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You can say that until you're blue in the face, but nobody believes it anymore. This sort of block list has already been used to justify the blocking of complet
by lj3 10y ago
You can say that until you're blue in the face, but nobody believes it anymore. This sort of block list has already been used to justify the blocking of completely legitimate (albeit right wing) news sites from Google.
The fact of the matter is this isn't a spam filter, no matter how much you want to spin it that way. Anytime I see the phrase "fake news" I know for sure there's political bias at play. That phrase didn't exist in any real way before the election.
- tptacek 10y agoSo just to be clear, you think there really is a chance the Dalai Lama endorsed both Putin and Trump?
- lj3 10y agoAre you saying people who believe odd things no longer have the right to say them? Would websites covering the million man march in the 70's have been considered 'fake news' back then? Somebody saying the Dalai Lama endorsed both Putin and Trump is producing original content and by definition isn't spam (unless they stole that content from somebody else, of course). Whether nefarious, delusional or just misinformed, do you think merely being wrong is proof enough to label an entire site as 'fake news'? Are we applying this standard to Fox News and CNN? They aired quite a few inaccuracies during the election.
- tptacek 10y agoI'm saying that sites that report as news that the Dalai Lama joined Putin in condemning Obama and Clinton as progenitors of ISIS are not worth listening to. We are not applying the same standard to Fox News and CNN, because neither of those organizations simply invented crazy stories out of whole cloth and ran them as news on multiple different sites. Here's an exercise: take the craziest story you can find on ENDTHEFED.COM (the spam site), and search for the headline. You'll see it's not just on ENDTHEFED.COM, but on several other sites. That's because it's laundered, exactly the same way webspam is, across many sites to conceal its origin and lack of originality. This is 2005-grade spam technology. You think you're arguing passionately in defense of open-minded political discourse. But you're not. You're defending webspam, run by cynical webspam farms. You should stop.
- lj3 10y agoWebspam farms are spam and should be filtered as such. The fact is 'fake news' is a separate term and is using separate filters because it's a completely separate concept that is political in nature. You claim this isn't a slippery slope, but we've already slid down it a bit. Infowars was delisted by Quantcast as 'fake news'. Whether you like Alex Jones or not, I think we can both agree his site isn't blogspam.
- tptacek 10y agoNo, they are not separate concepts. Your argument is akin to the one that says "if we block cialis spam, what's to prevent us from blocking all of commerce". Why are you defending spam? You just did it upthread, when you suggested that maybe we shouldn't be so hostile to people who believe that the Dalai Lama endorsed Trump. The authors of that story do not believe that. It's webspam.
- lj3 10y agoArgumentum ad absurdum. I expected better from someone with your reputation here on HN. And now you're not even reading what I said! Spam should be filtered as spam. 'fake news' applies to so much more than just spam, as I have already demonstrated.
- tptacek 10y agoNo, it's not reductio ad absurdum. The reason r.a.a. is a fallacy is that it introduces the false premise that the opponent must believe something ridiculous (that they clearly don't believe) for their statements to hold. But you actually just did defend the Dalai Lama site. Are we agreed that ENDTHEFED.COM should be filtered? Maybe we're just arguing past each other.
- lj3 10y agoNo, I think I'm done. You stopped engaging with my facts a while ago and switched to pure rhetoric. You've lost.