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My suspicion is that it's not that Facebook sucks at machine learning, but that they are scared of public backlash when their algorithm accidentally takes a sto

My suspicion is that it's not that Facebook sucks at machine learning, but that they are scared of public backlash when their algorithm accidentally takes a story from Breitbart and classifies it (arguably correctly) as fake news. At that point Facebook is derided as a tool of the liberal msm (after all it's run by liberal Silicon Valley technocrats), and from there eyeballs go elsewhere and Facebook is harmed. Better for them to feign ignorance and lie to themselves.

tomp 10y ago
Funny you mention Breitbart, it's one of the rare media that didn't predict a landslide victory for Hillary.
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  I don't have a dog in this show, but wouldn't that be quite reasonable/expected if they are skewed towards Republican/Trump?
  - snewk 10y ago
    i think the bigger question in wake of hillary's missing landslide, is whether facebook may actually be classifying CNN et. al. as 'fake' news.
    - tomp 10y ago
      A better example would be NYT or WSJ, as CNN is obviously fake news [1]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/10/17/remember-its-illegal-to-possess-wikileaks-clinton-emails-but-its-different-for-the-media-says-cnns-chris-cuomo/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
    - serge2k 10y ago
      Poor polling data doesn't mean you are publishing fake news.
  - tomp 10y ago
    Not according to my logic, no. If I wanted a candidate to win, I'd imagine it would be better for me to propagandize predictions that my candidate would lose, as to motivate more of his/her supporters to actually vote.
    - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
      according to your logic then the MSM is all biased for trump and breitbart is biased for hillary. sounds legit.
      - cderwin 10y ago
        I don't agree with tomp's reasoning but you are confusing cause and effect. If tomp is correct, it only implies that a news outlet biased towards one candidate would predict a victory for the other, not that every media outlet predicts a victory a candidate they are biased against.
      - candiodari 10y ago
        Because of extreme amounts of arrogance on the democratic side, this is actually what happened. It's the same as you hear from Russians. If something's in any big newspaper, it is (a) fake (b) it is rather obvious what the truth is I'm not saying this is the level the MSM has dropped to, but it most certainly is where it's going. I'd also like to say that this is what's happening to large media worldwide, and is in fact being used to marginalize the victims of the current economic climate. Exactly what leftists SHOULD NOT do, if anything they should err on the side of the poor. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/14/opinions/america-doing-better-bailey/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/14/opinions/america-doing-bet... (and 1000s other articles) vs http://www.wsj.com/articles/election-2016-is-propelled-by-the-american-economys-failed-promises-1467909580 http://www.wsj.com/articles/election-2016-is-propelled-by-th... and the "fake news" version of it https://www.videoblocks.com/video/detroit-ghetto-driving-1-driving-through-an-economically-depressed-neighborhood-of-detroit-michigan-many-houses-boarded-up-and-abandoned-some-still-occupied-but-very-run-down-this-area-is-just-to-the-east-of-the-abandoned-packard-factory-dtk9ysm/ https://www.videoblocks.com/video/detroit-ghetto-driving-1-d... Now read the Hillary articles again, assuming you 100% believe the above links and what they mean about the MSM. I think you'll understand better what is happening. Frankly the MSM lies about economic facts that are very much in the face of a hell of a lot of people, and that causes people to not trust them anymore. This seems natural, and ... censorship of fake news will make this worse, not better (or better put: I have enough Russian friends and stories from them certainly indicate it will). But as someone who regularly visits Middle/Eastern Europe but does not live there I see the same thing. I read the newspapers and ... I just don't believe them. The difference with the country I see when visiting is too great. Online fora, filled with locals are easy to find and while filtering absolutely is a necessity, they are generally telling the truth. There are areas where it is worse, e.g. immigrants (and whether or not a particular town was seriously damaged/looted during a "protest" march), but it is certainly true in general. And yes, these fora do not put forward the view the American left has of the world. They don't like immigrants (too many stories of looting, extremely poor work ethic, attacks, criminal behavior, ... combined with stories of the government working against the victims. It is extremely hard to not believe all of them when you've had 2 friends tell you one. In confidence, because they were afraid of retaliation at work. I think that's one thing people don't realize. The main fake news, in terms of reach, are sites like reddit, and it's country-local alternatives. But the story goes like this: they had rented a "work" apartment, a place to sleep close to work for during the week, avoiding a commute after a long day at work. Work is in the middle of the capital city, surrounded by immigrant neighborhoods, so this apartment was in an immigrant neighborhood. They got constantly treated very unfriendly in the hallways, but that, they can take. One day a few obviously muslim youth stormed in, speaking French, screaming to eachother how it's their right to rob kuffar (arabic word meaning infidel in the sense of non-muslim, or cockroach), lots of screaming, obviously high. They broke the tv they were stealing, and beat my friend and his colleague in revenge for that. They had guns, took several macbooks, their cell phones and wallets, beat them up, and took their time to smash up the place. At the hospital they could not see a police officer, they knew where the police office was in the hospital, but there was no-one there that wanted to see them, so they went to the police station 2 days later. The police refused