe some basic journalistic notions should be taught in primary school and high school. How to separate BS from news and how to report on events. If we are to be self-styled journalists, then at least we should learn about it.
    - karmelapple 10y ago
      Every time we click Share or Post, we are a journalist. I think training in this new world to help everyone be a responsible social media journalist would greatly benefit society.
    - qznc 10y ago
      Angela Merkel does not have a Twitter account and you probably know her. You only get official news from the spokesman @RegSprecher. She does not write personally on any social media.
  - lambertsimnel 10y ago
    I suppose there might be two problems with free news: insufficient funding and strings-attached funding. I'm not sure that free news is worse than news for a fee in these respects. I get my news from ad-funded, donor-funded and tax-funded sources. None of these is perfect, but is news provided to readers/listeners/viewers for an access-fee better, or does it tell people what they want to hear? It's also worth considering the respected print publications that get revenue both directly from readers and from advertising. My understanding is that they typically get more revenue from advertising, so are they really better than free news? All the ad-free news I know of is also free-of-charge.
- karmelapple 10y ago
  > When the media does everything it can to slowly erode trust Your link provides nothing to support that comment. Your link does clearly show people's trust in the media is extremely low, but it makes no claims as to why the trust has eroded. There have certainly been times when various media parties have not lived up to their ethical duties, but to say blanket that the media has "done everything it can to slowly erode trust" seems exaggerated. Do you think political party rhetoric can erode trust in the media? One presidential candidate regularly claimed reports about him from one specific media outlet were lies, although they have turned out to be usually true [1]. One presidential candidate made claims during the debates that he did not say things which, simply, he did. The claims he denied making were well-documented on the internet, frequently from his own social media account. Is it unreasonable to think this rhetoric had some effect on the big drop in mass media trust from supporters of that political party, documented in the gallup.com link you posted? And would you have recommendations for ways "the media" to gain back that trust? Note that I take issue with the phrase "the media", since it's another unhelpful blanket statement. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/donald-trumps-gripes-about-the-new-york-times-are-usually-about-stories-that-are-shown-to-be-accurate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/do...
  - adnzzzzZ 10y ago
    >One presidential candidate The other presidential candidate has been shown to be colluding multiple times with various media outlets, while they don't fairly report on that collusion. I think things like that erode people's trust in media.
    - karmelapple 10y ago
      > The other presidential candidate has been shown to be colluding multiple times with various media outlets That appears to be true, too - I agree! So we've identified two causes of eroding media trust. I'd be curious if any research has been done on what erodes trust more: authority criticizing it, muckraking journalism (no pejorative implied there - muckraking is a good thing to expose corruption!), or other things yet. The huge amount of fake news in people's social media has certainly had some kind of impact on people's trust of news sources in general, too. I am most interested in how to combat that; simply doing good work won't necessarily bring a media outlet the attention it needs to stay in business these days. Incentives in journalism are currently pretty out of whack.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- goalieca 10y ago
  There are still lots of good old fashioned reporting going on. I have no idea what you're getting at!?
micaksica 10y ago
The problem with journalism and media today is that the fierce streak of journalistic independence is long, long gone; media outposts have become too connected, too hungry at the teat of the powerful for any scoop at all now that they do not have regional monopolies on information. Because of the supply of content outlets - blogs, newspapers, magazines, what have you - the power has shifted back to those that have the information in the first place. It does not matter the industry. If you are a unicorn tech startup, you build relationships with journalists that give you positive reviews, and shun those that do not -- because there are enough to go around and still get your message out, and the journos are hungry for pageviews. The same goes for CEOs and "confidential sources" on Wall Street or Main Street, or politicians gravitating toward CNN or Fox News, or respective anchors that paint them positively that ensnare the audiences they are targeting. It is the way modern PR works. The quantity of journalists are now the surplus, and the real scoops that generate traffic (and revenue) are scarce. Because of this economic inversion, we now have the companies running the media institutions. In a mainstream economic environment, you then have two choices: media that plays into the confirmation biases of its readership (customers) - just as NYT is doing here - or investigative journalism that is digging up heretofore unknown stories people are trying to conceal (eg The Intercept, Muckrock) to get the pageviews and therefore the ad revenue.
- karmelapple 10y ago
  Also, what is the incentive to scoop in today's media climate? If one news outlet breaks a story - even if it's a multi-month, highly-researched think piece - every other website will quickly summarize it and provide one link back to it. The link back is at least citing the source, but the summary is likely good enough for most users, and the originating news outlet gets no ad revenue if the reader only reads the summary. How can we shift that incentive?
  - lambertsimnel 10y ago
    Be careful about shifting the incentive. One way to get scoops is to cozy up to news makers, who are typically powerful people and often politicians in government.
