10 ms·

According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem

60 points by Yhippa 10y ago

rdtsc 10y ago
> the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. Mass media has mostly lost their grip on manufacturing consent. It was effectively used in the past for that. The Democrats have relied on it too heavily. That was the old school strategy - those who control the media, control the outcome. In this case it backfired on them. The more money, manipulation and control they poured into it, the more insiders they had, the less trustworthy they became. Instead of stopping and re-evaluating, they doubled down on lies, which made them even less credible. One thing they missed is that to be effective, they had to keep up appearances of some nominal impartiality. In a way they are one of the primary reason this election was lost. They manufactured Kool-Aid, which is fine, that's their job, but then instead of giving it to the Trump supporters, they gave it to Hillary supporters. They were showing all blue maps with a Hillary landslide. There was no other choice, of course, after endorsing her openly for months, they'd never show an all red map. Even if somehow they had one projected. (They didn't. USC / LA Times poll predicted a win for Trump, and it is an interesting reason why, but that for another discussion...) The idea perhaps was to discourage undecided/Trump voters by showing that candidate has 1% chance of winning, so why bother voting. In the end it had the exact opposite effect. They showed a Hillary landslide and so Hillary supporters stayed home. Why bother putting your shoes on or staying in line if it is landslide anyway. So then last week everyone started talking about "Fake News" almost overnight. All was good, nobody likes lizard people, everyone thinks that's crazy. But then it quickly turned into a label that gets thrown at "news I don't agree with". Just a few days ago, a story about an oil field and Texas and it seems they got the estimates wrong or the model for the cost was off and it immediately got slapped with the label of "Fake News". In a certain way it is not surprising. Throwing labels around is basically the new way of conducting discourse. One can blame Twitter for it (I am sure there is some study already on how Twitter affects discussion and exchange of ideas). You can say so much in a 140 characters so what you do is throw a label at the end "Fake News" / "Soros" / "Sexism" and you're done, point proven.
- csydas 10y ago
  I don't think some of these points are necessarily accurate. Speaking generally, "fake news" is a real problem, though a more accurate term would perhaps be "poorly vetted" news. Large media outlets feel the need and pressure to compete with the rapidity of social media for news since prior to doing so, the large media outlets appared to be lagging behind "real news". I think that it's better to say that we're still not sure how to handle and adjust to a new world where data updates are instanateous for the general population. The traditional gatekeepers have lost a lot of power and many new ones have risen up in their place - the new gatekeepers have various degrees of fact checking and integrity, so they can produce more content and faster, meaning that anyone regardless of affiliation can find nearly instant authoritative sources on just about anything they care to in a matter of seconds, with search bubbles catering to their biases. Fake news in the context of it being poorly researches and poorly vetted is a real problem. We don't have the system of checks that journalism used to have for instaneous news pieces, and it's not something you can mine out either - it requires some actual fact checking; did this person really say this? what is the context of the statement? was the piece legitimate or satire? It's not necessarily a disinformation battle, no, but man, it's really hard to sort through a lot of the information out there, especially when the majority of the populous is used to having a few definitive sources they can rely on for good hard hitting journalism.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    > Seaking generally, "fake news" is a real problem, though a more accurate term would perhaps be "poorly vetted" news. Undoubtedly. However I agree with Snopes here in that this was not "the" problem of why this election was lost. > I think that it's better to say that we're still not sure how to handle and adjust to a new world where data updates are instanateous for the general population Agree. I see that the landscape is changing quickly but how it is changing or the exactly reason need to be figured out. > Fake news in the context of it being poorly researches and poorly vetted is a real problem. Yeah, I like that Google and Facebook have started to attack the problem. I am a bit suspicious of those using this label all too quickly as it dilutes its meaning. > but man, it's really hard to sort through a lot of the information out there, especially when the majority of the populous is used to having a few definitive sources they can rely on for good hard hitting journalism. Agree. The lack of trust is the issue. I am guessing that's why the appeal of Wikileaks and email. Those can obviously be editorialized based on what's released and what isn't. However what is released can be considered as a reliable source. So in this environment of uncertainty, many probably saw raw email texts as one of the few instances of "valid" news (for better or for worse).
mgiannopoulos 10y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967630
whybroke 10y ago
A parallel false equivalence: snopes sometimes makes mistakes therefore it's as bad as breitbart. And the idea that misinformation has no impact is the equivalent of saying advertisement has no impact. Or propaganda. What is happening is an attempt to cast doubt on the genuine information sources critical to a well informed electorate. The same way doubt has been successfully cast on climate change and natural selection. The word 'Lugenpresse' was used to do this in a previous generation. That anyone genuinely believes the implication of this, that the entire free press of all democracies world wide is conspiring against the American people while Putin's press and tabloid websites are their sole champion, could not possibly be more absurd.
verroq 10y ago
Snopes always had a heavy liberal bias.
- yosito 10y ago
