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"Fake news" is a shitty meme that needs to stop. If the media truly suggests they be accountable for what they peddle, they will be in for a big surprise. We

by alva 10y ago

"Fake news" is a shitty meme that needs to stop. If the media truly suggests they be accountable for what they peddle, they will be in for a big surprise. We are witnessing a mortally wounded animal frantically flailing in a primal, desperate bid to hold onto life.

gfody 10y ago
What else do you call this sort of thing? e.g.: http://abcnews.com.co http://abcnews.com.co
- insickness 10y ago
  A better word for this might be counterfeit. This is pretending to be a different website than it really is. The problem is that 'fake' in the current context is being extended to sites that are judged--rightly or wrongly--to have lower journalistic standards. That slippery slope allows more dominant media to dismiss alternative media when they themselves sometimes exhibit bad journalistic standards.
myowncrapulence 10y ago
It's as if they were pushing for an online "lie detector" which banned people for telling lies.. It's absurd.
_red 10y ago
>"Fake News" Its a shame humanity keeps needing learning the same lessons over and over. Anytime I think of the "newspaper" I can't help but think of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. >“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. >In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Precisely this. I don't understand why it's so hard to internalize for most people. Maybe because they feel they have to believe someone, so they don't have a choice but to accept the news as true? Hint: you don't. Life does not get any worse if you don't stay up to date with the news. This is junk information, at best it will poison your holistic understanding of the world. And most of it doesn't matter. I think one's better off reading a book instead. Or if you really need to follow news, stick to discussions on topical subreddits or HN - there at least you'll get people who don't have a strong incentive lie, and quite often you'll actually find comments by people with first-hand knowledge on the subject.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jbronn 10y ago
Pretending that facts don't exist is a shitty meme that needs to stop. For example, it's definitely false to claim that Donald Trump won the popular vote yet there are a multitude of fake stories on FB that claim as much.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  The primary value proposition of social media is that it utilizes some combination of your social graph and "the crowd" to filter and/or approve content, sending more interesting/important/relevant stuff to the top. Amazing how gushing fantasies about the power of the democratization of media seem to flip into nightmares days after the tech elite's favored candidate loses. People shouldn't be silenced just because you disagree with them. Many disagreements come down to a different evaluation of "the facts", some element that the one side would say the other side has objectively incorrect. Both sides have the same data, but they have a different interpretation about what's an "objective fact". It is critical that we allow those discussions to play out. Platform owners becoming the fire companies of Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian horror show. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that users MUST be allowed to choose for themselves and have free range over the marketplace of ideas.
  - throwaway1342 10y ago
    Let's see here: GP says that facts that are false (namely, Trump won the popular vote) made it onto the newsfeed. You said that there is a "different evaluation of the facts". The popular vote count is a number. How, pray tell, do you disagree with a number?
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      When people dispute "objective facts" and "hard numbers", it's generally due to a different credibility rating on the source of the information. First, the entire popular vote has not yet returned. Several states are sitting at 99% reporting, and Utah is sitting at 94% according to NYT. You can say that most of those votes are probable Clinton votes, but the simple fact is that the count isn't finished. The popular vote will continue to change until all the votes have been counted. "It ain't over until the fat lady sings". A Trump supporter could easily make this argument and have the "objective fact" that we don't know the final popular vote tally on their side. You must now convince them that this hard reality is either not so real or not so important. Second, there are people that believe either faulty or intentionally modified equipment caused many people to vote for Clinton unwillingly. For example, there's a video of a voter unable to select Trump on his electronic ballot; the touches repeatedly register as Clinton though his finger is clearly pressing the Trump option. That's one anecdote, but a Trump supporter who wants to claim the popular vote could say the election was rigged in Clinton's favor and that while the official numbers show more Clinton votes, the true numbers (which are impossible to measure), i.e., the number of voters that actually wanted Trump to be president, were larger than the number of voters that actually wanted Clinton to be president. The supporter could use a collection of anecdotes similar to the one described above as supporting evidence. They could also use the recording of HRC expressing interest in rigging the Palestinian election as supporting evidence. No "hard numbers" here, but some objective facts that could be used to cast doubt on some of the hard numbers. Thus, "objective facts" and "hard numbers" become more ambiguous because the other side doesn't believe the entity that is issuing your "objective facts" is credible. You must first convince your opponent that the machines were not altered (which is not possible to prove), that any official tampering with the vote counts was insufficient to push Clinton over the top (also not possible to prove), and that there is an insufficient quantity of votes outstanding to result in a Trump win (possible). This same thing happens whenever a research study is released. If the audience approves of the study's findings, they say "Yes, this is an objective and good study." If the audience disapproves of the study's findings, they say "This study cannot be trusted because its author holds political views X, Y, and Z, the institution's primary donor is a company that stands to make money from these unpopular findings, the methodology was incorrect because the sample was too small or too large and the control group was not adequately controlled". These are debatable, subjective elements of study design that can't be objectively proven or disproven, and they can be used to cast doubt on any "hard" source you want. The fact of the matter is that humans are excellent at retroactively rationalizing at least semi-defensible arguments against someone's "objective facts". Every side seems to believe all of the "objective facts" are in their favor. That should tell you that "objective facts" are worth practically nothing when it comes to human decision making.