to take down a complaint ... They reported it at work and a director called them in that they were not to talk about it or they'd "face consequences", as those assholes say. Why ? Because nothing good could come of this. Either the story dies and they'll be frustrated, or the story gets attention ... and, the director felt, city hall would be mad, and there might even be an attack on the hospital in revenge for the story. And just so we're clear, I know these people. This happened, in the sense that I know one of the 2 people this happened to. Now this is one data point, and I get it, it's not like crime is new to that part of town (violent crime like that is, though, pickpocketing is what it used to be). It's the reaction to it that makes me believe a lot of far right nuttery. If you read the newspapers, you'd think this was a harmonious neighborhood with everyone living together peacefully. Regular initiatives and public displays about how integrated everyone is, but, and this is important, a drive through it will make it incredibly obvious that there is exactly one ethnic group living there, or if others are living there, they're certainly not willing to show their faces on the street. The neighborhood has a reputation that women cannot go there and you should, under no circumstances, take your girlfriend there, but as a man you can eat there, eat well, and cheap (and there's lots of businesses where one might work nearby, including a huge hospital), but don't take expensive phones or a wallet with either your ID or more money than you'd need to eat. There are no businesses, not a single one, that is owned by anyone from even a slightly different ethnic group.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    Never followed or watched Breitbart, but CNN and friends presented it as a poll, presumably done with rigor and impartiality. Either they couldn't afford to pay their statisticans or they deliberately fudged them and lied.
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      > Either they couldn't afford to pay their statisticans or they deliberately fudged them and lied. So it's only those two options? It's not possible that the polling was just flawed or wrong but it's they can't pay them (implying they have shit statisticians) or they lied? Not a fan of most of the media but come on there are more options here. It was a tough election to predict. Bringing in two, fairly unpopular candidates is going to create some interesting results.
      - rdtsc 10y ago
        > So it's only those two options? The implication was that they fudged their data to make a candidate look better. Clearly they have the money to pay for the poll and statisticians. The more I think about the more it is seems one of the reason for the loss was this overconfidence. News channels were often way too happy to put up a map with Hillary in the 400+ points and the whole map being blue. They believed that would just discourage those voting for Trump to show up. In their it was a terrible blunder (or win depending who you support), in the end more people who would have voted for the Democrats stayed home.
        hga 10y ago
        Overconfidence is certainly a story we're getting out of the Clinton campaign; WRT to the Rust Belt where she decisively lost the election: Bill's advice to put effort into was ridiculed. Russ Feingold, who was as far as I know honestly expected to win his election for Senator (note he'd just lost the seat 6 years earlier in the off-season 2010 Republican langslide), desperately asked for help towards the end of the campaign and was ignored. It's been reported that a computer system named Ada was driving pretty much all these sorts of decisions, and it said the Rust Belt was safe. And there are some other things I think I'm forgetting this early in the morning, anyway, just how wrong this was is demonstrated by how close Minnesota ended up. If Team Trump had realized the opportunity there earlier and put more resources into it, he might well have won it. That that Democratic (well, DFL) bastion was in play....
- mturmon 10y ago
  Well, there's one data point.
- morgante 10y ago
  Incorrectly forecasting an election result (where polls ended up having substantial errors) is hardly "fake" news.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    The fake part comes into play if you think they lied and pushed the wrong results, but presented them as "scientific". Note it was not just a small mistake. They presented Hillary having a massive landslide, and instead she delivered the worst Democratic performance in 20 years. Something doesn't add up...
    - morgante 10y ago
      Frankly, this is an incredibly stupid argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Incorrectly forecasting the future is a far cry from incorrectly reporting facts. Nobody said it was a fact that Clinton would win. Where do you think they "lied?" Even simple poll averages showed Hillary was ahead. I'm willing to admit that they overestimated the chances of a Clinton victory. Nate Silver's 60% was a lot more realistic than the 90% the NYT was pushing. But having a poor prediction model is a lot different than falsely reporting the past. More importantly, it's totally incoherent. If the MSM was tilting their model to try to get Hillary elected, the worst thing they could do would be to present it as a sure thing (depressing turnout). Also, for the record, Clinton won the popular vote. So the polls got the popular vote percentage right. State polls were a lot more noisy and infrequent—it's not that surprising that there was a polling miss.
      - rdtsc 10y ago