  - 10y ago
gragas 10y ago
Will the Times ever produce objective political journalism again? Or has it just forever devolved into how can we pin this on the other side?
- dfabulich 10y ago
  How would you know if it turned out that they were already objective?
  - LordHumungous 10y ago
    The term "biased" should be discarded, people just use it to mean "publishes things I don't agree with".
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      Good point. I think there are some sources where it is defined in a more rigorous manner, Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent book is one example I like. They tried as much as possible to document bias in reporting for similar instances in corporate controlled media in US. There are a series of well documented cases. In conversation, I agree, the term "bias" when it comes to news means "doesn't say things I like"
kneel 10y ago
I'm really curious how long NYTimes will keep their paywall down. They announced that they would take down the paywall for 72 hours leading up to the election, they haven't put it back up since. I would guess their eroding relationship with anything Whitehouse and the potential rise of Breitbart is causing panic.
- micaksica 10y ago
  The paywall is back up for me at this point.
  - kneel 10y ago
    That's interesting. I've been checking it for days now on all my devices, work and home. No paywall.
- grzm 10y ago
  Has it not been up or perhaps you just haven't hit the limit since it's been put back in place? Isn't it 10 articles or so a month?
  - kneel 10y ago
    I've been reading it everyday for hours (its free!) for the last week. No paywall.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Enjoy it while it lasts! (Or am I supposed to say "Why are you reading the NYT anyway?" ;) )
rdtsc 10y ago
I think "Fake News" is a boogey-man rationalization for what happened. "Half of the country voted for someone else. Not someone I liked. I am baffled. What happened? Because they read about lizard people or how Obama was born in Africa" or, the officially sanctioned response: "Because of those pesky KGB agents hiding in the bushes". That is the easiest rationalization and one which leads to least cognitive dissonance and one in which the other side is completely demonized or idioticized. All those working men and women from PA and MI who before voted for the "right party" almost religiously for years, all of the sudden have been brainwashed by sneaky foreigners to believe in lizard people, they are all now white supremacists and like Hitler (nevermind they voted for Obama just a few years ago), and will also use gays for target practice.
- chis 10y ago
  Yeah, it was interesting seeing Rachel Maddow jump from "3rd party voting screwed us" to "down with the electoral college" and now it's somehow all about Facebook clickbait. This one seems like the narrative most likely to catch on.
  - megalox 10y ago
    There are a number of contributing factors to the outcome. As such, it is reasonable to expect a number of different conversations.
- flukus 10y ago
  It's not even a new problem in any case. There were all sorts of crazy conspiracy magazines in every newsagent long before the internet existed. "Respectable" news sources have been publishing completely fictional stuff for as long as they've existed too.
  - karmelapple 10y ago
    There is a rash of outlets turning out completely fake news with inflammatory, baiting headlines, which can be more easily shared now than ever before. This problem is undoubtedly different than if some newspapers in one town or city publishing wrong information; then it was contained to a geographic area, but that's no longer the case with electronic media.
known 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
JanneVee 10y ago
Who would have thunk? By feeding into biases and helping them resolving their cognitive dissonance for ad dollars is unhealthy for politics.
mr_bluesky 10y ago
Fake news - not just on Facebook. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
colllectorof 10y ago
This article is fake "news" (or "coverage") in its own right. Its main purpose is anchoring[1] the reader. It attempts to impress the notions that fake information on Facebook is a significant factor in politics. Conveniently, it's published right after an American election where mainstream media like NYT took a serious blow to their credibility. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring Ask yourself the following questions. Is this article covering some specific recent event? Is there any investigative journalism involved? No and no. So what is it "informing" us about, exactly? All I see is a bunch of random stuff pulled together to promote a pre-determined meta-narrative. If you don't believe in meta-narratives, just look below the text to "Related Coverage" box on the page: STATE OF THE ART Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power NOV. 16, 2016 Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites NOV. 14, 2016 Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence NOV. 12, 2016 The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day NOV. 8, 2016 This is what high-grade propaganda looks like. It doesn't use outright lies, but rather relies on reframing, anchoring, deliberate name-dropping and rote repetition to establish certain associations and emotional responses. I find it infinitely more sinister than some outrageous bullshit appearing on Facebook. And it's disconcerting to see just how hard some outlets try to (morally if not otherwise) discredit the outcome of the elections right now. NYT is actually not the worst in this regard. Just open the home pages of Washington Post or The Atlantic. Political FUD stacked on top of more political FUD. Maybe I have a memory lapse, but I've never seen anything quite like it.
- dmitrij 10y ago
  I understand the frustration of journalists from news organisations completely. They are held to a high standard, having to fact check every detail and get hell for being wrong (which naturally occurs). Along come people who simply invent facts, and nobody seems to care. And: putting everything into the perspective of a big media conspiracy doesn't help the public discourse at all.
  - ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
    Get hell for being wrong? All the same journalists who pushed for the Iraq war on false intelligence are still there at their jobs doing the same crap. There are zero consequences when "mainstream" journalists push fake news.
Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
"Even in long-established democracies like Germany, Spain and Italy, false news reports and hate speech on social media have whipped up grass-roots populist movements, which have often targeted the recent influx of Middle Eastern refugees, to garner wider electoral support." I'm from Spain and I haven't seen such a thing. To be precise: in Spain the movement that is typically called "populist" by the establishment is Podemos, which by the way is pro-refugees, and fake news have been widely disseminated (originating in conventional media, although being distributed in social media too) to discredit them. In fact they have won several lawsuits in the courts against newspapers that published absolutely made up news about supposed illegal funding, etc. (but who cares about the lawsuits and meager compensations they get, once the information has been publicized, the damage is done). I haven't seen any "pro-populist" fake news circulating around, though. The establishment parties have so many open corruption scandals that there is no need of any fake to discredit them. As always, journalists make up whatever they need to go on with their "good vs. evil" narrative where everything the establishment doesn't like is "populist". And then the blame is on social networks...
- mxfh 10y ago
  At least in Germany the whole AfD-Pegida-komplex had significant backing and media support from foreign sources, namely Russia and Switzerland. It's the "when they go low, we go high" fallacy that will cost more elections to moderates. If it's free for all psyops out there, the non-authoritarians need a emotional-demagogue front-outlet too. If bot's and brigades are one-sidedly spamming controversial twitter hashtag or or comment sections it's an inflation of their presence. Hashtags are useless for anybody who wants to hear a plurality of opinions these days. As long as social media is so easy to exploit by organized actors at marginal costs, it's worse than no social media at all. If a channel is brigaded and spammed by one party it should be spammed by all, some sort of MAD-strategy might be needed, to get past the current status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
jister 10y ago
Duterte and Philippines were mentioned in the article. Yes that is true that there were many fake news in facebook during election and until now. In fact, there are sponsored FB pages posting fake and exagerated news about Duterte now. Aside from facebook we also have mainstream media that are publishing unverified or poorly written news all the time namely ABS-CBN, Inquirer and Rappler. These medias are owned by Liberal Party supporters. New York Times gets their news from these presstitutes all the time. I know because I've read several news/articles from NYT that were just pure BS. Up to this day our news here are manipulated by Liberal Party -- they are the people that runs and plundered the Philippines after the martial law in 1986. Yes they are the same people that lost all the perks of corruption and drugs when Duterte was elected and would want to do anything to impeach him. So what's your country's excuse of having fake news?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tomohawk 10y ago
A lot of the news this election was fake. https://sharylattkisson.com/newsgate-2016/ https://sharylattkisson.com/newsgate-2016/
- cpr 10y ago
  Why is this getting downvoted? Can you provide counter-arguments to her very strong case?
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    The "downvote and run" actually exemplifies some of the points expressed. Quickly dismissing opposite opinions, paint it all as influenced by "Fake News", throwing labels like "racists", "sexists" around is part of the issue at hand I think. Interestingly, one would expect people here (or I would dare say liberal in general) to be the more educated ones, with better self control, more rational and local approaches to issues and so on. One thing this election has shown is that it is not necessarily the case.
    - grzm 10y ago
      It'd be great to see better self control across the board, though HN does seem better in that regard than some communities. When emotions get high and people sometimes hit submit before they've really thought through the content, phrasing, or tone of what they're posting, or down voting, or flagging. We're all human. I've seen "down vote and run" on all kinds of comments, and I suspect for all kinds of reasons. throwaway accounts used for drive-by attacks look like they're allied with no one party as well.
      - rdtsc 10y ago
        > though HN does seem better in that regard than some communities. Agreed. That's why I like to comment here even though the topic at hand is not necessarily technical. In other places it just turns into an mess much quicker.
mikebay 10y ago
Twitter, Facebook and Google. All push this same agenda. They are the most corrupted organizations. They feel they can suppress, hide and delete your online profiles when they feel that you or your organization is not following they nwo agenda. Latest twitter censorship quiter is James Woods.
Chinjut 10y ago