cookiecaper 10y ago
Yes, absolutely. The stunning hypocrisy and myopia of this propaganda campaign is driving me up the wall, and the conspirators (several of whom are seen openly volunteering their services to the DNC and/or the Clintons in the Wikileaks) have hardly attempted to hide the coordination. Do we really believe that the execs at tech companies are that interested in John Oliver's opinion that the day after he "exposes" "fake" news as the reason Trump won, they'd all decide they need to ban/quarantine these "fake" outlets? Give me a break. Anyone who buys this is beyond gullible. This election season has been tough but this meme is bringing me closer to the edge of tolerance than anything else has so far.
- throwanem 10y ago
  I know, it's frustrating as hell. But if we're to build a better future for all of us on both sides of the political abyss, it has to start with someone reaching out. We have to be the ones to do that now. No one else seems to want to. And nothing is more important to our future as a country. It feels right now like division and divisiveness are everywhere. It is incumbent upon us not to exacerbate those problems, but do everything in our power to reduce them. And our power to do that is now greater than it was. This is the role which events have given us the opportunity to play. History will judge our actions in that light. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
edblarney 10y ago
No, there is a very big difference between professional journos who sometimes have bias - and completely fake news. 'Fake news' sites reports information that is completely fabricated and non-factual. 'News sites' - by and large - are pretty good. Most stories on CNN and Fox are not biased. Go ahead to their web-sites - it's mostly boring stuff. Some of their headlines, and their choice of words etc. is arguably biased, but it's difficult to pin down. To fail to differentiate between 'lies' and 'facts presented in a certain way' is wrong. You don't have to 'fully trust' the MSM, but if you are open minded enough and pull from enough sources, then you'll do ok. The 'fake news sites' are run by kids in Macedonia trying to get clicks and it's a total fabrication.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  If it was just about kids in Macedonia, it'd be collapsed into Google's ordinary anti-spam techniques and it wouldn't be newsworthy. John Oliver wouldn't have dedicated the half-hour to, ironically and bizarrely, attempting to deflect the blame for Clinton's loss onto social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It is equal parts hilarious and depressing that they would expect anyone to buy that. The American people resoundingly rejected the MSM/establishment narrative on Nov 8. The establishment responded by shouting "You kids need to get off your computers! I know what's best for you!" (even more astonishing, the world's tech conglomerates appear to agree). The meltdown here is, frankly, dumbfounding. For the record, I'm all for shutting down plagiarized and spam sites. But the tech companies have already been doing that for years. "Fake news" is fake news.
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  Oh come on. The mainstream media make up news all the time. For example, the New York Times manufactured the story of Trump mocking a reporter's disability. Then they sent in their fact checkers to validate the lie. More here: http://newslines.org/blog/lets-talk-about-fake-news/ http://newslines.org/blog/lets-talk-about-fake-news/
  - spdustin 10y ago
    You're aware that many of us watched it on video, right? EDIT: Context at the time matters, and revising the intention later without regard for behavioral patterns of condescension and shaming is disingenuous. As for fake news: if your particular vectors don't align with those of fake news readers, Facebook wont show them to you. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
elefanten 10y ago
I think there's a pretty clear class of things that people are referring to as "fake news" currently. Yes, some people conflate it with more debatable claims about bias, quality or whatever. And yes, even the obvious or verifiable fake news might still be difficult to catch algorithmically. But "fake news" isn't a meme. It's an observed problem.
- adnzzzzZ 10y ago
  It's very not clear what people are referring to as fake news. And this is where this conversation leads by the way: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-16/zero-hedge-targeted-list-fake-news-sources http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-16/zero-hedge-targeted... Legitimate sites getting labelled as "fake news"
RockyMcNuts 10y ago
Oh, really, so there is no way to tell if the pope endorsed Donald Trump? That is just an undecidable proposition? I hope you don't do some kind of science or engineering. I'd hate to buy a product from people like that. Maybe it's 24K gold, maybe it's gold-plated, maybe it's just yellow paint? In this topsy-turvy world, who can really know anything? I thought it was liberals who were supposed to be all squishy and morally relative. Certain things are falsifiable, and at some level are true or false. Either Hillary sold arms to ISIS or she didn't. If people can't agree on what it means for something to be true, I don't really see how democracy or even basic communication can work if people don't try to share the same reality. We've reached a level where, the only truth that matters is, if Facebook were to stop presenting nonsense under the rubric of news, it would hurt one party more than another. Truth is what serves the party line and the Great Leader. Decent people should realize that a society where any lie can be the truth, isn't a society that can lead the world, or one worth having.
m3rc 10y ago
How ridiculously melodramatic
venomsnake 10y ago
Look. The "wrong" person won. We did nothing to stop the anti vaxxer bullshit. Or the MLM schemes. Or any fake science news about breakthroughs. All of the new age crap. Any spiritual content. Any gossip site. Any conspiracy theory, medical advice, clairvoyance ad ... and on and on and on. We may even throw religious beliefs as something people think of as truth, that is not entirely substantiated with facts.