        > Frankly, this is an incredibly stupid argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Sorry. Didn't know you heard this before. Yeah the argument is misguided perhaps, but "incredibly stupid"? I don't know, I think you're being a bit harsh. > Where do you think they "lied?" They lied who they polled and how they fudged the results > Incorrectly forecasting the future is a far cry from incorrectly reporting facts. It is not far cry. This is one organization which has lost its credibility because it routinely lied and misconstrued facts, cheated during debates. I don't see as suspicious that they fudged the models to make her look good as "incredibly stupid", but again you have your opinion, so that's cool. > More importantly, it's totally incoherent. Sometimes maliciousness and coherency doesn't go together. Again, I would say it might be "mildly incoherent" but not "totally". You can just as well say they wanted her to look good to discourage anyone voting for the other candidate, which indeed jives with the rest of the rhetoric. > Also, for the record, Clinton won the popular vote. So the polls got the popular vote percentage right. What does that have to do with anything? Are you saying, she is a top experienced politician, lawyer, with a stellar team of experts, media behind her back, President, DNC, may large corporate donors and she didn't know that she had to win electoral college votes and just got a little confused? > State polls were a lot more noisy and infrequent—it's not that surprising that there was a polling miss. Somehow the "idiot" Trump managed to poll in the right states at the right time make Hillary deliver the worst Democratic election results in more than 20 years. If a dummy can do it, surely it was possible to poll properly.
- opsiprogram 10y ago
  tomp maybe Breitbart got brought up for content like this: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08/birth-control-makes-women-unattractive-and-crazy/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08/birth-control-makes... It's mostly unsubstantiated claims, without scientific rigor to back them up (ex: they cite papers but misrepresent the findings), and heavily mixed with personal opinion. Breitbart may have been right about the election, but that doesn't really seem to be because the website is dedicated to clear objective journalism... Wouldn't you agree?
  - tomp 10y ago
    > It's mostly unsubstantiated claims, without scientific rigor to back them up (ex: they cite papers but misrepresent the findings), and heavily mixed with personal opinion. Sounds like pretty much any non-scientific media citing scientific articles.
    - opsiprogram 10y ago
      Okay, so other news sources also can be biased/wrong/misrepresent science ... how does that make this Breitbart article more accurate? or Breitbart a more objective news source?
      - tomp 10y ago
        Nah, same bullshit (neither more nor less fake), just in the other direction. Best to read both left-ist and right-ist media to avoid bias. Although personally I sometimes find Breitbart more agreeable, as they seem opposed to political correctness and unafraid of voicing inconvenient truths (opinions?).
  - hga 10y ago
    It's Milo being Milo, which any regular reader of Breitbart, or anyone sensitive to nuance and style, would realize is more opinion than official un/less biased "news".
basch 10y ago
its probably somewhat hard to separate parody too, sometimes the only thing that makes it parody is the context or people the message is sent to. it could be an inside joke not meant to be taken literally. for example, say i am a hillary fan, and i say to another hillary fan "hillary is a criminal" as a way to mock people who say that. will facebook know when something is insincere and in jest? How much of the hoopla around Sessions is "fake"?
marcoperaza 10y ago
This whole fake news thing is ridiculous. Where is all of the outrage at CNN telling its viewers, falsely, that it's illegal for them to read Wikileaks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Wtu8Pzvd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Wtu8Pzvd4 >“Also interesting is, remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.” CNN has yet to apologize for, or even retract, this. Where is the outrage at all of these "real news" outlets coordinating their messaging with the DNC? Where is the shock at them asking the DNC for questions to pose to Trump? Or the concern that Hillary Clinton was given multiple debate questions by a CNN employee? The simple fact is that almost all media is propaganda. Depending on anyone, or anything, to protect you from "fake news" is laughable.
- jwtadvice 10y ago
  The media industry in the United States, primarily because it functions as a propaganda medium for state narrative, has increasingly been losing credibility with its audience. The 'fake news' thing, the 'troll' thing before that, the 'political spam' thing before that: these are attempts to prevent the manifestations of credible alternatives that can attract funding, challenge the doctrinal ideology espoused by the network of media, or further disrupt the reputation of the current infrastructure for engaging in public diplomacy.
  - jwtadvice 10y ago
    A bit ridiculous that I'm being downvoted for misspelling "its" as "it's". I've now corrected it in the above post.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I'm often curious why particular comments are down voted, so this caught my eye. Why did you come to the conclusion that it was due to a typo? That said, I don't have an alternative theory.
      - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
japanese_donald 10y ago
If this were the case, it means the bias is programmed into the machine learning algorithms. What consitutes false news to you? I've seen it on huffpo, salon, cnn, and msnbc. Any article claiming Trump is a racist/rapist is false, for instance...because there is really no substantial proof. Most people screaming about fake articles just want to censor opposing opinions.
praisewhitey 10y ago
You and the people writing these articles need to take a less US-centric view of this situation. This has been going on for a long time in non-English speaking communities. My hope is that now that it has become very noticeable in the US maybe they'll do something about it, but it's entirely possible they do nothing for the reasons you said.
- tsneed290 10y ago
  Could you expand on this? I'm genuinely curious.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  How do people (readers or news agencies) handle this problem in non-English speaking communities? I'm curious what approaches have already been tried.
  - praisewhitey 10y ago
