5 ms·

How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study

57 points by dudisbrie 10y ago

jflowers45 10y ago
already submitted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  And this one already has 15x as many points, so deal with it.
  - huilee 10y ago
    Actually, it's normal in HN historically to post links to previous discussions on the same link. There's no reason to get upset about such a comment.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      There are literally zero comments on those other two, so they aren't discussions.
exolymph 10y ago
I agree with something Ben Thompson said on his podcast Exponent — fake news is a problem intimated tied to Facebook as a platform and the filter bubbles that most people create for themselves. This material functions less as news, per se, and more as performative identity affirmation.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Somewhat true. There was a bit of this in the blogger bubbles of the 2000s too, but facebook does bring it to a larger audience.
tmaly 10y ago
read Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying. He lays out the bigger manipulation of the media. False blog posts get picked up by slightly bigger media sites. Then larger sites like Huffington post pick the story up. There is no validation of these stories.
anabis 10y ago
An anonymous blog entry titled 「保育園落ちた日本死ね」"Couldn't get slot for my child in nursery school, Japan should drop dead." got discussed in the Japanese parliament. The opposition party picked it up. I wish political discussions were more evidence based, but I don't know how to do it.
Jerry2 10y ago
"Fake News" is a Orwellian double-speak for alternative news. Mainstream media lost its grip on propaganda and now they're trying to push for censorship of opposing views (this past election is the proof of that). Read this interview with the founder of Snopes for the background of this [0]. Never mind the fact that "real news" organizations have been caught lying so many times and have collaborated, behind the closed doors, with Hillary's campaign, for example. [1] And they're also grouping WikiLeaks under the "fake news" category as well. I guess that's the punishment for exposing how corrupt the mainstream media really is. [0] https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not-the-problem-4ca4852b1ff0 https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not... [1] http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-hit-list-of-fake-news-sites/ http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-hit-l...
- noobermin 10y ago
  The article is specifically about an event which was a mistake. Perhaps they are making a larger statement about alternative media by posting that, but that wasn't the point of the article.
  - norikki 10y ago
    The point of the article is to discourage 'non-approved' news sources because they must all be fake like this bus thing was. Its propaganda to try and keep the NYT relevant despite their lies and deception such as promoting the war in Iraq.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      To be fair to the article, the origin of the misconception was a single tweet, which I'm not sure really counts as "non-approved" news sources. The second stage of the stories spread was reddit, which I think too isn't really a news source, or may be that's what you mean.
      - norikki 10y ago
psychometry 10y ago
Americans apparently don't learn how to think in their many years of compulsory schooling. They can apparently be shown pictures of unmarked buses and be told to believe anything you want. I really don't know how you combat that. How can you try to show these people the truth when they don't have the capacity to discern fact from fiction?
- ryhamz 10y ago
  Why make this an attack specifically against Americans? Plenty of dumb people everywhere. Fake news, state news, no news, they'll eat it up. I've basically given up on trying to show anyone any sort of truth. A third of my life is over and we're not even to the point where 10/10 people could tell you which way is up without consulting some blog or CNN. I just gotta carve the best life I can, regardless of any mob rule.
- andrepd 10y ago
  Pff, yeah, as if this was a thing only Americans specifically were susceptible to. Not to mention doing a sweeping generalisation on 300+ million people.
- noobermin 10y ago
  It isn't just that people aren't critical in their thinking, they just tend to be more critical in their thinking about things that violate their experience (read: things they disagree with) than things that they expect. For example, are you critical of the floor being solid when you get out of bed? You probably wouldn't spend extra milliseconds contemplating they hardness of the floor. Now let's say you get up and the floor is wet. You might take a moment thinking about what happened, looking up at the ceiling, whether the dog peed, did someone spill water, etc. That is an extreme example, but many people find it very difficult to critically analyze everything they come in contact with. It helps immensely that things like political opinions are controversial, so we are at least aware of other possibilities, but it is still very difficult to accept something that contradicts what is established in our minds, even when that which is established is wrong. So it isn't just that we need to be critical, it is we must be somewhat critical[0] of even things we believe when there is at least some doubt to their validity. [0] I actually wouldn't call this being critical, but rather, being open-minded to being incorrect.
necessity 10y ago
Said the newspaper spreading cheap pro-Hillary propaganda the entire election cycle.
- augustt 10y ago
  I'm curious what you would call Breitbart. Or is this a case of people saying things I don't like = propaganda?
  - colllectorof 10y ago
    I am amused by how often people these days defend NYT by comparing to to Breitbart. How the mighty have fallen... Breidbard is a right-wing propaganda outlet. There are facts somewhere in there, but they spin those fact to the utmost degree. Sadly, NYT is going down the same route right now. They used to be much more objective just several years ago.
ttam 10y ago
The amount of attention that fake news are receiving from traditional media _AFTER_ the elections is astonishing... almost as if they wanted to blame fake news for the results of the election and the failure of their own forecast Why were they not so active about this phenomenon during elections? I doubt they were unaware of it since even I saw many tweets that were obviously fake
- andrepd 10y ago
  Hindsight is 20/20, and that applies to everyone. Sorry to say, but not all journalist are incompetents like you suggest. Yeah of course after Trump "won" the election you can say "yeah of course he did it was so obvious, how come none of those stupid journalists could see it" yadda yadda. Same thing for this fake news phenomenon. Did you realize it was happening before Trump won the election and gave us all a rude wake up slap?