All the handwringing over fake news on the Internet prompts within me two negative, dismissive reactions: The first is that this is just a convenient scapegoat to avoid examining the failures of the Democratic Party in this election cycle. They can't have screwed up. Must have been FAKE NEWS which misled voters into erroneously not voting for them. Fix that and fix the problem. Fine, whatever. Pin the blame there if you like. But… My second reaction is that I think among what we are inclined to think of as "fake news", very little is actually outright brute falsehoods. Such things as are actually libelous or fraudulent, perhaps they should be blocked, or dealt with in some manner. But most of what is shared is, I imagine, rather "fake news" in the sense of being ideologically shaded in a manner we find ridiculous. "Immigrants are going to murder your children", that sort of thing. And this stuff IS ridiculous, and false, and terrible… But not in a clear, mechanical, bright-line distinguishable way. It's wrong because it's wrong, not because there's something for a fact-checker to point at. And if we do put moderators in charge of deciding that such news is still clearly false and therefore not shareable, I get uncomfortable. Because the merit determination will just become "Whatever matches status quo consensus", which is just "Whatever pleases the status quo powers". It was fake news when the New York Times beat the drums for war, Judith Miller speaking of WMDs in Iraq. But that would never be classified as such. The source was prestigious, and the claims buttressed the politics of the right people. "fake" determination at any level where there is controversy would amount to simply enshrining consensus of that class of often wrong people. Indeed, I say to those liberals itching for something to be done, the same board that today puts the kibosh on articles full of conservative idiocy about global warming evidence being overblown could just as well tomorrow decide "Econ professor consensus says minimum wage hikes destroy jobs; articles arguing otherwise oughtn't be shared", or some such thing. On the other hand, if "fake news" suppression only targets articles where there is no controversy as to their falsehood, then it is a solution in search of a significant problem. Such things exist, but did not (as far as I've yet seen any evidence to prove) play that major a role in the election. The story that fake news swung the election could itself be fake news. Anyway, that's my skittishness over cries that communication networks don't do enough to crack down on voluntary sharing of "fake news".
puranjay 10y ago
If something doesn't exist and the NYT tells you it does, doesn't that make NYT a fake news outlet as well? I'm talking about the WMDs in Iraq
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  Exactly, NYT is full of fake news. Even the NYT themselves are saying that they will "rededicate themselves to honest coverage". Nobody says that unless they are implying they were previously not pursuing honest coverage.
- udkl 10y ago
  Off-topic : Are you the puranjay from growthpub ?
  - puranjay 10y ago
    Yup!
    - udkl 10y ago
      Hey, can we connect ? I would like to understand what you do there. You can send me an email : https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=udkl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=udkl
alexmorenodev 10y ago
Funny thing is that here in Brazil this is EXTREMELY common, and people doesn't seem to care. Actually, people treat fake news as real here.
ceejay 10y ago
I have done zero research in depth on this, but one of the first (easy) things I would look at is the whois on the domains that are producing news. If they're hidden behind a proxy identity, probably unreliable. Also what about providing an inexpensive way to "verify" those whois credentials? Pay $5 and we'll send you a letter in the mail and you confirm you're the owner of the domain in question.
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
I think we need at least two guiding principles - transparency and equality for the new politics thrust upon us by the web Absolutely should facebook and google be forced to reveal their (ever changing) algorithms. In fact (cf Kathy ONeills book weapons of math destruction) inwould prefer a legal framework forcing this. But as for fake news being pushed into people's feeds, well this is a direct result of facebooks commercial desire to open up my feed to as many "friends and friends of friends" as they can. My friends don't share adverts about the Rock that lead to body building supplements - no one shares that with their friends ! That's out there as a "you might also like" Restrict Facebook to only showing what my friends actively share and guess what - no more fake news. No more Facebook billions maybe but then who cares. It's a peer to peer messaging site - it's not important really Edit: I would suggest that facebooks content would stall at the level twitters did if ones feed was driven by active sharing by ones actual nearest circle of friends. I think I would like to know more about the extent of content that appears in a feed that is not active sharing vs active - it should resemble retweets.
topbagsvk 10y ago
They are constantly sharing fake news that confirms their bias. http://www.bagsforsaleok.com/designer-handbags.html http://www.bagsforsaleok.com/designer-handbags.html
tmaly 10y ago
Categorizing what is truth with an algorithm has the potential to create a digital Fahrenheit 454
coldcode 10y ago
As Joseph Goebbels wrote in his book "The Big Lie" people will believe anything if you post it in enough places including the fact that he never wrote a book called "The Big Lie".
jopython 10y ago
Most of the fake news sites listed are conservative. Don't believe the leftist propaganda.
erikb 10y ago
What means "foreign" in this context? I mean US elections shouldn't be considered foreign by a US newspaper like the New York Times.
alarik33 10y ago
I personally blame the New York Times as much as anyone for the results of the election. For the last 15 years, they've participated in the fear mongering over-reporting on extremely rare Islamic terrorism to get readers and appeal to fearful Americans who don't understand statistics and don't get told by the media just how small a threat it's always really been. The culture of irrational overblown fear of terrorism they've helped create is what created Trump, more than emails, more than fake news. Big media players like the NYT play up threats for views and wonder why people vote for strongmen fascists to protect them from the big bad Muslims.
bigyaz 10y ago
You assholes spent 8+ years promoting the racist lie that our duly elected first black president was born in Africa. You tried to delegitimize him based on nothing but his skin color. And you used fake news and dishonest, bigoted, white-supremacist web sites to do it. To pretend this is just harmless, standard politics is bullshit. Cowards are behind this crap, and you sheep eat it up.