    Until the 2000s there was only one evening news broadcast and a few newspapers. But most people didn't bother with those and got their informations from friends and family. It was mostly nonsense before Facebook too. Facebook just made it digital and public. And that's the problem. The people who make up this stuff can see when it's being shared, and commented on, and what resonates most with people. They can write up the perfect crazy story for my Mom and Uncle to talk about like they have done for the past 60 years. I can go in and say this is fake, don't believe anything you read from this website or facebook page, and sometimes they'll believe me. But that doesn't stop the content from flooding in. The only thing I can think of is getting people to stop using Facebook altogether.
  - touzen 10y ago
    In Sweden, we have had numerous incidents where fake news has been spread with the purpose of spreading anti-immigrant sentiment. A recent example is a rumour stating that we had banned christmas decorations as it might offend muslim immigrants. What actually happened was that the Swedish Transport Administration had urged people not to decorate street poles as it might be a violation of our electricity laws. [0] We haven't really figured out how to address these issues. The best we've got now is an initiative by Metro called Viralgranskaren (~"viral post inspector") that debunks myths like these. [1] What I think needs to happen is for the education system to start putting a larger emphasis on skepticism and source criticism. These skills and qualities are crucial for a 21th century liberal democracy. [0]: http://www.snopes.com/sweden-bans-christmas-lights/ http://www.snopes.com/sweden-bans-christmas-lights/ [1]: http://www.metro.se/nyheter/viralgranskaren/ http://www.metro.se/nyheter/viralgranskaren/ (sadly only available in Swedish, it seems)
malz 10y ago
It's not just a suspicion, it's right in the title of articles like "Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash" http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204 http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-und...
- grzm 10y ago
  Well, to be fair, we've all seen recently how titles are often not an accurate representation of the content of the post :)
serge2k 10y ago
> Breitbart and classifies it (arguably correctly) as fake news Yeah, fine line between fake news and something that is just extremely slanted. where that ridiculous stuff about the podesta "spirit dinner" fall? Where does something like this https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2016/10/22/wikileaks-podesta-emails-clinton-foundation-works-with-big-pharma-to-keep-aids-drug-prices-high/comment-page-1/ https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2016/10/22/wikileaks-podest... fall? It's based on an email, but the content is, IMO, pretty low quality. It talks about unrelated things, and ignores context to portray a skewed version of facts. Despite that, you could argue that yes it is a fact based news source and should be allowed.
- hga 10y ago
  It's rather less ridiculous when you look at the artwork he displays in his office and home. I believe that's one of the things that gave all this traction, something is seriously wrong here, even if it's just a few sick souls. One of whom just happened to be the chairman of Hillary's campaign. If you believe the Clinton Machine is evil, and you're open to supernatural explanations for evil (I myself am not willing to rule them out), well, we can go so far as demonic possession, that's straight out of the New Testament, Jesus driving demons out of people.
morgante 10y ago
You're 100% correct. Look at all the backlash they got because their human editors wouldn't put fake news into the trending topics and that fake news happened to be conservative. Even look in this comment thread. You have people insisting that Breitbart is a highly reputable site (that just happens to promulgate far-right conspiracy theories) while mainstream news is supposedly "fake" because they incorrectly forecast an election.
- tomp 10y ago
  I was merely pointing out that "fake" is more of a propaganda, not a completely black and white issue. Or do you think it's a coincidence the "fake news" story only broke after the "non-fake" media lost the election, not before while they were still very confident they'd win?
  - morgante 10y ago
    > I was merely pointing out that "fake" is more of a propaganda, not a completely black and white issue. Don't pretend that your comment history doesn't display a clear Trump bias. There might be some difficult cases at the margin, but lots of fake news is very easy to spot. No, ISIS was not founded by Clinton. No, Obama is not instituting Sharia law. No, George Soros is not hacking voting machines. > Or do you think it's a coincidence the "fake news" story only broke after the "non-fake" media lost the election, not before while they were still very confident they'd win? No, I don't think it's a coincidence. It seems very natural that new events would shine an event on existing trends. Or perhaps do you think that Islamic terrorism only began on 9/11, or that mortgage fraud began in 2008?
    - tomp 10y ago
      I like to think that my comment history displays mostly a contrarian (vis-a-vis mainstream) bias, although admittedly that would seem pro-Trump to most HN users (I think yummyfajitas is often the target of similar accusations).
      - 10y ago
tomrod 10y ago
I don't see any downside in this scenario, especially if Brietbarters leave FB en masse. I'm not sure there is another network they can presently go to due to massive network effects.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  Brietbarters leaving Facebook en masse is bad for business. Shareholder value is Facebook's primary interest.
cderwin 10y ago
For what it's worth, if a reasonable person can make a compelling case that a story is not fake news (i.e. if it is "arguable"), doesn't the question of whether it is "fake" or not boil down to a reader's inherent bias (an opinion, which is by definition not fake)? Also, why not use a white list that includes outlets that sizable portions of facebook's user base seem to think are reliable? For example, include breitbart.com and motherjones.com, but exclude .tumblr.com and .wordpress.com.
RockyMcNuts 10y ago
Well, if I see one more utterly fake story passed off as news, and if the horror show of disgusting comments e.g. "Obamas are apes" infects my stream, I'm going to go elsewhere. Let FB turn into 4chan if it wants to, without me.