  Truth always had a heavy liberal bias.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    Which is false, and why Trump won, even though he's rough-shod, crude, and otherwise not suited to being president. Most of MSM has a soft-left bias and a lot of it is hard left - and not in the classical 'socialist' manner (i.e. representing working class) - they're now fully onto race and identity issues, and enforcing PC culture. There was an article in the Guardian today - written by a woman, lambasting how rude and crude and disgusting the male habit of 'stag parties' (UK bachelor parties) are. The comments section (and this is a fairly left wing site) lambasted the author, because were the roles reversed, she'd be chastised, she's never been to a stag, and the female version of stags are equally as bad. But in the Guardian, they need an article every day to hate on white men. Even their readers called them out. Every day there is an article in the Huffington Post or the Guardian or MSNBC that could very well be in the Onion. They are easily just as bad as anything alt-right. But in the article - only the 'alt right' was mentioned as being of poor quality. Again - this is obvious bias. Fox News - at least the news items (not the commentary, which is bad) is actually looking reasonable these days, which is shocking to me. Watch the local news only for 10 days. You'll feel something is 'too normal'. It's relaxing. It's just the news - that's it. Then - when you turn back to cable news - you'll realize how full of spin and ideology it is. The only reason I watch CNN is to try to grasp what kind of spin they are applying, and why. CNN is soft about it (Fox and MSNBC are blatant), and probably the trickiest, but it's there if you look for it.
    - mark_edward 10y ago
      Local news is pretty terrible for being an informed citizen. For example, people who watch it regularly dramatically overestimate the prevalence of crime in their local communities. This alone probably causes immense human suffering through our injustice system and jails
digi_owl 10y ago
The failing in the end is that the west refuse to talk class. We are very very happy to talk gender or race, but not class. Class is very much forbidden.
- kurttheviking 10y ago
  "forbidden" might be a bit strong; Pro Publica has had a variety of articles on this over time. A recent retrospective one: https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-class https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-... Or, was there some other aspect of class you feel is broadly unaddressed?
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    The typical mantra form the big parties in the west is a mix of "we are all middle class" and "education fixes everything". Thus when industry workers etc see their livelihood go out the window because of pressures from a globalizes market, and more center-left politicians seems willfully blind to the issue, said workers end up voting right wing. Because although the message is at its core racist, the talking points alt least touch of the problem of jobs etc.
Lxr 10y ago
This has probably been said before, but I feel the decline of quality reporting and rise of clickbait is largely due to the SV business model of "make everything free and support it via advertising". The only thing that matters in this model is engagement, therefore reporters and publishers optimize for engagement only, and clickbait is the natural consequence. I am not quite sure why we can't operate like the rest of the world and charge for services - as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers.
- edblarney 10y ago
  " as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers." Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through. Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else. Arguably, some news outfits were designed as profit making entities, and 'news' was just a vehicle to that profit. CNN is a relatively latecomer in the news world, and because they were formed primarily as a cable news channel ... they went about their business very differently that more classical print houses. One thing we don't talk about enough: 'information consumption habits'. People checked out the news every day to keep up. Now - they can read FB/Instagram and keep up with things that are possibly more important to them in their lives. So - the new social opportunity is literally grabbing 'waking hours' from regular news sites. Bloggers - good or bad - can report on events in some cases somewhat reliably - and so there are other outlets. If you live in Toronto, you used to buy the 'Toronto Star' or 'Globe and Mail'. Now you can read NYT, Guardian, Washington Post - so there's a degree of consolidation as well. Sadly, it's a mess and I hope someone can figure it out :)
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through. Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else. So maybe the problem is not bad news reporting, but the scarcity of highly educated and/or conscientious readership? That is, maybe we should fix the education and the citizenry -- else people won't make much out of well written news anyway, if not for anything else, because they wont be able to evaluate them...
erdevs 10y ago
This is a misleading title (both on Backchannel and here). I have no idea why the author chose to use it (other than as clickbait) when it misrepresents the content of the actual article. The article points out how much verifiably false information there is on the internet and how quickly it can spread. Clearly this is not good. The article itself and Snopes' editor, the primary source for of quotes in the article, both agree with that. And the actual quote from Snopes' editor is that social media isn't the problem. She does not say that fake news isn't the problem. What we should say is that all aspects mentioned in the article are problematic: the decline in the media, the rampant levels of fake news on the internet and the way social media can so quickly and pervasively spread patently false information. None of them are necessarily the problem alone, but they are each serious problems and all the moreso when in tandem as they are today.
- T2_t2 10y ago