  - xnull2guest 10y ago
    I both realized: 1) Trump had a significant chance of winning because of a disgruntled American public voting against establishment candidates (the same reason Obama himself was elected in 2008). 2) There was "fake news" before the election. Indeed, I know a number of additional things. 3) Right now there is a crisis in faith and credibility in the US domestic news. The reason for this is that the official narrative across the media industry - much of it literally state propaganda - has been consistently proving hallow and unreliable. People are continually confused, and their attentions are jerked around as the media needs the public to be outraged/motivated/mobilized at each subsequent juncture. 4) There is huge amounts of fake news and misinformation INSIDE the industry. If you want to focus on Trump rather than national security and propaganda, take the ubiquity of the "search terms spike for how to move to Canada after Trump won primaries" with absolutely no coverage giving the context that Canada had on that day finally passed a long-in-revision piece of legislature revising US-to-Canada patriation and such search terms would have spiked regardless of the candidate in the US primaries. (Trump is not and never was a candidate for president that I would endorse.) 5) The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as sole sources.
noobermin 10y ago
Something that can help people ferret out false news stories in addition to what has been discussed is to follow-up on stories or at least to be open to follow-ups. It is definitely as difficult as being critical of your own biases, as has been suggested here before, but this is at least one other step we can take to be less swayed by information which can seemingly confirm our biases.
boneheadmed 10y ago
NYT = fake_news(newspaper)
honkhonkpants 10y ago
I think the original fake tweet author's response to this is pretty revealing. He essentially retracts his tweet, while reserving the right to repost it again, and to post such false things in the future. Let's read his own word: "While there’s no such thing as absolute certainty, I now believe that the busses that I photographed on Wednesday, November 9, were for the Tableau Conference 2016 and had no relation to the ongoing protests against President Elect Trump." In other words, he is saying in that first sentence that he doesn't rule out that his original interpretation will eventually be proven correct. There's no such thing as an absolute certainty, after all! It remains possible that the 2016 Tableau conference and its 13000+ attendees were all an elaborate ruse to cover up an astroturf protest. We can't rule anything out prematurely! But he _currently_ believes that this might not be the case, in agreement with the overwhelming evidence. Currently. "I don’t know that Donald Trump was talking about me (posted 24 hours after my post), but he’s among many with doubts" Many people doubt this fact, in the face of overwhelming evidence, because people like Eric Tucker, Donald Trump and his campaign apparatus have spent the last year priming the public to believe crazy things that aren't true. "Let’s not be afraid to say things when we aren’t completely sure" Well actually yeah, let's just be afraid to do that. "I value our ability to discuss with each other in a civil and respectful tone regardless of where our views may stand." Except for that part where he gets up on Twitter and makes stuff up about people with whom he disagrees, and posts those made-up things as facts, he is totally 100% down with respect. Very respectful. None more respectful. For reference the original tweet was "Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI"
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Here's the news story that Fox News posted in its non-opinion, non-blog, supposedly-factual reporting section of their site. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/trump-protests-intensify-as-doubts-swirl-about-spontaneity.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/trump-protests-intensif... Here's some quality facts from that article. """ But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes - a telltale sign of coordination. “Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem,” one local in the Texas capitol tweeted Wednesday, along with photos offered as evidence. [...] Rumors have also been circulating that the new batch of anti-Trump protesters has been bankrolled by individuals like billionaire liberal activist George Soros and groups like Moveon.org. “WTF, @georgesoros busing in & paying #protestors to destroy cities is domestic #terrorism. #fakeProtests #BlueLivesMatter have tough days,” read one tweet in response to the viral picture of buses in Austin. """ Fox News runs pieces using these fantasy tweets as their primary source. They also run these stories on their TV network that your mom watches all day.
narrator 10y ago
It's funny how the next big idea for the news media to get on board with starts at the New York Times and then filters it's way down the food chain through the less influential newspapers, CNN, and other mainstream news outlets, etc. It's sad that nobody is coming up with their own material much any more among the big networks. The agenda is set and it's all just a bunch or mstaphorical retweets. It's like there's some board somewhere that comes up with the next big thing we are going to try and sell to the American people on and they publish it in the NYT and then the whole mainstream dutifully jumps on board and it gets pushed and pushed by all the networks until they give up or they move onto something else. Searching news archives, one could build a nice directed timeline of the genesis and bloom through the media of these regular campaigns.
- birken 10y ago
  The NYT seemingly has written a well supported and fact checked story explaining how a verifiably false tweet from a person with few followers spread far and wide. What exactly is being pushed on the American people?
  - cryoshon 10y ago
    >What exactly is being pushed on the American people?' what about that time the NYT pushed the iraq war or that time they pushed hillary clinton or that time they pushed (insert whatever their paid PR "article" of the second is pushing for)
    - woodruffw 10y ago
      If I remember correctly, the NYT published a written apology for their role in popularizing the invasion of Iraq. Newspapers make mistakes, recognize them, and apologize publicly. That's journalistic ethics. They were also forwards about their editorial support for HRC, having declared her their candidate well before she became the presumptive DNC nominee. You might not like the fact that pro-HRC opinion pieces made their way to the top, but there's no ethical dilemma there either.