by alva 10y ago

gfody 10y ago

What else do you call this sort of thing? e.g.: http://abcnews.com.co http://abcnews.com.co

insickness 10y ago
A better word for this might be counterfeit. This is pretending to be a different website than it really is. The problem is that 'fake' in the current context is being extended to sites that are judged--rightly or wrongly--to have lower journalistic standards. That slippery slope allows more dominant media to dismiss alternative media when they themselves sometimes exhibit bad journalistic standards.

myowncrapulence 10y ago

It's as if they were pushing for an online "lie detector" which banned people for telling lies.. It's absurd.

_red 10y ago

>"Fake News" Its a shame humanity keeps needing learning the same lessons over and over. Anytime I think of the "newspaper" I can't help but think of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. >“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. >In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Precisely this. I don't understand why it's so hard to internalize for most people. Maybe because they feel they have to believe someone, so they don't have a choice but to accept the news as true? Hint: you don't. Life does not get any worse if you don't stay up to date with the news. This is junk information, at best it will poison your holistic understanding of the world. And most of it doesn't matter. I think one's better off reading a book instead. Or if you really need to follow news, stick to discussions on topical subreddits or HN - there at least you'll get people who don't have a strong incentive lie, and quite often you'll actually find comments by people with first-hand knowledge on the subject.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jbronn 10y ago

Pretending that facts don't exist is a shitty meme that needs to stop. For example, it's definitely false to claim that Donald Trump won the popular vote yet there are a multitude of fake stories on FB that claim as much.