  Except... the election was super close. There wasn't really a clear trend of much of anything when it comes to making people vote one way or tother. The rise of the combination of third Party vote - Gary Johnson and Jill Stein + other was over 4% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... - and less overall votes says that, far from people seeing their own side, people didn't like ANY side. The question should really be "What made Blacks and Latinos turn out in lower numbers, and what made so many people vote Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or other, especially in swing states?" That doesn't seem to be the question anyone wants to look at, and I reckon that's the real story here: how invested in the two party system, and their own survival, the media is.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    > less overall votes Those also came about due to stricter limits on how to id oneself for voting, and ... well, either retarded or hostile (your choice) voting office setups that forced people to wait far longer than reasonable to be able to vote. Both of these very effectively keep particularly economically weaker voters out of the game. Completely my personal opinion: Until the US moves voting onto a weekend and makes it a multi-day affair, and makes affordable unified country-wide id available and usable, the US democracy doesn't deserve the label.
jack9 10y ago
When you alter you contradict your own fact checking to include partisan interpretations and equivocation to bolster an agenda, you lose credibility. Snopes is no longer a wholly credible source for fact checking when they don't stick to facts as stated BY SNOPES. Now I have to suspect every analysis on editorializing. Snopes provides their own custom narrative on judgement re: http://www.snopes.com/hillary-.. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-... [snopes.com] - she did laugh, she did plea bargain him out, etc. Don't say false when it's true, but you are trying to meet your own overall conclusion. It really soured me. Yes, the story is basically false, but the fact checking there is factually incorrect by their own measure. Her behavior isn't all that strange among defense attorneys (backpedal apologizing), so whatever. That being said, the idea of "fake news" is tricky subject when real news can be spun so hard. Facts get blurred when put together in unexpected ways to form a new headline which is almost always to meet some agenda. On the other hand, a news story always starts with a perceived context, so which is more correct? The more factually correct or the more coherent/recent narrative?
- tomjakubowski 10y ago
  Your link http://www.snopes.com/hillary-. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-.. 404s, FYI.
  - jack9 10y ago
    Dunno what happened. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-laughed-about-it/ http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-lau...
Beltiras 10y ago
Sometimes Snopes gets it wrong too. Read this article by Kevin Folta: http://kfolta.blogspot.is/2016/11/snopes-claims-about-glyphosate-in-food.html http://kfolta.blogspot.is/2016/11/snopes-claims-about-glypho...
- vidarh 10y ago
  ... though they've thankfully already corrected it: http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cancerous-herbicide-in-food/ http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cance...
bakhy 10y ago
if you'll forgive a bit of cynicism, it turns out, in hindsight, that the correct maxim should be: "information wants to be false" ;)
msravi 10y ago
The gist of the article is not that fake news is not the problem, but that people have lost faith in all media, including mainstream media. > The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. So basically, now, people give about as much credence to an established media article as to a social media article - which is a good thing in my opinion, given that established media are no longer vetting their sources as they should, are hypocritical about their opinions, and are instead giving in to the biases that they hold in their own echo chambers. Social media simply provides an alternative, equally biased opinion from the opposite end.
- NumberCruncher 10y ago
  >> So basically, now, people give about as much credence to an established media article as to a social media article "established media articles" are as good as FB hoaxes. Sad but true.
tomohawk 10y ago
The article makes it seem like a lot of these stories are just the result of reporters being too busy. That may be, but that leaves out other reasons such as the revolving door allowing partisan operators to run newsrooms, outright collusion with candidates, etc. Here's a more "haha, only serious" take: http://freebeacon.com/culture/news-thats-fit-fake/ http://freebeacon.com/culture/news-thats-fit-fake/
jonathanstrange 10y ago
I'm not going to comment on the same story twice. I shit, I just did.
throw2016 10y ago
I think this is as good a time as any to reflect on the news industry and their business model. I think the word 'news' itself is becoming somewhat nebulous and this is important as it relates to the value that news organizations can extract from a paying readership. Traditionally information was power and the ability to influence large numbers people was valuable and this unique power was what made the news industry important and also made it prone to abuse and control. The free press is supposed to play a critical role in a democracy but as a business it can't perform that function and is reduced to currying favours, pushing agendas and journalists trying to be part of an inner circle so it can't play the role we think it plays or should play. Best case they are just vehicles for advertisements but worst case they are colluding to manipulate the public. Journalists don't go out randomly on the road to get news, various government departments, public organizations and businesses reach out and brief reporters. 'News' comes to them. Their power has tradionally come from having exclusive access to eyeballs which could fund having more reporters and thus 'more news' but that has become irrelevant with the internet. I don't think people are willing anymore to pay for briefings from various public departments and private businesses with some opinion thrown in. If it comes free, they may choose to consume it for amusement but as a business model or a pillar of democracy it seem the 'press' has challenges and 'news' itself is going to need defining to give it value. And as citizens we need to find new modes of accountability for democracy because the press can't deliver it.
tmaly 10y ago
It would probably be a pretty useful tool to be able to find which sites have published a specific story or fact even if false just to see which news sites are reporting it.
rektide 10y ago
Reminds me of & compares decently against a post on how people deal with the media in China: https://medium.com/@xuhulk/watching-the-election-from-the-post-truth-future-97a0d66bdcfe https://medium.com/@xuhulk/watching-the-election-from-the-po...

