2 ms·

I'm a bit tired of this "fake news" fad. We, the consumers of the content, need to decide for ourselves if the news is real or fake. Use your common sense and c

I'm a bit tired of this "fake news" fad. We, the consumers of the content, need to decide for ourselves if the news is real or fake. Use your common sense and check the damn facts. If we need someone/something to help us determine if the news is real or fake, then we are truly lost. The problem is fundamentally with education. Students need to learn from a young age to fact check and insert correct bibliography. Fake news did not win the election for Trump. We, ourselves and our lack of common sense, did.

mhalle 10y ago
The cases where it is straightforward to determine "fact" or "truth" aren't the ones that really worry me (although it remains shocking to me that clear, easily debunked falsehoods bounced around this US election cycle in a most dispiriting way). The danger lies in statements that cannot be directly verified or reasoned about. In the most extreme example, "the big lie" is a powerful propaganda tool specifically because big lies overwhelm our ability to distinguish truth from fiction. We can more effectively gauge small lies through our everyday experience, but we find big lies delivered with confidence to be impossible to reconcile. Rather than reject the lie, we also question whether such a lie could be told. In this way, we can begin to believe the lie rather than accept the reality of lying. The big lie is particularly effective in cases where we cannot verify or refute a statement from first principles or from our own life experiences. If verification of a statement requires trust of another authority, a sufficiently egregious and persistent lie can overwhelm that authority by seeding doubt and distrust about the authority itself. Education can be rendered irrelevant if we can be convinced to question what we've learned. I don't know if a relatively simple approach to detecting "fake news" like the submission uses will prove useful or sufficient. But technology clearly has a role in helping us verify facts, correctly attribute statements, and weigh opinions.

mhalle 10y ago

The cases where it is straightforward to determine "fact" or "truth" aren't the ones that really worry me (although it remains shocking to me that clear, easily debunked falsehoods bounced around this US election cycle in a most dispiriting way). The danger lies in statements that cannot be directly verified or reasoned about. In the most extreme example, "the big lie" is a powerful propaganda tool specifically because big lies overwhelm our ability to distinguish truth from fiction. We can more effectively gauge small lies through our everyday experience, but we find big lies delivered with confidence to be impossible to reconcile. Rather than reject the lie, we also question whether such a lie could be told. In this way, we can begin to believe the lie rather than accept the reality of lying. The big lie is particularly effective in cases where we cannot verify or refute a statement from first principles or from our own life experiences. If verification of a statement requires trust of another authority, a sufficiently egregious and persistent lie can overwhelm that authority by seeding doubt and distrust about the authority itself. Education can be rendered irrelevant if we can be convinced to question what we've learned. I don't know if a relatively simple approach to detecting "fake news" like the submission uses will prove useful or sufficient. But technology clearly has a role in helping us verify facts, correctly attribute statements, and weigh opinions.