tomp 10y ago

Funny you mention Breitbart, it's one of the rare media that didn't predict a landslide victory for Hillary.

notheguyouthink 10y ago
I don't have a dog in this show, but wouldn't that be quite reasonable/expected if they are skewed towards Republican/Trump?
- snewk 10y ago
  i think the bigger question in wake of hillary's missing landslide, is whether facebook may actually be classifying CNN et. al. as 'fake' news.
  - tomp 10y ago
    A better example would be NYT or WSJ, as CNN is obviously fake news [1]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/10/17/remember-its-illegal-to-possess-wikileaks-clinton-emails-but-its-different-for-the-media-says-cnns-chris-cuomo/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
  - serge2k 10y ago
    Poor polling data doesn't mean you are publishing fake news.
- tomp 10y ago
  Not according to my logic, no. If I wanted a candidate to win, I'd imagine it would be better for me to propagandize predictions that my candidate would lose, as to motivate more of his/her supporters to actually vote.
  - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
    according to your logic then the MSM is all biased for trump and breitbart is biased for hillary. sounds legit.
    - cderwin 10y ago
      I don't agree with tomp's reasoning but you are confusing cause and effect. If tomp is correct, it only implies that a news outlet biased towards one candidate would predict a victory for the other, not that every media outlet predicts a victory a candidate they are biased against.
    - candiodari 10y ago
      Because of extreme amounts of arrogance on the democratic side, this is actually what happened. It's the same as you hear from Russians. If something's in any big newspaper, it is (a) fake (b) it is rather obvious what the truth is I'm not saying this is the level the MSM has dropped to, but it most certainly is where it's going. I'd also like to say that this is what's happening to large media worldwide, and is in fact being used to marginalize the victims of the current economic climate. Exactly what leftists SHOULD NOT do, if anything they should err on the side of the poor. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/14/opinions/america-doing-better-bailey/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/14/opinions/america-doing-bet... (and 1000s other articles) vs http://www.wsj.com/articles/election-2016-is-propelled-by-the-american-economys-failed-promises-1467909580 http://www.wsj.com/articles/election-2016-is-propelled-by-th... and the "fake news" version of it https://www.videoblocks.com/video/detroit-ghetto-driving-1-driving-through-an-economically-depressed-neighborhood-of-detroit-michigan-many-houses-boarded-up-and-abandoned-some-still-occupied-but-very-run-down-this-area-is-just-to-the-east-of-the-abandoned-packard-factory-dtk9ysm/ https://www.videoblocks.com/video/detroit-ghetto-driving-1-d... Now read the Hillary articles again, assuming you 100% believe the above links and what they mean about the MSM. I think you'll understand better what is happening. Frankly the MSM lies about economic facts that are very much in the face of a hell of a lot of people, and that causes people to not trust them anymore. This seems natural, and ... censorship of fake news will make this worse, not better (or better put: I have enough Russian friends and stories from them certainly indicate it will). But as someone who regularly visits Middle/Eastern Europe but does not live there I see the same thing. I read the newspapers and ... I just don't believe them. The difference with the country I see when visiting is too great. Online fora, filled with locals are easy to find and while filtering absolutely is a necessity, they are generally telling the truth. There are areas where it is worse, e.g. immigrants (and whether or not a particular town was seriously damaged/looted during a "protest" march), but it is certainly true in general. And yes, these fora do not put forward the view the American left has of the world. They don't like immigrants (too many stories of looting, extremely poor work ethic, attacks, criminal behavior, ... combined with stories of the government working against the victims. It is extremely hard to not believe all of them when you've had 2 friends tell you one. In confidence, because they were afraid of retaliation at work. I think that's one thing people don't realize. The main fake news, in terms of reach, are sites like reddit, and it's country-local alternatives. But the story goes like this: they had rented a "work" apartment, a place to sleep close to work for during the week, avoiding a commute after a long day at work. Work is in the middle of the capital city, surrounded by immigrant neighborhoods, so this apartment was in an immigrant neighborhood. They got constantly treated very unfriendly in the hallways, but that, they can take. One day a few obviously muslim youth stormed in, speaking French, screaming to eachother how it's their right to rob kuffar (arabic word meaning infidel in the sense of non-muslim, or cockroach), lots of screaming, obviously high. They broke the tv they were stealing, and beat my friend and his colleague in revenge for that. They had guns, took several macbooks, their cell phones and wallets, beat them up, and took their time to smash up the place. At the hospital they could not see a police officer, they knew where the police office was in the hospital, but there was no-one there that wanted to see them, so they went to the police station 2 days later. The police refused to take down a complaint ... They reported it at work and a director called them in that they were not to talk about it or they'd "face consequences", as those assholes say. Why ? Because nothing good could come of this. Either the story dies and they'll be frustrated, or the story gets attention ... and, the director felt, city hall would be mad, and there might even be an attack on the hospital in revenge for the story. And just so we're clear, I know these people. This happened, in the sense that I know one of the 2 people this happened to. Now this is one data point, and I get it, it's not like crime is new to that part of town (violent crime like that is, though, pickpocketing is what it used to be). It's the reaction to it that makes me believe a lot of far right nuttery. If you read the newspapers, you'd think this was a harmonious neighborhood with everyone living together peacefully. Regular initiatives and public displays about how integrated everyone is, but, and this is important, a drive through it will make it incredibly obvious that there is exactly one ethnic group living there, or if others are living there, they're certainly not willing to show their faces on the street. The neighborhood has a reputation that women cannot go there and you should, under no circumstances, take your girlfriend there, but as a man you can eat there, eat well, and cheap (and there's lots of businesses where one might work nearby, including a huge hospital), but don't take expensive phones or a wallet with either your ID or more money than you'd need to eat. There are no businesses, not a single one, that is owned by anyone from even a slightly different ethnic group.