60 points by Yhippa 10y ago

rdtsc 10y ago

> the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. Mass media has mostly lost their grip on manufacturing consent. It was effectively used in the past for that. The Democrats have relied on it too heavily. That was the old school strategy - those who control the media, control the outcome. In this case it backfired on them. The more money, manipulation and control they poured into it, the more insiders they had, the less trustworthy they became. Instead of stopping and re-evaluating, they doubled down on lies, which made them even less credible. One thing they missed is that to be effective, they had to keep up appearances of some nominal impartiality. In a way they are one of the primary reason this election was lost. They manufactured Kool-Aid, which is fine, that's their job, but then instead of giving it to the Trump supporters, they gave it to Hillary supporters. They were showing all blue maps with a Hillary landslide. There was no other choice, of course, after endorsing her openly for months, they'd never show an all red map. Even if somehow they had one projected. (They didn't. USC / LA Times poll predicted a win for Trump, and it is an interesting reason why, but that for another discussion...) The idea perhaps was to discourage undecided/Trump voters by showing that candidate has 1% chance of winning, so why bother voting. In the end it had the exact opposite effect. They showed a Hillary landslide and so Hillary supporters stayed home. Why bother putting your shoes on or staying in line if it is landslide anyway. So then last week everyone started talking about "Fake News" almost overnight. All was good, nobody likes lizard people, everyone thinks that's crazy. But then it quickly turned into a label that gets thrown at "news I don't agree with". Just a few days ago, a story about an oil field and Texas and it seems they got the estimates wrong or the model for the cost was off and it immediately got slapped with the label of "Fake News". In a certain way it is not surprising. Throwing labels around is basically the new way of conducting discourse. One can blame Twitter for it (I am sure there is some study already on how Twitter affects discussion and exchange of ideas). You can say so much in a 140 characters so what you do is throw a label at the end "Fake News" / "Soros" / "Sexism" and you're done, point proven.

