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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

by 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.
  - trobertson 10y ago
    > the official narrative across the media industry - much of it literally state propaganda - has been consistently proving hallow and unreliable. > The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as sole sources. This is exactly it. The following google trends graph makes this obvious: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=fake%20news https://www.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=fake%20news
gr_thrwy 10y ago
To have done so DURING the election would have created accusations of bias. This was always going to be a big story post-election. Stories about troll factories and the Macedonian clickbait troll town were out before the election. The comment trolling phenomenon hasn't even picked up much coverage yet. That said, a lot of blame does need to be apportioned to western intelligence agencies. The idea that hostile foreign actors could (if they wanted) manipulate large segments of electorates seems to have escaped them entirely. This is especially damning since they saw how those tools were effectively deployed in the Arab Spring and elsewhere to foment revolutions (if they weren't behind those movements themselves). It is an epic fail, and joins a long list of intelligence failures.

by ttam 10y ago

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.
- trobertson 10y ago
  > the official narrative across the media industry - much of it literally state propaganda - has been consistently proving hallow and unreliable. > The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as sole sources. This is exactly it. The following google trends graph makes this obvious: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=fake%20news https://www.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=fake%20news

gr_thrwy 10y ago

To have done so DURING the election would have created accusations of bias. This was always going to be a big story post-election. Stories about troll factories and the Macedonian clickbait troll town were out before the election. The comment trolling phenomenon hasn't even picked up much coverage yet. That said, a lot of blame does need to be apportioned to western intelligence agencies. The idea that hostile foreign actors could (if they wanted) manipulate large segments of electorates seems to have escaped them entirely. This is especially damning since they saw how those tools were effectively deployed in the Arab Spring and elsewhere to foment revolutions (if they weren't behind those movements themselves). It is an epic fail, and joins a long list of intelligence failures.