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  Never followed or watched Breitbart, but CNN and friends presented it as a poll, presumably done with rigor and impartiality. Either they couldn't afford to pay their statisticans or they deliberately fudged them and lied.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    > Either they couldn't afford to pay their statisticans or they deliberately fudged them and lied. So it's only those two options? It's not possible that the polling was just flawed or wrong but it's they can't pay them (implying they have shit statisticians) or they lied? Not a fan of most of the media but come on there are more options here. It was a tough election to predict. Bringing in two, fairly unpopular candidates is going to create some interesting results.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      > So it's only those two options? The implication was that they fudged their data to make a candidate look better. Clearly they have the money to pay for the poll and statisticians. The more I think about the more it is seems one of the reason for the loss was this overconfidence. News channels were often way too happy to put up a map with Hillary in the 400+ points and the whole map being blue. They believed that would just discourage those voting for Trump to show up. In their it was a terrible blunder (or win depending who you support), in the end more people who would have voted for the Democrats stayed home.
      - hga 10y ago
        Overconfidence is certainly a story we're getting out of the Clinton campaign; WRT to the Rust Belt where she decisively lost the election: Bill's advice to put effort into was ridiculed. Russ Feingold, who was as far as I know honestly expected to win his election for Senator (note he'd just lost the seat 6 years earlier in the off-season 2010 Republican langslide), desperately asked for help towards the end of the campaign and was ignored. It's been reported that a computer system named Ada was driving pretty much all these sorts of decisions, and it said the Rust Belt was safe. And there are some other things I think I'm forgetting this early in the morning, anyway, just how wrong this was is demonstrated by how close Minnesota ended up. If Team Trump had realized the opportunity there earlier and put more resources into it, he might well have won it. That that Democratic (well, DFL) bastion was in play....
mturmon 10y ago
Well, there's one data point.
morgante 10y ago
Incorrectly forecasting an election result (where polls ended up having substantial errors) is hardly "fake" news.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  The fake part comes into play if you think they lied and pushed the wrong results, but presented them as "scientific". Note it was not just a small mistake. They presented Hillary having a massive landslide, and instead she delivered the worst Democratic performance in 20 years. Something doesn't add up...
  - morgante 10y ago
    Frankly, this is an incredibly stupid argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Incorrectly forecasting the future is a far cry from incorrectly reporting facts. Nobody said it was a fact that Clinton would win. Where do you think they "lied?" Even simple poll averages showed Hillary was ahead. I'm willing to admit that they overestimated the chances of a Clinton victory. Nate Silver's 60% was a lot more realistic than the 90% the NYT was pushing. But having a poor prediction model is a lot different than falsely reporting the past. More importantly, it's totally incoherent. If the MSM was tilting their model to try to get Hillary elected, the worst thing they could do would be to present it as a sure thing (depressing turnout). Also, for the record, Clinton won the popular vote. So the polls got the popular vote percentage right. State polls were a lot more noisy and infrequent—it's not that surprising that there was a polling miss.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      > Frankly, this is an incredibly stupid argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Sorry. Didn't know you heard this before. Yeah the argument is misguided perhaps, but "incredibly stupid"? I don't know, I think you're being a bit harsh. > Where do you think they "lied?" They lied who they polled and how they fudged the results > Incorrectly forecasting the future is a far cry from incorrectly reporting facts. It is not far cry. This is one organization which has lost its credibility because it routinely lied and misconstrued facts, cheated during debates. I don't see as suspicious that they fudged the models to make her look good as "incredibly stupid", but again you have your opinion, so that's cool. > More importantly, it's totally incoherent. Sometimes maliciousness and coherency doesn't go together. Again, I would say it might be "mildly incoherent" but not "totally". You can just as well say they wanted her to look good to discourage anyone voting for the other candidate, which indeed jives with the rest of the rhetoric. > Also, for the record, Clinton won the popular vote. So the polls got the popular vote percentage right. What does that have to do with anything? Are you saying, she is a top experienced politician, lawyer, with a stellar team of experts, media behind her back, President, DNC, may large corporate donors and she didn't know that she had to win electoral college votes and just got a little confused? > State polls were a lot more noisy and infrequent—it's not that surprising that there was a polling miss. Somehow the "idiot" Trump managed to poll in the right states at the right time make Hillary deliver the worst Democratic election results in more than 20 years. If a dummy can do it, surely it was possible to poll properly.
opsiprogram 10y ago
tomp maybe Breitbart got brought up for content like this: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08/birth-control-makes-women-unattractive-and-crazy/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08/birth-control-makes... It's mostly unsubstantiated claims, without scientific rigor to back them up (ex: they cite papers but misrepresent the findings), and heavily mixed with personal opinion. Breitbart may have been right about the election, but that doesn't really seem to be because the website is dedicated to clear objective journalism... Wouldn't you agree?
- tomp 10y ago
  > It's mostly unsubstantiated claims, without scientific rigor to back them up (ex: they cite papers but misrepresent the findings), and heavily mixed with personal opinion. Sounds like pretty much any non-scientific media citing scientific articles.
  - opsiprogram 10y ago
    Okay, so other news sources also can be biased/wrong/misrepresent science ... how does that make this Breitbart article more accurate? or Breitbart a more objective news source?
    - tomp 10y ago
      Nah, same bullshit (neither more nor less fake), just in the other direction. Best to read both left-ist and right-ist media to avoid bias. Although personally I sometimes find Breitbart more agreeable, as they seem opposed to political correctness and unafraid of voicing inconvenient truths (opinions?).
- hga 10y ago
  It's Milo being Milo, which any regular reader of Breitbart, or anyone sensitive to nuance and style, would realize is more opinion than official un/less biased "news".