csydas 10y ago
I don't think some of these points are necessarily accurate. Speaking generally, "fake news" is a real problem, though a more accurate term would perhaps be "poorly vetted" news. Large media outlets feel the need and pressure to compete with the rapidity of social media for news since prior to doing so, the large media outlets appared to be lagging behind "real news". I think that it's better to say that we're still not sure how to handle and adjust to a new world where data updates are instanateous for the general population. The traditional gatekeepers have lost a lot of power and many new ones have risen up in their place - the new gatekeepers have various degrees of fact checking and integrity, so they can produce more content and faster, meaning that anyone regardless of affiliation can find nearly instant authoritative sources on just about anything they care to in a matter of seconds, with search bubbles catering to their biases. Fake news in the context of it being poorly researches and poorly vetted is a real problem. We don't have the system of checks that journalism used to have for instaneous news pieces, and it's not something you can mine out either - it requires some actual fact checking; did this person really say this? what is the context of the statement? was the piece legitimate or satire? It's not necessarily a disinformation battle, no, but man, it's really hard to sort through a lot of the information out there, especially when the majority of the populous is used to having a few definitive sources they can rely on for good hard hitting journalism.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > Seaking generally, "fake news" is a real problem, though a more accurate term would perhaps be "poorly vetted" news. Undoubtedly. However I agree with Snopes here in that this was not "the" problem of why this election was lost. > I think that it's better to say that we're still not sure how to handle and adjust to a new world where data updates are instanateous for the general population Agree. I see that the landscape is changing quickly but how it is changing or the exactly reason need to be figured out. > Fake news in the context of it being poorly researches and poorly vetted is a real problem. Yeah, I like that Google and Facebook have started to attack the problem. I am a bit suspicious of those using this label all too quickly as it dilutes its meaning. > but man, it's really hard to sort through a lot of the information out there, especially when the majority of the populous is used to having a few definitive sources they can rely on for good hard hitting journalism. Agree. The lack of trust is the issue. I am guessing that's why the appeal of Wikileaks and email. Those can obviously be editorialized based on what's released and what isn't. However what is released can be considered as a reliable source. So in this environment of uncertainty, many probably saw raw email texts as one of the few instances of "valid" news (for better or for worse).

mgiannopoulos 10y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967630

whybroke 10y ago

A parallel false equivalence: snopes sometimes makes mistakes therefore it's as bad as breitbart. And the idea that misinformation has no impact is the equivalent of saying advertisement has no impact. Or propaganda. What is happening is an attempt to cast doubt on the genuine information sources critical to a well informed electorate. The same way doubt has been successfully cast on climate change and natural selection. The word 'Lugenpresse' was used to do this in a previous generation. That anyone genuinely believes the implication of this, that the entire free press of all democracies world wide is conspiring against the American people while Putin's press and tabloid websites are their sole champion, could not possibly be more absurd.

verroq 10y ago

Snopes always had a heavy liberal bias.

yosito 10y ago
Truth always had a heavy liberal bias.
- edblarney 10y ago
  Which is false, and why Trump won, even though he's rough-shod, crude, and otherwise not suited to being president. Most of MSM has a soft-left bias and a lot of it is hard left - and not in the classical 'socialist' manner (i.e. representing working class) - they're now fully onto race and identity issues, and enforcing PC culture. There was an article in the Guardian today - written by a woman, lambasting how rude and crude and disgusting the male habit of 'stag parties' (UK bachelor parties) are. The comments section (and this is a fairly left wing site) lambasted the author, because were the roles reversed, she'd be chastised, she's never been to a stag, and the female version of stags are equally as bad. But in the Guardian, they need an article every day to hate on white men. Even their readers called them out. Every day there is an article in the Huffington Post or the Guardian or MSNBC that could very well be in the Onion. They are easily just as bad as anything alt-right. But in the article - only the 'alt right' was mentioned as being of poor quality. Again - this is obvious bias. Fox News - at least the news items (not the commentary, which is bad) is actually looking reasonable these days, which is shocking to me. Watch the local news only for 10 days. You'll feel something is 'too normal'. It's relaxing. It's just the news - that's it. Then - when you turn back to cable news - you'll realize how full of spin and ideology it is. The only reason I watch CNN is to try to grasp what kind of spin they are applying, and why. CNN is soft about it (Fox and MSNBC are blatant), and probably the trickiest, but it's there if you look for it.
  - mark_edward 10y ago
    Local news is pretty terrible for being an informed citizen. For example, people who watch it regularly dramatically overestimate the prevalence of crime in their local communities. This alone probably causes immense human suffering through our injustice system and jails

digi_owl 10y ago

The failing in the end is that the west refuse to talk class. We are very very happy to talk gender or race, but not class. Class is very much forbidden.

