4 ms·
"Fake news" is potentially the most blatant propaganda campaign I've seen in the last few years. It is a very transparent effort by large, established media gro
by wyager 10y ago
"Fake news" is potentially the most blatant propaganda campaign I've seen in the last few years. It is a very transparent effort by large, established media groups to claim a monopoly on the dissemination of truth, and the campaign has thus far been frighteningly successful, as indicated by the OP.
There's also a bit of a motte and bailey argument involved in this campaign. In particular, when people ask "Can't the 'fake news' label just be applied to any politically unfavorable news source to suppress them?", the response is usually "Oh, this will only be used for those crazy clickbait sites that just come up with random titles and spam Facebook ads.". But then in other contexts, it's very obvious that NYT, AP, etc. are using this to refer to lower-quality but only marginally more falsehood-prone tabloids like Breitbart. Besides the differing political bias, the difference between breitbart and NYT is a matter of selectivity. Breitbart might publish more questionable or false stories (higher false positive rate) but they also publish true things that the NYT doesn't (lower false negative rate). For example, NYT's coverage of the Podesta leaks was garbage, and I had to turn to smaller, less reputable news sources to find (100% verifiable) coverage of leaked email contents.
Let's also not pretend that the media groups leading this campaign are innocent of (intentionally or unintentionally) publishing some outright false or misleading content themselves. Sure, they do it less frequently, but they're no saints.
As for the OP, it is absolutely unreasonable to allow the government to dictate the truth. I should not have to spell out how that can and will go wrong. Permit people to believe what they will. If you're worried about false information, try to make better information management tools rather than using the government to force people into some arbitrarily chosen "correct" belief system. This isn't some stupid appeal to the idea that objective truth doesn't exist; it's recognizing the fact that any one person (or government Ministry of Truth) is almost certainly wrong about a non-negligible number of things, and it's better for at least some people to be right about any given topic than for every single person to be uniformly right or wrong about any given topic.
- codeddesign 10y agoIf a news organization does it less frequently but has a much larger reach...where does that stand? If a website is 40% questionable with a low readership, but another is 10% questionable but reaches millions a day...who is more fake? Who is more accountable? NY Times and Washington Post run heavy political bias in their reporting with some questionable articles over the past month. Because of their resources and readership, if 10% of their content is intentionally misleading...is that fake news? Would they be considered a fake news site because they mislead a large segment of the population in 10% of their content? Or have they been socially deemed as "real news"? This is all for example sake.. ..what is fake news compared to real news? Are their really any news outlets that are unbiased, bipartisan, in-regurgitated, real news? My answer would be...what ever sells the most papers, that is what is printed. A news paper seing their shares fall because of a million small small sites acting as regurgitation machines is starting to take its toll, and papers are calling foul and continually running with that story. There is no real news anymore.
- hulahoof 10y agoI think it is clear the "more fake" source is the one that is "more questionable". The audience of a source doesn't lend or take credibility.
- Spivak 10y agoI think the parents argument is that that harm done by disseminating false information is both a function of the inaccuracy of the information and its reach. If a major news source intentionally slips subtle inaccuracies into their stories to push some agenda it could reasonably be argued that it causes more harm than a small no-name blog with no readership publishing blatant lies.
- hkon 10y agoA local news paper said it best, I think unintentionally. They said: "In an effort to remove disturbing or fake news, Facebook is goign to do blabla" Better remove all those disturbing truths...
- scotty79 10y ago> to claim a monopoly on the dissemination of truth to regain a monopoly
- rokosbasilisk 10y agoYea its especially telling that wapo article about fake news had something similar to an editors retraction.
- grzm 10y agoThough a retraction or correction indicates that WaPo is trying to stand behind its articles.
- rokosbasilisk 10y agoSure, but not in this context. the article was accusing other media outlets of being russia propaganda.