okreallywtf 10y ago
First off this is terrifying. Additionally I was realizing the other day I thought of another reason fake news might resonate so quickly with people that doesn't get brought up as much (not that I think I've had a novel idea of course, it probably isn't true or has been brought up and I haven't seen it): fake news has little nuance. Its part of what I think makes conspiracy theories so attractive, they give the impression that no matter what else is going on, someone is in control and things happen for a reason. I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people). I don't think it is entirely that fake news fits into your own viewpoint already, I have some "friends" on facebook that sometimes share fake-right news that aren't even really right wing, they are just kind of gullible (I hate to say that but they also fell for the fake wireless-charger video going around. Luckily that one was a little easier to debunk). The fake news would be so simple and digestible, without any nuance or subtlety that it might subconsciously be immediately favored over a more nuanced story. I don't dispute any of the other analyses going around but I think the simplicity of fake news can't be ignored and we need to remind our friends and family that the world is complex and very few stories are so straightforward.
- devoply 10y ago
  > I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people). But that's not true either, those two are not the only possibilities. The fact is that what happens in the world is usually due to the collective action of many different people and groups, with converging and diverging opinions. It's something like vector math, the resultant vector determines direction of decision making. The mass narrative which has been sold is that no one is in control, and things just happen. Which is also not true. Implicit conspiracy is common, when those interests converge. The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer working. HALP! Or maybe mass propaganda techniques have been democratized. HALP!
  - cryoshon 10y ago
    >The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer working. HALP! i read the opposite: the propaganda technology known as "clickbait" has become so widely disseminated that truth or factual information can't compete because it doesn't translate as smoothly. the truth and the facts are always a bit less streamlined, and are always presented in a slightly more complex way-- slightly more cognitively expensive. the human mind takes the easy path whenever it can.
madman2890 10y ago
uh, no shit
- andrepd 10y ago
  Constructive as all hell.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xnull2guest 10y ago
I remember reading a great deal on Judith Miller, the Iraqi National Conference, and the selling of the fake news out of (originally) the New York Times that propagandized the American public into invading Iraq. There's a number of ways that state narration becomes viral. The contacts that officials have with the media (the DNC leaks about media contacts pales in comparison to how the industry and government function together on a larger scale) coordinate messages, themes and ideas across distribution outlets - enabling large bodies of the American public to receive the same information (however fake it is or is not) in roughly the same time span. This messaging is able to set the boundaries for the ideological debate. For instance, the Snowden Documents were reported across media outlets under the terminology "Bulk Collection" rather than Mass Surveillance, and they all made the same arguments provided to them by the state for what was going on, what was and was not legal and what data was and was not collected. Almost all of this was fake information that went viral immediately. American citizens had discussions about whether or not Merkle and Obama were upset with one another - rather than discuss the actual contents of the leaks, which the media broadly did no technical reporting on. "Should we set up safe zones in Syria, or should we put boots on the ground?" is a safe ideological spectrum to coordinate for the American public, but it's difficult to see private-public partnership on messaging the American people to include, for example, criticism of American regime change, the US led coalitions' support of al Qaeda/Nusra/Fatah/Sham and the Islamic State Group. Both context and opinion are narrowly scoped to present particular fake perspectives that ultimately leave the American public uninformed and anxious. Virality in general, of course, is studied by the Department of Defense, and it's Strategic Communication in Social Media (SMISC) research effort has sought to create the operating conditions and strategies to control virality of information in populations (strategic communication or "stratcom" is a DoD term for propaganda, replacing the older terminology psyops). I think we're going to see evolving threats and technologies to detect, thwart and control virality more and more in the future - and people volunteering to be part of those networks of controlled information because its default, cheaper, has a better user experience, or just plain has all the other people.
WalterBright 10y ago
The trouble, of course, is who gets to decide what is "fake" and what isn't. Even history books get constantly rewritten because people change their minds about what is accurate and what isn't. It's why professional historians try to stick with original sources, for example.
- andrepd 10y ago
  What are your trying to suggest? This is objectively fake. The claim (that protesters were bussed to this place to protest against Trump) is objectively, demonstrably, false.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    It's not a big step to go from using obviously fakes to sell the idea that fake news must be stopped, to having someone decide if less obvious cases are fake or simply don't fit the agenda. Censorship of news is always sold as keeping people from being misinformed.
    - jameshart 10y ago
      Hold on a minute there, you almost disappeared down that slippery slope... All this piece is pointing out is that the difference between 'fake news' and 'real news' is the act of verification prior to publication. The thing journalists do, which makes what they publish worth paying attention to.
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        I've been personally involved in some news worthy events, and then watched the reporting of it. The professional media was invariably sloppy and flat out wrong with many of the facts of the case. And these were events where there was nothing political - the reporters simply couldn't be bothered with fact checking. It's made me skeptical ever since.
    - andrepd 10y ago