basch 10y ago

its probably somewhat hard to separate parody too, sometimes the only thing that makes it parody is the context or people the message is sent to. it could be an inside joke not meant to be taken literally. for example, say i am a hillary fan, and i say to another hillary fan "hillary is a criminal" as a way to mock people who say that. will facebook know when something is insincere and in jest? How much of the hoopla around Sessions is "fake"?

marcoperaza 10y ago

This whole fake news thing is ridiculous. Where is all of the outrage at CNN telling its viewers, falsely, that it's illegal for them to read Wikileaks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Wtu8Pzvd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Wtu8Pzvd4 >“Also interesting is, remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.” CNN has yet to apologize for, or even retract, this. Where is the outrage at all of these "real news" outlets coordinating their messaging with the DNC? Where is the shock at them asking the DNC for questions to pose to Trump? Or the concern that Hillary Clinton was given multiple debate questions by a CNN employee? The simple fact is that almost all media is propaganda. Depending on anyone, or anything, to protect you from "fake news" is laughable.

jwtadvice 10y ago
The media industry in the United States, primarily because it functions as a propaganda medium for state narrative, has increasingly been losing credibility with its audience. The 'fake news' thing, the 'troll' thing before that, the 'political spam' thing before that: these are attempts to prevent the manifestations of credible alternatives that can attract funding, challenge the doctrinal ideology espoused by the network of media, or further disrupt the reputation of the current infrastructure for engaging in public diplomacy.
- jwtadvice 10y ago
  A bit ridiculous that I'm being downvoted for misspelling "its" as "it's". I've now corrected it in the above post.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I'm often curious why particular comments are down voted, so this caught my eye. Why did you come to the conclusion that it was due to a typo? That said, I don't have an alternative theory.
    - 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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japanese_donald 10y ago

If this were the case, it means the bias is programmed into the machine learning algorithms. What consitutes false news to you? I've seen it on huffpo, salon, cnn, and msnbc. Any article claiming Trump is a racist/rapist is false, for instance...because there is really no substantial proof. Most people screaming about fake articles just want to censor opposing opinions.

praisewhitey 10y ago

You and the people writing these articles need to take a less US-centric view of this situation. This has been going on for a long time in non-English speaking communities. My hope is that now that it has become very noticeable in the US maybe they'll do something about it, but it's entirely possible they do nothing for the reasons you said.