139 points by dragonbonheur 10y ago

Maybe people wouldn't believe fake news if there were any respectable legacy media outlets left. When the media does everything it can to slowly erode trust (http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...), it's no surprise that things like this will happen. And I find it funny how legacy media now turns the blame on Facebook instead of looking at itself and changing its behavior. This is such a bad move (as expected by people who don't know what they're doing) that will only empower alternative media even more and further diminish the legacy media's influence over people.

hartator 10y ago
Yes, it's new narrative that has been pushed. It's not like the NYTimes was saying wikileaks was a Russian cover up for the past month. Without any real proofs. Now, the issue is stupid people reading fake news, without anything to back it off. Next week will be something else, we get it. Probably for "fake news", they don't have to look far.
- Natsu 10y ago
  It's silly to say the emails are fake. Many of them can be corroborated and a lot of them are authenticated with DKIM from Google's servers. Donna Brazille embarrassed herself by saying that message was altered, the DKIM hash quite clearly covered the message body.
panic 10y ago
When people expect to get news for free on the web, it's hard to see how quality journalism can survive.
- brookside 10y ago
  Exactly, some people here start melting down when a lightly paywalled WSJ link is posted.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 10y ago
  Maybe it's better to learn to deal with fake news, in this hyperconnected society. The old days of paper news and TV are long gone. Every politician I know has a FB and Twitter accounts from where they emit their bullshit. They make videos and post them online. That's why we don't need press conferences and coverage any more. And news can't be paywalled any more because anyone can write about anything, including rewording articles from other sources. The problem with FaceBook is that it is built in such a way as to create a separate view into the network for each person. By contrast, on reddit, everyone sees everything and debates anyone in comments, not just their friends. So the bubbling effect is much more pronounced on FB. People form cliques that drink their own kool-aid. Maybe some basic journalistic notions should be taught in primary school and high school. How to separate BS from news and how to report on events. If we are to be self-styled journalists, then at least we should learn about it.
  - karmelapple 10y ago
    Every time we click Share or Post, we are a journalist. I think training in this new world to help everyone be a responsible social media journalist would greatly benefit society.
  - qznc 10y ago
    Angela Merkel does not have a Twitter account and you probably know her. You only get official news from the spokesman @RegSprecher. She does not write personally on any social media.
- lambertsimnel 10y ago
  I suppose there might be two problems with free news: insufficient funding and strings-attached funding. I'm not sure that free news is worse than news for a fee in these respects. I get my news from ad-funded, donor-funded and tax-funded sources. None of these is perfect, but is news provided to readers/listeners/viewers for an access-fee better, or does it tell people what they want to hear? It's also worth considering the respected print publications that get revenue both directly from readers and from advertising. My understanding is that they typically get more revenue from advertising, so are they really better than free news? All the ad-free news I know of is also free-of-charge.
karmelapple 10y ago
> When the media does everything it can to slowly erode trust Your link provides nothing to support that comment. Your link does clearly show people's trust in the media is extremely low, but it makes no claims as to why the trust has eroded. There have certainly been times when various media parties have not lived up to their ethical duties, but to say blanket that the media has "done everything it can to slowly erode trust" seems exaggerated. Do you think political party rhetoric can erode trust in the media? One presidential candidate regularly claimed reports about him from one specific media outlet were lies, although they have turned out to be usually true [1]. One presidential candidate made claims during the debates that he did not say things which, simply, he did. The claims he denied making were well-documented on the internet, frequently from his own social media account. Is it unreasonable to think this rhetoric had some effect on the big drop in mass media trust from supporters of that political party, documented in the gallup.com link you posted? And would you have recommendations for ways "the media" to gain back that trust? Note that I take issue with the phrase "the media", since it's another unhelpful blanket statement. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/donald-trumps-gripes-about-the-new-york-times-are-usually-about-stories-that-are-shown-to-be-accurate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/do...
- adnzzzzZ 10y ago
  >One presidential candidate The other presidential candidate has been shown to be colluding multiple times with various media outlets, while they don't fairly report on that collusion. I think things like that erode people's trust in media.
  - karmelapple 10y ago
    > The other presidential candidate has been shown to be colluding multiple times with various media outlets That appears to be true, too - I agree! So we've identified two causes of eroding media trust. I'd be curious if any research has been done on what erodes trust more: authority criticizing it, muckraking journalism (no pejorative implied there - muckraking is a good thing to expose corruption!), or other things yet. The huge amount of fake news in people's social media has certainly had some kind of impact on people's trust of news sources in general, too. I am most interested in how to combat that; simply doing good work won't necessarily bring a media outlet the attention it needs to stay in business these days. Incentives in journalism are currently pretty out of whack.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
goalieca 10y ago
There are still lots of good old fashioned reporting going on. I have no idea what you're getting at!?

micaksica 10y ago

The problem with journalism and media today is that the fierce streak of journalistic independence is long, long gone; media outposts have become too connected, too hungry at the teat of the powerful for any scoop at all now that they do not have regional monopolies on information. Because of the supply of content outlets - blogs, newspapers, magazines, what have you - the power has shifted back to those that have the information in the first place. It does not matter the industry. If you are a unicorn tech startup, you build relationships with journalists that give you positive reviews, and shun those that do not -- because there are enough to go around and still get your message out, and the journos are hungry for pageviews. The same goes for CEOs and "confidential sources" on Wall Street or Main Street, or politicians gravitating toward CNN or Fox News, or respective anchors that paint them positively that ensnare the audiences they are targeting. It is the way modern PR works. The quantity of journalists are now the surplus, and the real scoops that generate traffic (and revenue) are scarce. Because of this economic inversion, we now have the companies running the media institutions. In a mainstream economic environment, you then have two choices: media that plays into the confirmation biases of its readership (customers) - just as NYT is doing here - or investigative journalism that is digging up heretofore unknown stories people are trying to conceal (eg The Intercept, Muckrock) to get the pageviews and therefore the ad revenue.