colllectorof 10y ago
How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how many will end up on HN? Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really, this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim Hunt?) Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's obvious why.) I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social media during Arab Spring. --- Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you want to count every blog post and every comment as such. Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so either. At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is. The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true. No one in the pipeline is a journalist or an editor with incentives to do fact-checking. And everyone can always link to the original post, say "Joe Shmoe posted such and such on Twitter" and thus completely relegate responsibility for the content. (Modern mainstream media pulls these kinds of stunts all the time: http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-contend-we-have-no-idea/ http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-co...)
- andrepd 10y ago
  It's almost as if there happened some event of global proportions less than 2 weeks ago that was perhaps in great measure directly caused by this phenomenon?
  - colllectorof 10y ago
    Do you really believe that seeing a picture of two buses on Facebook changed the candidate someone voted for?
jaydz 10y ago
Looks like their site is using ads from Google, their party will be over soon. edit: already banned by facebook, that was fast.
_red 10y ago
"Fake News" Yellow Cake? Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hackuser 10y ago
I have an hypothesis that I believe predicts very accurately how information will be treated in this segment of the American political right-wing (hard to define, but Fox and the WSJ editorial page to the right-wing blogosphere to talk radio to it's many participants on social media). I invite you to test it out: The NY Times is asking the wrong question; they implicitly acknowledge that it lacks predictive power: The accuracy of information does not predict if it will spread and be believed. * Ideology predicts it. If information matches their ideology, they spread it and believe it. If not, they don't. I believe this is now taken to its extreme: Ideological compliance, not factual accuracy, determines 99% of 'truth'. No matter how factually unsound, they will believe ideologically 'true' information. And no matter how factually sound, they will deny and attack ideologically 'false' material. Consider climate change, as an easy example - factually undeniable but ideologically unsound. It's a full-fledged ideological movement, which seems an anachronism in this educated age, happening right under our noses.. I've been reading about Medieval philosoph, and I recognized the pattern. It's a per-Enlightenment approach, placing ideology (back then it was mainly religious dogma rather than political) ahead of reason as the test for truth. Note also the attacks on sources of factual credibility, such as serious journalists, intellectuals, academia, scientists, education in general, etc. Those sources provide factual accuracy, but ideological 'falsehoods'. Again, it's in some ways similar to what was experienced in the Enlightenment. Finally, note that leaders of this political group prove themselves not by knowledge, leadership, good decisions, etc., but by saying things that are both crazy by normal standards but acceptable by the ideology's standards - their and their followers priority is that they prove their commitment to the ideology. .... Finally a couple caveats: 1) In a way it might seem obvious because everyone tends to believe things that meet their preconceived notions, but this is far more extreme - usually accuracy does have a large influence on people, including probably most people reading this. 2) Yes, some people behave similarly on other parts of the political spectrum, but the reality is that in 2016 there is relatively very large and very powerful movement on the right - IMHO it just elected a President and has corrupted major U.S. institutions such as the FBI.
mythrwy 10y ago
In the absence of real news fake news will flourish. (turns out nature does indeed abhor a vacuum). Censorship isn't a workable answer. The answer is for mainstream media to attempt to regain credibility by providing non-biased reporting and leaving off the propaganda. This isn't an ideological statement either so please don't misconstrue. If you prefer, think of it as a strategy. BTW.. I'm personally am sick of the "fake news" whining. I suspect I'm not alone in this. If it was a problem it was a problem a year ago. I generally don't agree with Zuckerburg but in this case I do. Fake news didn't win the election. So please just stop it. Threatening forms of censorship isn't going to win more respect. Try behaving respectfully. _Last article about fake news I intend to ever read or comment on_
hodgesrm 10y ago
The focus on the corrosive effects of money on the political system has hidden what looks like the real threat to the American constitution: the Internet. The founders understood the threat of monied interests pretty well--after all the problem was described by historians of the late Roman republic like Sallust. The mechanics of communication in social networks are completely different from anything in the classical world. It's a genuine paradigm shift. Does anyone remember the Foundation Trilogy by Asimov? There's a point in the story where the calculations of the future developed by Hari Seldon are derailed by the arrival of the Mule, a black swan event that could not be predicted easily. It's hard to understand paradigm shifts when they are happening but it feels as if the US has hit a similar point where an unforeseeable event overthrows the stable equilibrium of the past 225 years. What happens next is hard to guess but the range of outcomes seems pretty broad. I don't think you can rule out the breakup of the United States.
akytt 10y ago
Snow Crash combined with Selfish Gene and infection theory provides a neat mental model of what's happening. Basically you get a constant bacground of competing memes all the time. But since the competition is fierce, none of them becomes too powerful. The elections made a lot of people more susceptible to infections and ideas become to spread. The social media provides the number of contacts necessary as well as increasing the transmission likelyhood as it forms echo chambers. It all makes sense.
ManlyBread 10y ago
Strange, so many fake news about Trump and he still managed to win the election somehow.
ry4n413 10y ago
This entire thing is a fucking joke... Wait a second! Ahhh... I see now, got your tin-foil hats on? Make sure you stock up because four years is a long time. Assholes.