kurttheviking 10y ago
"forbidden" might be a bit strong; Pro Publica has had a variety of articles on this over time. A recent retrospective one: https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-class https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-... Or, was there some other aspect of class you feel is broadly unaddressed?
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The typical mantra form the big parties in the west is a mix of "we are all middle class" and "education fixes everything". Thus when industry workers etc see their livelihood go out the window because of pressures from a globalizes market, and more center-left politicians seems willfully blind to the issue, said workers end up voting right wing. Because although the message is at its core racist, the talking points alt least touch of the problem of jobs etc.

Lxr 10y ago

This has probably been said before, but I feel the decline of quality reporting and rise of clickbait is largely due to the SV business model of "make everything free and support it via advertising". The only thing that matters in this model is engagement, therefore reporters and publishers optimize for engagement only, and clickbait is the natural consequence. I am not quite sure why we can't operate like the rest of the world and charge for services - as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers.

edblarney 10y ago
" as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers." Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through. Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else. Arguably, some news outfits were designed as profit making entities, and 'news' was just a vehicle to that profit. CNN is a relatively latecomer in the news world, and because they were formed primarily as a cable news channel ... they went about their business very differently that more classical print houses. One thing we don't talk about enough: 'information consumption habits'. People checked out the news every day to keep up. Now - they can read FB/Instagram and keep up with things that are possibly more important to them in their lives. So - the new social opportunity is literally grabbing 'waking hours' from regular news sites. Bloggers - good or bad - can report on events in some cases somewhat reliably - and so there are other outlets. If you live in Toronto, you used to buy the 'Toronto Star' or 'Globe and Mail'. Now you can read NYT, Guardian, Washington Post - so there's a degree of consolidation as well. Sadly, it's a mess and I hope someone can figure it out :)
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through. Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else. So maybe the problem is not bad news reporting, but the scarcity of highly educated and/or conscientious readership? That is, maybe we should fix the education and the citizenry -- else people won't make much out of well written news anyway, if not for anything else, because they wont be able to evaluate them...

erdevs 10y ago

This is a misleading title (both on Backchannel and here). I have no idea why the author chose to use it (other than as clickbait) when it misrepresents the content of the actual article. The article points out how much verifiably false information there is on the internet and how quickly it can spread. Clearly this is not good. The article itself and Snopes' editor, the primary source for of quotes in the article, both agree with that. And the actual quote from Snopes' editor is that social media isn't the problem. She does not say that fake news isn't the problem. What we should say is that all aspects mentioned in the article are problematic: the decline in the media, the rampant levels of fake news on the internet and the way social media can so quickly and pervasively spread patently false information. None of them are necessarily the problem alone, but they are each serious problems and all the moreso when in tandem as they are today.

T2_t2 10y ago
Except... the election was super close. There wasn't really a clear trend of much of anything when it comes to making people vote one way or tother. The rise of the combination of third Party vote - Gary Johnson and Jill Stein + other was over 4% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... - and less overall votes says that, far from people seeing their own side, people didn't like ANY side. The question should really be "What made Blacks and Latinos turn out in lower numbers, and what made so many people vote Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or other, especially in swing states?" That doesn't seem to be the question anyone wants to look at, and I reckon that's the real story here: how invested in the two party system, and their own survival, the media is.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  > less overall votes Those also came about due to stricter limits on how to id oneself for voting, and ... well, either retarded or hostile (your choice) voting office setups that forced people to wait far longer than reasonable to be able to vote. Both of these very effectively keep particularly economically weaker voters out of the game. Completely my personal opinion: Until the US moves voting onto a weekend and makes it a multi-day affair, and makes affordable unified country-wide id available and usable, the US democracy doesn't deserve the label.