tsneed290 10y ago
Could you expand on this? I'm genuinely curious.
cpeterso 10y ago
How do people (readers or news agencies) handle this problem in non-English speaking communities? I'm curious what approaches have already been tried.
- praisewhitey 10y ago
  Until the 2000s there was only one evening news broadcast and a few newspapers. But most people didn't bother with those and got their informations from friends and family. It was mostly nonsense before Facebook too. Facebook just made it digital and public. And that's the problem. The people who make up this stuff can see when it's being shared, and commented on, and what resonates most with people. They can write up the perfect crazy story for my Mom and Uncle to talk about like they have done for the past 60 years. I can go in and say this is fake, don't believe anything you read from this website or facebook page, and sometimes they'll believe me. But that doesn't stop the content from flooding in. The only thing I can think of is getting people to stop using Facebook altogether.
- touzen 10y ago
  In Sweden, we have had numerous incidents where fake news has been spread with the purpose of spreading anti-immigrant sentiment. A recent example is a rumour stating that we had banned christmas decorations as it might offend muslim immigrants. What actually happened was that the Swedish Transport Administration had urged people not to decorate street poles as it might be a violation of our electricity laws. [0] We haven't really figured out how to address these issues. The best we've got now is an initiative by Metro called Viralgranskaren (~"viral post inspector") that debunks myths like these. [1] What I think needs to happen is for the education system to start putting a larger emphasis on skepticism and source criticism. These skills and qualities are crucial for a 21th century liberal democracy. [0]: http://www.snopes.com/sweden-bans-christmas-lights/ http://www.snopes.com/sweden-bans-christmas-lights/ [1]: http://www.metro.se/nyheter/viralgranskaren/ http://www.metro.se/nyheter/viralgranskaren/ (sadly only available in Swedish, it seems)

malz 10y ago

It's not just a suspicion, it's right in the title of articles like "Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash" http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204 http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-und...

grzm 10y ago
Well, to be fair, we've all seen recently how titles are often not an accurate representation of the content of the post :)

serge2k 10y ago

> Breitbart and classifies it (arguably correctly) as fake news Yeah, fine line between fake news and something that is just extremely slanted. where that ridiculous stuff about the podesta "spirit dinner" fall? Where does something like this https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2016/10/22/wikileaks-podesta-emails-clinton-foundation-works-with-big-pharma-to-keep-aids-drug-prices-high/comment-page-1/ https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2016/10/22/wikileaks-podest... fall? It's based on an email, but the content is, IMO, pretty low quality. It talks about unrelated things, and ignores context to portray a skewed version of facts. Despite that, you could argue that yes it is a fact based news source and should be allowed.

hga 10y ago
It's rather less ridiculous when you look at the artwork he displays in his office and home. I believe that's one of the things that gave all this traction, something is seriously wrong here, even if it's just a few sick souls. One of whom just happened to be the chairman of Hillary's campaign. If you believe the Clinton Machine is evil, and you're open to supernatural explanations for evil (I myself am not willing to rule them out), well, we can go so far as demonic possession, that's straight out of the New Testament, Jesus driving demons out of people.

morgante 10y ago

You're 100% correct. Look at all the backlash they got because their human editors wouldn't put fake news into the trending topics and that fake news happened to be conservative. Even look in this comment thread. You have people insisting that Breitbart is a highly reputable site (that just happens to promulgate far-right conspiracy theories) while mainstream news is supposedly "fake" because they incorrectly forecast an election.

tomp 10y ago
I was merely pointing out that "fake" is more of a propaganda, not a completely black and white issue. Or do you think it's a coincidence the "fake news" story only broke after the "non-fake" media lost the election, not before while they were still very confident they'd win?
- morgante 10y ago
  > I was merely pointing out that "fake" is more of a propaganda, not a completely black and white issue. Don't pretend that your comment history doesn't display a clear Trump bias. There might be some difficult cases at the margin, but lots of fake news is very easy to spot. No, ISIS was not founded by Clinton. No, Obama is not instituting Sharia law. No, George Soros is not hacking voting machines. > Or do you think it's a coincidence the "fake news" story only broke after the "non-fake" media lost the election, not before while they were still very confident they'd win? No, I don't think it's a coincidence. It seems very natural that new events would shine an event on existing trends. Or perhaps do you think that Islamic terrorism only began on 9/11, or that mortgage fraud began in 2008?
  - tomp 10y ago
    I like to think that my comment history displays mostly a contrarian (vis-a-vis mainstream) bias, although admittedly that would seem pro-Trump to most HN users (I think yummyfajitas is often the target of similar accusations).
    - 10y ago

tomrod 10y ago

I don't see any downside in this scenario, especially if Brietbarters leave FB en masse. I'm not sure there is another network they can presently go to due to massive network effects.

cpeterso 10y ago
Brietbarters leaving Facebook en masse is bad for business. Shareholder value is Facebook's primary interest.

cderwin 10y ago

For what it's worth, if a reasonable person can make a compelling case that a story is not fake news (i.e. if it is "arguable"), doesn't the question of whether it is "fake" or not boil down to a reader's inherent bias (an opinion, which is by definition not fake)? Also, why not use a white list that includes outlets that sizable portions of facebook's user base seem to think are reliable? For example, include breitbart.com and motherjones.com, but exclude .tumblr.com and .wordpress.com.

RockyMcNuts 10y ago

Well, if I see one more utterly fake story passed off as news, and if the horror show of disgusting comments e.g. "Obamas are apes" infects my stream, I'm going to go elsewhere. Let FB turn into 4chan if it wants to, without me.