57 points by dudisbrie 10y ago

already submitted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981

honkhonkpants 10y ago
And this one already has 15x as many points, so deal with it.
- huilee 10y ago
  Actually, it's normal in HN historically to post links to previous discussions on the same link. There's no reason to get upset about such a comment.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    There are literally zero comments on those other two, so they aren't discussions.

exolymph 10y ago

I agree with something Ben Thompson said on his podcast Exponent — fake news is a problem intimated tied to Facebook as a platform and the filter bubbles that most people create for themselves. This material functions less as news, per se, and more as performative identity affirmation.

noobermin 10y ago
Somewhat true. There was a bit of this in the blogger bubbles of the 2000s too, but facebook does bring it to a larger audience.

tmaly 10y ago

read Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying. He lays out the bigger manipulation of the media. False blog posts get picked up by slightly bigger media sites. Then larger sites like Huffington post pick the story up. There is no validation of these stories.

anabis 10y ago

An anonymous blog entry titled 「保育園落ちた日本死ね」"Couldn't get slot for my child in nursery school, Japan should drop dead." got discussed in the Japanese parliament. The opposition party picked it up. I wish political discussions were more evidence based, but I don't know how to do it.

Jerry2 10y ago

"Fake News" is a Orwellian double-speak for alternative news. Mainstream media lost its grip on propaganda and now they're trying to push for censorship of opposing views (this past election is the proof of that). Read this interview with the founder of Snopes for the background of this [0]. Never mind the fact that "real news" organizations have been caught lying so many times and have collaborated, behind the closed doors, with Hillary's campaign, for example. [1] And they're also grouping WikiLeaks under the "fake news" category as well. I guess that's the punishment for exposing how corrupt the mainstream media really is. [0] https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not-the-problem-4ca4852b1ff0 https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not... [1] http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-hit-list-of-fake-news-sites/ http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-hit-l...

noobermin 10y ago
The article is specifically about an event which was a mistake. Perhaps they are making a larger statement about alternative media by posting that, but that wasn't the point of the article.
- norikki 10y ago
  The point of the article is to discourage 'non-approved' news sources because they must all be fake like this bus thing was. Its propaganda to try and keep the NYT relevant despite their lies and deception such as promoting the war in Iraq.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    To be fair to the article, the origin of the misconception was a single tweet, which I'm not sure really counts as "non-approved" news sources. The second stage of the stories spread was reddit, which I think too isn't really a news source, or may be that's what you mean.
    - norikki 10y ago

psychometry 10y ago

Americans apparently don't learn how to think in their many years of compulsory schooling. They can apparently be shown pictures of unmarked buses and be told to believe anything you want. I really don't know how you combat that. How can you try to show these people the truth when they don't have the capacity to discern fact from fiction?

ryhamz 10y ago
Why make this an attack specifically against Americans? Plenty of dumb people everywhere. Fake news, state news, no news, they'll eat it up. I've basically given up on trying to show anyone any sort of truth. A third of my life is over and we're not even to the point where 10/10 people could tell you which way is up without consulting some blog or CNN. I just gotta carve the best life I can, regardless of any mob rule.
andrepd 10y ago
Pff, yeah, as if this was a thing only Americans specifically were susceptible to. Not to mention doing a sweeping generalisation on 300+ million people.
noobermin 10y ago
It isn't just that people aren't critical in their thinking, they just tend to be more critical in their thinking about things that violate their experience (read: things they disagree with) than things that they expect. For example, are you critical of the floor being solid when you get out of bed? You probably wouldn't spend extra milliseconds contemplating they hardness of the floor. Now let's say you get up and the floor is wet. You might take a moment thinking about what happened, looking up at the ceiling, whether the dog peed, did someone spill water, etc. That is an extreme example, but many people find it very difficult to critically analyze everything they come in contact with. It helps immensely that things like political opinions are controversial, so we are at least aware of other possibilities, but it is still very difficult to accept something that contradicts what is established in our minds, even when that which is established is wrong. So it isn't just that we need to be critical, it is we must be somewhat critical[0] of even things we believe when there is at least some doubt to their validity. [0] I actually wouldn't call this being critical, but rather, being open-minded to being incorrect.

necessity 10y ago

Said the newspaper spreading cheap pro-Hillary propaganda the entire election cycle.

augustt 10y ago
I'm curious what you would call Breitbart. Or is this a case of people saying things I don't like = propaganda?
- colllectorof 10y ago
  I am amused by how often people these days defend NYT by comparing to to Breitbart. How the mighty have fallen... Breidbard is a right-wing propaganda outlet. There are facts somewhere in there, but they spin those fact to the utmost degree. Sadly, NYT is going down the same route right now. They used to be much more objective just several years ago.