cookiecaper 10y ago
The primary value proposition of social media is that it utilizes some combination of your social graph and "the crowd" to filter and/or approve content, sending more interesting/important/relevant stuff to the top. Amazing how gushing fantasies about the power of the democratization of media seem to flip into nightmares days after the tech elite's favored candidate loses. People shouldn't be silenced just because you disagree with them. Many disagreements come down to a different evaluation of "the facts", some element that the one side would say the other side has objectively incorrect. Both sides have the same data, but they have a different interpretation about what's an "objective fact". It is critical that we allow those discussions to play out. Platform owners becoming the fire companies of Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian horror show. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that users MUST be allowed to choose for themselves and have free range over the marketplace of ideas.
- throwaway1342 10y ago
  Let's see here: GP says that facts that are false (namely, Trump won the popular vote) made it onto the newsfeed. You said that there is a "different evaluation of the facts". The popular vote count is a number. How, pray tell, do you disagree with a number?
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    When people dispute "objective facts" and "hard numbers", it's generally due to a different credibility rating on the source of the information. First, the entire popular vote has not yet returned. Several states are sitting at 99% reporting, and Utah is sitting at 94% according to NYT. You can say that most of those votes are probable Clinton votes, but the simple fact is that the count isn't finished. The popular vote will continue to change until all the votes have been counted. "It ain't over until the fat lady sings". A Trump supporter could easily make this argument and have the "objective fact" that we don't know the final popular vote tally on their side. You must now convince them that this hard reality is either not so real or not so important. Second, there are people that believe either faulty or intentionally modified equipment caused many people to vote for Clinton unwillingly. For example, there's a video of a voter unable to select Trump on his electronic ballot; the touches repeatedly register as Clinton though his finger is clearly pressing the Trump option. That's one anecdote, but a Trump supporter who wants to claim the popular vote could say the election was rigged in Clinton's favor and that while the official numbers show more Clinton votes, the true numbers (which are impossible to measure), i.e., the number of voters that actually wanted Trump to be president, were larger than the number of voters that actually wanted Clinton to be president. The supporter could use a collection of anecdotes similar to the one described above as supporting evidence. They could also use the recording of HRC expressing interest in rigging the Palestinian election as supporting evidence. No "hard numbers" here, but some objective facts that could be used to cast doubt on some of the hard numbers. Thus, "objective facts" and "hard numbers" become more ambiguous because the other side doesn't believe the entity that is issuing your "objective facts" is credible. You must first convince your opponent that the machines were not altered (which is not possible to prove), that any official tampering with the vote counts was insufficient to push Clinton over the top (also not possible to prove), and that there is an insufficient quantity of votes outstanding to result in a Trump win (possible). This same thing happens whenever a research study is released. If the audience approves of the study's findings, they say "Yes, this is an objective and good study." If the audience disapproves of the study's findings, they say "This study cannot be trusted because its author holds political views X, Y, and Z, the institution's primary donor is a company that stands to make money from these unpopular findings, the methodology was incorrect because the sample was too small or too large and the control group was not adequately controlled". These are debatable, subjective elements of study design that can't be objectively proven or disproven, and they can be used to cast doubt on any "hard" source you want. The fact of the matter is that humans are excellent at retroactively rationalizing at least semi-defensible arguments against someone's "objective facts". Every side seems to believe all of the "objective facts" are in their favor. That should tell you that "objective facts" are worth practically nothing when it comes to human decision making.

cookiecaper 10y ago

Yes, absolutely. The stunning hypocrisy and myopia of this propaganda campaign is driving me up the wall, and the conspirators (several of whom are seen openly volunteering their services to the DNC and/or the Clintons in the Wikileaks) have hardly attempted to hide the coordination. Do we really believe that the execs at tech companies are that interested in John Oliver's opinion that the day after he "exposes" "fake" news as the reason Trump won, they'd all decide they need to ban/quarantine these "fake" outlets? Give me a break. Anyone who buys this is beyond gullible. This election season has been tough but this meme is bringing me closer to the edge of tolerance than anything else has so far.