karmelapple 10y ago
Also, what is the incentive to scoop in today's media climate? If one news outlet breaks a story - even if it's a multi-month, highly-researched think piece - every other website will quickly summarize it and provide one link back to it. The link back is at least citing the source, but the summary is likely good enough for most users, and the originating news outlet gets no ad revenue if the reader only reads the summary. How can we shift that incentive?
- lambertsimnel 10y ago
  Be careful about shifting the incentive. One way to get scoops is to cozy up to news makers, who are typically powerful people and often politicians in government.
- 10y ago

gragas 10y ago

Will the Times ever produce objective political journalism again? Or has it just forever devolved into how can we pin this on the other side?

dfabulich 10y ago
How would you know if it turned out that they were already objective?
- LordHumungous 10y ago
  The term "biased" should be discarded, people just use it to mean "publishes things I don't agree with".
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    Good point. I think there are some sources where it is defined in a more rigorous manner, Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent book is one example I like. They tried as much as possible to document bias in reporting for similar instances in corporate controlled media in US. There are a series of well documented cases. In conversation, I agree, the term "bias" when it comes to news means "doesn't say things I like"

kneel 10y ago

I'm really curious how long NYTimes will keep their paywall down. They announced that they would take down the paywall for 72 hours leading up to the election, they haven't put it back up since. I would guess their eroding relationship with anything Whitehouse and the potential rise of Breitbart is causing panic.

micaksica 10y ago
The paywall is back up for me at this point.
- kneel 10y ago
  That's interesting. I've been checking it for days now on all my devices, work and home. No paywall.
grzm 10y ago
Has it not been up or perhaps you just haven't hit the limit since it's been put back in place? Isn't it 10 articles or so a month?
- kneel 10y ago
  I've been reading it everyday for hours (its free!) for the last week. No paywall.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Enjoy it while it lasts! (Or am I supposed to say "Why are you reading the NYT anyway?" ;) )

rdtsc 10y ago

I think "Fake News" is a boogey-man rationalization for what happened. "Half of the country voted for someone else. Not someone I liked. I am baffled. What happened? Because they read about lizard people or how Obama was born in Africa" or, the officially sanctioned response: "Because of those pesky KGB agents hiding in the bushes". That is the easiest rationalization and one which leads to least cognitive dissonance and one in which the other side is completely demonized or idioticized. All those working men and women from PA and MI who before voted for the "right party" almost religiously for years, all of the sudden have been brainwashed by sneaky foreigners to believe in lizard people, they are all now white supremacists and like Hitler (nevermind they voted for Obama just a few years ago), and will also use gays for target practice.

chis 10y ago
Yeah, it was interesting seeing Rachel Maddow jump from "3rd party voting screwed us" to "down with the electoral college" and now it's somehow all about Facebook clickbait. This one seems like the narrative most likely to catch on.
- megalox 10y ago
  There are a number of contributing factors to the outcome. As such, it is reasonable to expect a number of different conversations.
flukus 10y ago
It's not even a new problem in any case. There were all sorts of crazy conspiracy magazines in every newsagent long before the internet existed. "Respectable" news sources have been publishing completely fictional stuff for as long as they've existed too.
- karmelapple 10y ago
  There is a rash of outlets turning out completely fake news with inflammatory, baiting headlines, which can be more easily shared now than ever before. This problem is undoubtedly different than if some newspapers in one town or city publishing wrong information; then it was contained to a geographic area, but that's no longer the case with electronic media.

known 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify

JanneVee 10y ago

Who would have thunk? By feeding into biases and helping them resolving their cognitive dissonance for ad dollars is unhealthy for politics.

mr_bluesky 10y ago

Fake news - not just on Facebook. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...

colllectorof 10y ago

This article is fake "news" (or "coverage") in its own right. Its main purpose is anchoring[1] the reader. It attempts to impress the notions that fake information on Facebook is a significant factor in politics. Conveniently, it's published right after an American election where mainstream media like NYT took a serious blow to their credibility. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring Ask yourself the following questions. Is this article covering some specific recent event? Is there any investigative journalism involved? No and no. So what is it "informing" us about, exactly? All I see is a bunch of random stuff pulled together to promote a pre-determined meta-narrative. If you don't believe in meta-narratives, just look below the text to "Related Coverage" box on the page: STATE OF THE ART Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power NOV. 16, 2016 Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites NOV. 14, 2016 Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence NOV. 12, 2016 The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day NOV. 8, 2016 This is what high-grade propaganda looks like. It doesn't use outright lies, but rather relies on reframing, anchoring, deliberate name-dropping and rote repetition to establish certain associations and emotional responses. I find it infinitely more sinister than some outrageous bullshit appearing on Facebook. And it's disconcerting to see just how hard some outlets try to (morally if not otherwise) discredit the outcome of the elections right now. NYT is actually not the worst in this regard. Just open the home pages of Washington Post or The Atlantic. Political FUD stacked on top of more political FUD. Maybe I have a memory lapse, but I've never seen anything quite like it.

dmitrij 10y ago
I understand the frustration of journalists from news organisations completely. They are held to a high standard, having to fact check every detail and get hell for being wrong (which naturally occurs). Along come people who simply invent facts, and nobody seems to care. And: putting everything into the perspective of a big media conspiracy doesn't help the public discourse at all.
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  Get hell for being wrong? All the same journalists who pushed for the Iraq war on false intelligence are still there at their jobs doing the same crap. There are zero consequences when "mainstream" journalists push fake news.

Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago

"Even in long-established democracies like Germany, Spain and Italy, false news reports and hate speech on social media have whipped up grass-roots populist movements, which have often targeted the recent influx of Middle Eastern refugees, to garner wider electoral support." I'm from Spain and I haven't seen such a thing. To be precise: in Spain the movement that is typically called "populist" by the establishment is Podemos, which by the way is pro-refugees, and fake news have been widely disseminated (originating in conventional media, although being distributed in social media too) to discredit them. In fact they have won several lawsuits in the courts against newspapers that published absolutely made up news about supposed illegal funding, etc. (but who cares about the lawsuits and meager compensations they get, once the information has been publicized, the damage is done). I haven't seen any "pro-populist" fake news circulating around, though. The establishment parties have so many open corruption scandals that there is no need of any fake to discredit them. As always, journalists make up whatever they need to go on with their "good vs. evil" narrative where everything the establishment doesn't like is "populist". And then the blame is on social networks...

mxfh 10y ago
At least in Germany the whole AfD-Pegida-komplex had significant backing and media support from foreign sources, namely Russia and Switzerland. It's the "when they go low, we go high" fallacy that will cost more elections to moderates. If it's free for all psyops out there, the non-authoritarians need a emotional-demagogue front-outlet too. If bot's and brigades are one-sidedly spamming controversial twitter hashtag or or comment sections it's an inflation of their presence. Hashtags are useless for anybody who wants to hear a plurality of opinions these days. As long as social media is so easy to exploit by organized actors at marginal costs, it's worse than no social media at all. If a channel is brigaded and spammed by one party it should be spammed by all, some sort of MAD-strategy might be needed, to get past the current status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

jister 10y ago

Duterte and Philippines were mentioned in the article. Yes that is true that there were many fake news in facebook during election and until now. In fact, there are sponsored FB pages posting fake and exagerated news about Duterte now. Aside from facebook we also have mainstream media that are publishing unverified or poorly written news all the time namely ABS-CBN, Inquirer and Rappler. These medias are owned by Liberal Party supporters. New York Times gets their news from these presstitutes all the time. I know because I've read several news/articles from NYT that were just pure BS. Up to this day our news here are manipulated by Liberal Party -- they are the people that runs and plundered the Philippines after the martial law in 1986. Yes they are the same people that lost all the perks of corruption and drugs when Duterte was elected and would want to do anything to impeach him. So what's your country's excuse of having fake news?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tomohawk 10y ago

A lot of the news this election was fake. https://sharylattkisson.com/newsgate-2016/ https://sharylattkisson.com/newsgate-2016/

cpr 10y ago
Why is this getting downvoted? Can you provide counter-arguments to her very strong case?
- rdtsc 10y ago
  The "downvote and run" actually exemplifies some of the points expressed. Quickly dismissing opposite opinions, paint it all as influenced by "Fake News", throwing labels like "racists", "sexists" around is part of the issue at hand I think. Interestingly, one would expect people here (or I would dare say liberal in general) to be the more educated ones, with better self control, more rational and local approaches to issues and so on. One thing this election has shown is that it is not necessarily the case.
  - grzm 10y ago
    It'd be great to see better self control across the board, though HN does seem better in that regard than some communities. When emotions get high and people sometimes hit submit before they've really thought through the content, phrasing, or tone of what they're posting, or down voting, or flagging. We're all human. I've seen "down vote and run" on all kinds of comments, and I suspect for all kinds of reasons. throwaway accounts used for drive-by attacks look like they're allied with no one party as well.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      > though HN does seem better in that regard than some communities. Agreed. That's why I like to comment here even though the topic at hand is not necessarily technical. In other places it just turns into an mess much quicker.

mikebay 10y ago

Twitter, Facebook and Google. All push this same agenda. They are the most corrupted organizations. They feel they can suppress, hide and delete your online profiles when they feel that you or your organization is not following they nwo agenda. Latest twitter censorship quiter is James Woods.