ttam 10y ago

The amount of attention that fake news are receiving from traditional media _AFTER_ the elections is astonishing... almost as if they wanted to blame fake news for the results of the election and the failure of their own forecast Why were they not so active about this phenomenon during elections? I doubt they were unaware of it since even I saw many tweets that were obviously fake

andrepd 10y ago
Hindsight is 20/20, and that applies to everyone. Sorry to say, but not all journalist are incompetents like you suggest. Yeah of course after Trump "won" the election you can say "yeah of course he did it was so obvious, how come none of those stupid journalists could see it" yadda yadda. Same thing for this fake news phenomenon. Did you realize it was happening before Trump won the election and gave us all a rude wake up slap?
- xnull2guest 10y ago
  I both realized: 1) Trump had a significant chance of winning because of a disgruntled American public voting against establishment candidates (the same reason Obama himself was elected in 2008). 2) There was "fake news" before the election. Indeed, I know a number of additional things. 3) Right now there is a crisis in faith and credibility in the US domestic news. The reason for this is that the official narrative across the media industry - much of it literally state propaganda - has been consistently proving hallow and unreliable. People are continually confused, and their attentions are jerked around as the media needs the public to be outraged/motivated/mobilized at each subsequent juncture. 4) There is huge amounts of fake news and misinformation INSIDE the industry. If you want to focus on Trump rather than national security and propaganda, take the ubiquity of the "search terms spike for how to move to Canada after Trump won primaries" with absolutely no coverage giving the context that Canada had on that day finally passed a long-in-revision piece of legislature revising US-to-Canada patriation and such search terms would have spiked regardless of the candidate in the US primaries. (Trump is not and never was a candidate for president that I would endorse.) 5) The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as sole sources.

noobermin 10y ago

Something that can help people ferret out false news stories in addition to what has been discussed is to follow-up on stories or at least to be open to follow-ups. It is definitely as difficult as being critical of your own biases, as has been suggested here before, but this is at least one other step we can take to be less swayed by information which can seemingly confirm our biases.

boneheadmed 10y ago

NYT = fake_news(newspaper)

honkhonkpants 10y ago

I think the original fake tweet author's response to this is pretty revealing. He essentially retracts his tweet, while reserving the right to repost it again, and to post such false things in the future. Let's read his own word: "While there’s no such thing as absolute certainty, I now believe that the busses that I photographed on Wednesday, November 9, were for the Tableau Conference 2016 and had no relation to the ongoing protests against President Elect Trump." In other words, he is saying in that first sentence that he doesn't rule out that his original interpretation will eventually be proven correct. There's no such thing as an absolute certainty, after all! It remains possible that the 2016 Tableau conference and its 13000+ attendees were all an elaborate ruse to cover up an astroturf protest. We can't rule anything out prematurely! But he _currently_ believes that this might not be the case, in agreement with the overwhelming evidence. Currently. "I don’t know that Donald Trump was talking about me (posted 24 hours after my post), but he’s among many with doubts" Many people doubt this fact, in the face of overwhelming evidence, because people like Eric Tucker, Donald Trump and his campaign apparatus have spent the last year priming the public to believe crazy things that aren't true. "Let’s not be afraid to say things when we aren’t completely sure" Well actually yeah, let's just be afraid to do that. "I value our ability to discuss with each other in a civil and respectful tone regardless of where our views may stand." Except for that part where he gets up on Twitter and makes stuff up about people with whom he disagrees, and posts those made-up things as facts, he is totally 100% down with respect. Very respectful. None more respectful. For reference the original tweet was "Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI"

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Here's the news story that Fox News posted in its non-opinion, non-blog, supposedly-factual reporting section of their site. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/trump-protests-intensify-as-doubts-swirl-about-spontaneity.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/trump-protests-intensif... Here's some quality facts from that article. """ But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes - a telltale sign of coordination. “Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem,” one local in the Texas capitol tweeted Wednesday, along with photos offered as evidence. [...] Rumors have also been circulating that the new batch of anti-Trump protesters has been bankrolled by individuals like billionaire liberal activist George Soros and groups like Moveon.org. “WTF, @georgesoros busing in & paying #protestors to destroy cities is domestic #terrorism. #fakeProtests #BlueLivesMatter have tough days,” read one tweet in response to the viral picture of buses in Austin. """ Fox News runs pieces using these fantasy tweets as their primary source. They also run these stories on their TV network that your mom watches all day.

narrator 10y ago

It's funny how the next big idea for the news media to get on board with starts at the New York Times and then filters it's way down the food chain through the less influential newspapers, CNN, and other mainstream news outlets, etc. It's sad that nobody is coming up with their own material much any more among the big networks. The agenda is set and it's all just a bunch or mstaphorical retweets. It's like there's some board somewhere that comes up with the next big thing we are going to try and sell to the American people on and they publish it in the NYT and then the whole mainstream dutifully jumps on board and it gets pushed and pushed by all the networks until they give up or they move onto something else. Searching news archives, one could build a nice directed timeline of the genesis and bloom through the media of these regular campaigns.

birken 10y ago
The NYT seemingly has written a well supported and fact checked story explaining how a verifiably false tweet from a person with few followers spread far and wide. What exactly is being pushed on the American people?
- cryoshon 10y ago
  >What exactly is being pushed on the American people?' what about that time the NYT pushed the iraq war or that time they pushed hillary clinton or that time they pushed (insert whatever their paid PR "article" of the second is pushing for)
  - woodruffw 10y ago
    If I remember correctly, the NYT published a written apology for their role in popularizing the invasion of Iraq. Newspapers make mistakes, recognize them, and apologize publicly. That's journalistic ethics. They were also forwards about their editorial support for HRC, having declared her their candidate well before she became the presumptive DNC nominee. You might not like the fact that pro-HRC opinion pieces made their way to the top, but there's no ethical dilemma there either.