jack9 10y ago

When you alter you contradict your own fact checking to include partisan interpretations and equivocation to bolster an agenda, you lose credibility. Snopes is no longer a wholly credible source for fact checking when they don't stick to facts as stated BY SNOPES. Now I have to suspect every analysis on editorializing. Snopes provides their own custom narrative on judgement re: http://www.snopes.com/hillary-.. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-... [snopes.com] - she did laugh, she did plea bargain him out, etc. Don't say false when it's true, but you are trying to meet your own overall conclusion. It really soured me. Yes, the story is basically false, but the fact checking there is factually incorrect by their own measure. Her behavior isn't all that strange among defense attorneys (backpedal apologizing), so whatever. That being said, the idea of "fake news" is tricky subject when real news can be spun so hard. Facts get blurred when put together in unexpected ways to form a new headline which is almost always to meet some agenda. On the other hand, a news story always starts with a perceived context, so which is more correct? The more factually correct or the more coherent/recent narrative?

tomjakubowski 10y ago
Your link http://www.snopes.com/hillary-. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-.. 404s, FYI.
- jack9 10y ago
  Dunno what happened. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-laughed-about-it/ http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-lau...

Beltiras 10y ago

Sometimes Snopes gets it wrong too. Read this article by Kevin Folta: http://kfolta.blogspot.is/2016/11/snopes-claims-about-glyphosate-in-food.html http://kfolta.blogspot.is/2016/11/snopes-claims-about-glypho...

vidarh 10y ago
... though they've thankfully already corrected it: http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cancerous-herbicide-in-food/ http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cance...

bakhy 10y ago

if you'll forgive a bit of cynicism, it turns out, in hindsight, that the correct maxim should be: "information wants to be false" ;)

msravi 10y ago

The gist of the article is not that fake news is not the problem, but that people have lost faith in all media, including mainstream media. > The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. So basically, now, people give about as much credence to an established media article as to a social media article - which is a good thing in my opinion, given that established media are no longer vetting their sources as they should, are hypocritical about their opinions, and are instead giving in to the biases that they hold in their own echo chambers. Social media simply provides an alternative, equally biased opinion from the opposite end.

NumberCruncher 10y ago
>> So basically, now, people give about as much credence to an established media article as to a social media article "established media articles" are as good as FB hoaxes. Sad but true.

tomohawk 10y ago

The article makes it seem like a lot of these stories are just the result of reporters being too busy. That may be, but that leaves out other reasons such as the revolving door allowing partisan operators to run newsrooms, outright collusion with candidates, etc. Here's a more "haha, only serious" take: http://freebeacon.com/culture/news-thats-fit-fake/ http://freebeacon.com/culture/news-thats-fit-fake/

jonathanstrange 10y ago

I'm not going to comment on the same story twice. I shit, I just did.

throw2016 10y ago

I think this is as good a time as any to reflect on the news industry and their business model. I think the word 'news' itself is becoming somewhat nebulous and this is important as it relates to the value that news organizations can extract from a paying readership. Traditionally information was power and the ability to influence large numbers people was valuable and this unique power was what made the news industry important and also made it prone to abuse and control. The free press is supposed to play a critical role in a democracy but as a business it can't perform that function and is reduced to currying favours, pushing agendas and journalists trying to be part of an inner circle so it can't play the role we think it plays or should play. Best case they are just vehicles for advertisements but worst case they are colluding to manipulate the public. Journalists don't go out randomly on the road to get news, various government departments, public organizations and businesses reach out and brief reporters. 'News' comes to them. Their power has tradionally come from having exclusive access to eyeballs which could fund having more reporters and thus 'more news' but that has become irrelevant with the internet. I don't think people are willing anymore to pay for briefings from various public departments and private businesses with some opinion thrown in. If it comes free, they may choose to consume it for amusement but as a business model or a pillar of democracy it seem the 'press' has challenges and 'news' itself is going to need defining to give it value. And as citizens we need to find new modes of accountability for democracy because the press can't deliver it.

tmaly 10y ago

It would probably be a pretty useful tool to be able to find which sites have published a specific story or fact even if false just to see which news sites are reporting it.

rektide 10y ago

Reminds me of & compares decently against a post on how people deal with the media in China: https://medium.com/@xuhulk/watching-the-election-from-the-post-truth-future-97a0d66bdcfe https://medium.com/@xuhulk/watching-the-election-from-the-po...