throwanem 10y ago
I know, it's frustrating as hell. But if we're to build a better future for all of us on both sides of the political abyss, it has to start with someone reaching out. We have to be the ones to do that now. No one else seems to want to. And nothing is more important to our future as a country. It feels right now like division and divisiveness are everywhere. It is incumbent upon us not to exacerbate those problems, but do everything in our power to reduce them. And our power to do that is now greater than it was. This is the role which events have given us the opportunity to play. History will judge our actions in that light. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

edblarney 10y ago

No, there is a very big difference between professional journos who sometimes have bias - and completely fake news. 'Fake news' sites reports information that is completely fabricated and non-factual. 'News sites' - by and large - are pretty good. Most stories on CNN and Fox are not biased. Go ahead to their web-sites - it's mostly boring stuff. Some of their headlines, and their choice of words etc. is arguably biased, but it's difficult to pin down. To fail to differentiate between 'lies' and 'facts presented in a certain way' is wrong. You don't have to 'fully trust' the MSM, but if you are open minded enough and pull from enough sources, then you'll do ok. The 'fake news sites' are run by kids in Macedonia trying to get clicks and it's a total fabrication.

cookiecaper 10y ago
If it was just about kids in Macedonia, it'd be collapsed into Google's ordinary anti-spam techniques and it wouldn't be newsworthy. John Oliver wouldn't have dedicated the half-hour to, ironically and bizarrely, attempting to deflect the blame for Clinton's loss onto social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It is equal parts hilarious and depressing that they would expect anyone to buy that. The American people resoundingly rejected the MSM/establishment narrative on Nov 8. The establishment responded by shouting "You kids need to get off your computers! I know what's best for you!" (even more astonishing, the world's tech conglomerates appear to agree). The meltdown here is, frankly, dumbfounding. For the record, I'm all for shutting down plagiarized and spam sites. But the tech companies have already been doing that for years. "Fake news" is fake news.
sparkzilla 10y ago
Oh come on. The mainstream media make up news all the time. For example, the New York Times manufactured the story of Trump mocking a reporter's disability. Then they sent in their fact checkers to validate the lie. More here: http://newslines.org/blog/lets-talk-about-fake-news/ http://newslines.org/blog/lets-talk-about-fake-news/
- spdustin 10y ago
  You're aware that many of us watched it on video, right? EDIT: Context at the time matters, and revising the intention later without regard for behavioral patterns of condescension and shaming is disingenuous. As for fake news: if your particular vectors don't align with those of fake news readers, Facebook wont show them to you. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

elefanten 10y ago

I think there's a pretty clear class of things that people are referring to as "fake news" currently. Yes, some people conflate it with more debatable claims about bias, quality or whatever. And yes, even the obvious or verifiable fake news might still be difficult to catch algorithmically. But "fake news" isn't a meme. It's an observed problem.

adnzzzzZ 10y ago
It's very not clear what people are referring to as fake news. And this is where this conversation leads by the way: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-16/zero-hedge-targeted-list-fake-news-sources http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-16/zero-hedge-targeted... Legitimate sites getting labelled as "fake news"

RockyMcNuts 10y ago

Oh, really, so there is no way to tell if the pope endorsed Donald Trump? That is just an undecidable proposition? I hope you don't do some kind of science or engineering. I'd hate to buy a product from people like that. Maybe it's 24K gold, maybe it's gold-plated, maybe it's just yellow paint? In this topsy-turvy world, who can really know anything? I thought it was liberals who were supposed to be all squishy and morally relative. Certain things are falsifiable, and at some level are true or false. Either Hillary sold arms to ISIS or she didn't. If people can't agree on what it means for something to be true, I don't really see how democracy or even basic communication can work if people don't try to share the same reality. We've reached a level where, the only truth that matters is, if Facebook were to stop presenting nonsense under the rubric of news, it would hurt one party more than another. Truth is what serves the party line and the Great Leader. Decent people should realize that a society where any lie can be the truth, isn't a society that can lead the world, or one worth having.

m3rc 10y ago

How ridiculously melodramatic

venomsnake 10y ago

Look. The "wrong" person won. We did nothing to stop the anti vaxxer bullshit. Or the MLM schemes. Or any fake science news about breakthroughs. All of the new age crap. Any spiritual content. Any gossip site. Any conspiracy theory, medical advice, clairvoyance ad ... and on and on and on. We may even throw religious beliefs as something people think of as truth, that is not entirely substantiated with facts.