okreallywtf 10y ago

First off this is terrifying. Additionally I was realizing the other day I thought of another reason fake news might resonate so quickly with people that doesn't get brought up as much (not that I think I've had a novel idea of course, it probably isn't true or has been brought up and I haven't seen it): fake news has little nuance. Its part of what I think makes conspiracy theories so attractive, they give the impression that no matter what else is going on, someone is in control and things happen for a reason. I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people). I don't think it is entirely that fake news fits into your own viewpoint already, I have some "friends" on facebook that sometimes share fake-right news that aren't even really right wing, they are just kind of gullible (I hate to say that but they also fell for the fake wireless-charger video going around. Luckily that one was a little easier to debunk). The fake news would be so simple and digestible, without any nuance or subtlety that it might subconsciously be immediately favored over a more nuanced story. I don't dispute any of the other analyses going around but I think the simplicity of fake news can't be ignored and we need to remind our friends and family that the world is complex and very few stories are so straightforward.

devoply 10y ago
> I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people). But that's not true either, those two are not the only possibilities. The fact is that what happens in the world is usually due to the collective action of many different people and groups, with converging and diverging opinions. It's something like vector math, the resultant vector determines direction of decision making. The mass narrative which has been sold is that no one is in control, and things just happen. Which is also not true. Implicit conspiracy is common, when those interests converge. The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer working. HALP! Or maybe mass propaganda techniques have been democratized. HALP!
- cryoshon 10y ago
  >The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer working. HALP! i read the opposite: the propaganda technology known as "clickbait" has become so widely disseminated that truth or factual information can't compete because it doesn't translate as smoothly. the truth and the facts are always a bit less streamlined, and are always presented in a slightly more complex way-- slightly more cognitively expensive. the human mind takes the easy path whenever it can.

madman2890 10y ago

uh, no shit

andrepd 10y ago
Constructive as all hell.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

xnull2guest 10y ago

I remember reading a great deal on Judith Miller, the Iraqi National Conference, and the selling of the fake news out of (originally) the New York Times that propagandized the American public into invading Iraq. There's a number of ways that state narration becomes viral. The contacts that officials have with the media (the DNC leaks about media contacts pales in comparison to how the industry and government function together on a larger scale) coordinate messages, themes and ideas across distribution outlets - enabling large bodies of the American public to receive the same information (however fake it is or is not) in roughly the same time span. This messaging is able to set the boundaries for the ideological debate. For instance, the Snowden Documents were reported across media outlets under the terminology "Bulk Collection" rather than Mass Surveillance, and they all made the same arguments provided to them by the state for what was going on, what was and was not legal and what data was and was not collected. Almost all of this was fake information that went viral immediately. American citizens had discussions about whether or not Merkle and Obama were upset with one another - rather than discuss the actual contents of the leaks, which the media broadly did no technical reporting on. "Should we set up safe zones in Syria, or should we put boots on the ground?" is a safe ideological spectrum to coordinate for the American public, but it's difficult to see private-public partnership on messaging the American people to include, for example, criticism of American regime change, the US led coalitions' support of al Qaeda/Nusra/Fatah/Sham and the Islamic State Group. Both context and opinion are narrowly scoped to present particular fake perspectives that ultimately leave the American public uninformed and anxious. Virality in general, of course, is studied by the Department of Defense, and it's Strategic Communication in Social Media (SMISC) research effort has sought to create the operating conditions and strategies to control virality of information in populations (strategic communication or "stratcom" is a DoD term for propaganda, replacing the older terminology psyops). I think we're going to see evolving threats and technologies to detect, thwart and control virality more and more in the future - and people volunteering to be part of those networks of controlled information because its default, cheaper, has a better user experience, or just plain has all the other people.

WalterBright 10y ago

The trouble, of course, is who gets to decide what is "fake" and what isn't. Even history books get constantly rewritten because people change their minds about what is accurate and what isn't. It's why professional historians try to stick with original sources, for example.

andrepd 10y ago
What are your trying to suggest? This is objectively fake. The claim (that protesters were bussed to this place to protest against Trump) is objectively, demonstrably, false.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  It's not a big step to go from using obviously fakes to sell the idea that fake news must be stopped, to having someone decide if less obvious cases are fake or simply don't fit the agenda. Censorship of news is always sold as keeping people from being misinformed.
  - jameshart 10y ago
    Hold on a minute there, you almost disappeared down that slippery slope... All this piece is pointing out is that the difference between 'fake news' and 'real news' is the act of verification prior to publication. The thing journalists do, which makes what they publish worth paying attention to.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      I've been personally involved in some news worthy events, and then watched the reporting of it. The professional media was invariably sloppy and flat out wrong with many of the facts of the case. And these were events where there was nothing political - the reporters simply couldn't be bothered with fact checking. It's made me skeptical ever since.
  - andrepd 10y ago

colllectorof 10y ago

How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how many will end up on HN? Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really, this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim Hunt?) Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's obvious why.) I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social media during Arab Spring. --- Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you want to count every blog post and every comment as such. Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so either. At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is. The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true. No one in the pipeline is a journalist or an editor with incentives to do fact-checking. And everyone can always link to the original post, say "Joe Shmoe posted such and such on Twitter" and thus completely relegate responsibility for the content. (Modern mainstream media pulls these kinds of stunts all the time: http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-contend-we-have-no-idea/ http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-co...)