Chinjut 10y ago

All the handwringing over fake news on the Internet prompts within me two negative, dismissive reactions: The first is that this is just a convenient scapegoat to avoid examining the failures of the Democratic Party in this election cycle. They can't have screwed up. Must have been FAKE NEWS which misled voters into erroneously not voting for them. Fix that and fix the problem. Fine, whatever. Pin the blame there if you like. But… My second reaction is that I think among what we are inclined to think of as "fake news", very little is actually outright brute falsehoods. Such things as are actually libelous or fraudulent, perhaps they should be blocked, or dealt with in some manner. But most of what is shared is, I imagine, rather "fake news" in the sense of being ideologically shaded in a manner we find ridiculous. "Immigrants are going to murder your children", that sort of thing. And this stuff IS ridiculous, and false, and terrible… But not in a clear, mechanical, bright-line distinguishable way. It's wrong because it's wrong, not because there's something for a fact-checker to point at. And if we do put moderators in charge of deciding that such news is still clearly false and therefore not shareable, I get uncomfortable. Because the merit determination will just become "Whatever matches status quo consensus", which is just "Whatever pleases the status quo powers". It was fake news when the New York Times beat the drums for war, Judith Miller speaking of WMDs in Iraq. But that would never be classified as such. The source was prestigious, and the claims buttressed the politics of the right people. "fake" determination at any level where there is controversy would amount to simply enshrining consensus of that class of often wrong people. Indeed, I say to those liberals itching for something to be done, the same board that today puts the kibosh on articles full of conservative idiocy about global warming evidence being overblown could just as well tomorrow decide "Econ professor consensus says minimum wage hikes destroy jobs; articles arguing otherwise oughtn't be shared", or some such thing. On the other hand, if "fake news" suppression only targets articles where there is no controversy as to their falsehood, then it is a solution in search of a significant problem. Such things exist, but did not (as far as I've yet seen any evidence to prove) play that major a role in the election. The story that fake news swung the election could itself be fake news. Anyway, that's my skittishness over cries that communication networks don't do enough to crack down on voluntary sharing of "fake news".

puranjay 10y ago

If something doesn't exist and the NYT tells you it does, doesn't that make NYT a fake news outlet as well? I'm talking about the WMDs in Iraq

ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
Exactly, NYT is full of fake news. Even the NYT themselves are saying that they will "rededicate themselves to honest coverage". Nobody says that unless they are implying they were previously not pursuing honest coverage.
udkl 10y ago
Off-topic : Are you the puranjay from growthpub ?
- puranjay 10y ago
  Yup!
  - udkl 10y ago
    Hey, can we connect ? I would like to understand what you do there. You can send me an email : https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=udkl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=udkl

alexmorenodev 10y ago

Funny thing is that here in Brazil this is EXTREMELY common, and people doesn't seem to care. Actually, people treat fake news as real here.

ceejay 10y ago

I have done zero research in depth on this, but one of the first (easy) things I would look at is the whois on the domains that are producing news. If they're hidden behind a proxy identity, probably unreliable. Also what about providing an inexpensive way to "verify" those whois credentials? Pay $5 and we'll send you a letter in the mail and you confirm you're the owner of the domain in question.

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

I think we need at least two guiding principles - transparency and equality for the new politics thrust upon us by the web Absolutely should facebook and google be forced to reveal their (ever changing) algorithms. In fact (cf Kathy ONeills book weapons of math destruction) inwould prefer a legal framework forcing this. But as for fake news being pushed into people's feeds, well this is a direct result of facebooks commercial desire to open up my feed to as many "friends and friends of friends" as they can. My friends don't share adverts about the Rock that lead to body building supplements - no one shares that with their friends ! That's out there as a "you might also like" Restrict Facebook to only showing what my friends actively share and guess what - no more fake news. No more Facebook billions maybe but then who cares. It's a peer to peer messaging site - it's not important really Edit: I would suggest that facebooks content would stall at the level twitters did if ones feed was driven by active sharing by ones actual nearest circle of friends. I think I would like to know more about the extent of content that appears in a feed that is not active sharing vs active - it should resemble retweets.

topbagsvk 10y ago

They are constantly sharing fake news that confirms their bias. http://www.bagsforsaleok.com/designer-handbags.html http://www.bagsforsaleok.com/designer-handbags.html

tmaly 10y ago

Categorizing what is truth with an algorithm has the potential to create a digital Fahrenheit 454

coldcode 10y ago

As Joseph Goebbels wrote in his book "The Big Lie" people will believe anything if you post it in enough places including the fact that he never wrote a book called "The Big Lie".

jopython 10y ago

Most of the fake news sites listed are conservative. Don't believe the leftist propaganda.

erikb 10y ago

What means "foreign" in this context? I mean US elections shouldn't be considered foreign by a US newspaper like the New York Times.

alarik33 10y ago

I personally blame the New York Times as much as anyone for the results of the election. For the last 15 years, they've participated in the fear mongering over-reporting on extremely rare Islamic terrorism to get readers and appeal to fearful Americans who don't understand statistics and don't get told by the media just how small a threat it's always really been. The culture of irrational overblown fear of terrorism they've helped create is what created Trump, more than emails, more than fake news. Big media players like the NYT play up threats for views and wonder why people vote for strongmen fascists to protect them from the big bad Muslims.

bigyaz 10y ago

You assholes spent 8+ years promoting the racist lie that our duly elected first black president was born in Africa. You tried to delegitimize him based on nothing but his skin color. And you used fake news and dishonest, bigoted, white-supremacist web sites to do it. To pretend this is just harmless, standard politics is bullshit. Cowards are behind this crap, and you sheep eat it up.