andrepd 10y ago
It's almost as if there happened some event of global proportions less than 2 weeks ago that was perhaps in great measure directly caused by this phenomenon?
- colllectorof 10y ago
  Do you really believe that seeing a picture of two buses on Facebook changed the candidate someone voted for?

jaydz 10y ago

Looks like their site is using ads from Google, their party will be over soon. edit: already banned by facebook, that was fast.

_red 10y ago

"Fake News" Yellow Cake? Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

hackuser 10y ago

I have an hypothesis that I believe predicts very accurately how information will be treated in this segment of the American political right-wing (hard to define, but Fox and the WSJ editorial page to the right-wing blogosphere to talk radio to it's many participants on social media). I invite you to test it out: The NY Times is asking the wrong question; they implicitly acknowledge that it lacks predictive power: The accuracy of information does not predict if it will spread and be believed. * Ideology predicts it. If information matches their ideology, they spread it and believe it. If not, they don't. I believe this is now taken to its extreme: Ideological compliance, not factual accuracy, determines 99% of 'truth'. No matter how factually unsound, they will believe ideologically 'true' information. And no matter how factually sound, they will deny and attack ideologically 'false' material. Consider climate change, as an easy example - factually undeniable but ideologically unsound. It's a full-fledged ideological movement, which seems an anachronism in this educated age, happening right under our noses.. I've been reading about Medieval philosoph, and I recognized the pattern. It's a per-Enlightenment approach, placing ideology (back then it was mainly religious dogma rather than political) ahead of reason as the test for truth. Note also the attacks on sources of factual credibility, such as serious journalists, intellectuals, academia, scientists, education in general, etc. Those sources provide factual accuracy, but ideological 'falsehoods'. Again, it's in some ways similar to what was experienced in the Enlightenment. Finally, note that leaders of this political group prove themselves not by knowledge, leadership, good decisions, etc., but by saying things that are both crazy by normal standards but acceptable by the ideology's standards - their and their followers priority is that they prove their commitment to the ideology. .... Finally a couple caveats: 1) In a way it might seem obvious because everyone tends to believe things that meet their preconceived notions, but this is far more extreme - usually accuracy does have a large influence on people, including probably most people reading this. 2) Yes, some people behave similarly on other parts of the political spectrum, but the reality is that in 2016 there is relatively very large and very powerful movement on the right - IMHO it just elected a President and has corrupted major U.S. institutions such as the FBI.

mythrwy 10y ago

In the absence of real news fake news will flourish. (turns out nature does indeed abhor a vacuum). Censorship isn't a workable answer. The answer is for mainstream media to attempt to regain credibility by providing non-biased reporting and leaving off the propaganda. This isn't an ideological statement either so please don't misconstrue. If you prefer, think of it as a strategy. BTW.. I'm personally am sick of the "fake news" whining. I suspect I'm not alone in this. If it was a problem it was a problem a year ago. I generally don't agree with Zuckerburg but in this case I do. Fake news didn't win the election. So please just stop it. Threatening forms of censorship isn't going to win more respect. Try behaving respectfully. _Last article about fake news I intend to ever read or comment on_

hodgesrm 10y ago

The focus on the corrosive effects of money on the political system has hidden what looks like the real threat to the American constitution: the Internet. The founders understood the threat of monied interests pretty well--after all the problem was described by historians of the late Roman republic like Sallust. The mechanics of communication in social networks are completely different from anything in the classical world. It's a genuine paradigm shift. Does anyone remember the Foundation Trilogy by Asimov? There's a point in the story where the calculations of the future developed by Hari Seldon are derailed by the arrival of the Mule, a black swan event that could not be predicted easily. It's hard to understand paradigm shifts when they are happening but it feels as if the US has hit a similar point where an unforeseeable event overthrows the stable equilibrium of the past 225 years. What happens next is hard to guess but the range of outcomes seems pretty broad. I don't think you can rule out the breakup of the United States.

akytt 10y ago

Snow Crash combined with Selfish Gene and infection theory provides a neat mental model of what's happening. Basically you get a constant bacground of competing memes all the time. But since the competition is fierce, none of them becomes too powerful. The elections made a lot of people more susceptible to infections and ideas become to spread. The social media provides the number of contacts necessary as well as increasing the transmission likelyhood as it forms echo chambers. It all makes sense.

ManlyBread 10y ago

Strange, so many fake news about Trump and he still managed to win the election somehow.

ry4n413 10y ago

This entire thing is a fucking joke... Wait a second! Ahhh... I see now, got your tin-foil hats on? Make sure you stock up because four years is a long time. Assholes.