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The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm. If you don't like the way your local bak

The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm. If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear. This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world. On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?" All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.

digler999 10y ago
> A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached. How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? Or elderly people who become vulnerable and fall prey to exploitation (because they believe phone scams, or sob stories from strangers, etc) ? (Edit: or young people who think they're going to grow up and be an astronaut or NBA star). There will always be a sizable proportion of the population who believes wacky stories. I know you weren't implying this, but NYT and WaPo's hands aren't clean either. I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. That's predatory on the same level: take advantage of the nebulous word "hacking" and misapply it to something that doesn't even rely on computers, do some hand-waiving, and voila, there's some "fake news" to dish up to the masses [which is ironic when your other stories are about the spread of "fake news"].
- wybiral 10y ago
  > How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point. > I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. I never got the impression that those news orgs were saying that actual voting counts were being hacked. But the emails were hacked and leaked. They jumped the gun on blaming Russia, but that wasn't fake news (provided you believe prominent members of US intelligence). Even Trump seemed to think it was plausible... At least plausible enough to publicly ask Russia to hack Hilary's emails [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ
  - digler999 10y ago
    > I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point. my point is that there have always legions of people who believe ridiculous things. They've been around for every single previous election. So we shouldn't be surprised when the scientific community says "civilization has changed the climate" but people still don't believe it (even when the claim is supported by evidence).
  - garanduss 10y ago
    The point is that "election hacking" is an intentionally misleading phrase. A Pew poll found that, after this media circus, half of Hillary voters believed that Russia had tampered with vote tallies. The NYT and WaPo (among others) are incredibly biased, and much of the problem is that their support base is too sheltered to understand how. I've said more on this in previous comments.
    - wybiral 10y ago
      I found the Pew poll regarding Russian involvement in the email hack but not one involving direct hacking of tallies. Do you have a link? I followed the election from a variety of sources (WaPo and NYT included) and never got that impression. But I agree that it was a circus from all angles.
      - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
khana 10y ago
"The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm" Boom! Precisely.
tokenizer 10y ago
And yet, I'm sure none of your news, your sources, have been compromised. I'm sure one of these anti science boogeymen you've created would think you are equally brainwashed and they are equally correct in their views...
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  I agree with the parent but I began reading the New York Times every morning at the age of 12, wondering to myself "why is there so much speculation going on around Iraq and WMDs? We haven't found anything so why does everybody want to invade?" I still like the Times to an extent, but they like many other papers get it wrong from time to time. Doesn't mean I should leave and never look back, but instead I have taken to critically thinking about every story I read from every source to come to a conclusion about an issue. I don't think fake news or poor journalism is a problem. The problem is people and their lack of critical thinking, often substituted for blind acceptance of a narrative that fits their preferred reality.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people. It's because their sources were wrong and the journalists didn't do a good enough job verifying the information. Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.
    - untog 10y ago
      You're getting downvoted for this and I don't think you should be. The recent flood of fake news is very different to honest reporting that fails, and even very different to opinion-led reporting that presents a side. It is deliberately factually incorrect news, created and promoted simply to get clicks and profit from advertising. There is absolutely no journalistic merit to it.
ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
The problem is that we ever believed the nonsense that there's some information source that is NOT a product, complete with biases and agendas. The day the printing press was invented was the day print journalism was subverted to push agendas.
dgrealy 10y ago
Classification is still very needed. I'm interested to see what comes out of this. Especially with regard to eliminating biases of a classification system. Capitalism isn't going anywhere obviously and shouldn't. On the other end is state-run media, e.g. North Korea. We wouldn't want things to swing in that direction or even toward RT or many other examples. I think we should be looking to replicate whatever magic is and has been in PBS, early BBC, ITN, and other earlier UK and French programming.
nkkar 10y ago
> On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?" > All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories It goes both ways I think. Consider the possibility that there are more people that believe that other 'stupid' people believe these stories than there are 'stupid' people who actually believe these stories.
enknamel 10y ago
> The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm. I would say a huge part of the problem is that news is no longer news. It's all commentary. News organizations are not only incentivized to to sensationalize stories to make money but they are also ran by people who have extreme political views and want to essentially mind control the population. They don't want to report the facts of a story. They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts. A great example is how different news organizations cover the recent executive order on immigration. Depending on where you get your news you were told there was a Muslim ban, a ban from 7 Muslim majority countries, only accepting Christian refugees from the Middle East, 7 countries that harbor terrorists were banned, etc. Wherever you fall on that issue there is a news org trying to force you into a certain viewpoint one way or the other.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  > They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts. Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them. It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be accepted as par for the course. The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal" for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government "to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.
  - woah 10y ago
    I'm personally opposed to almost everything Trump is trying to do, but don't act like it's only a problem on the right. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?
spdustin 10y ago
Apple News does try to increase visibility of sources/topic you read a lot. If you swipe the story tile to the left, you can see more actions for that source.
crispyambulance 10y ago
Forgive me if I exercise a brand new buzzword but this project might better be classified as an exercise in "computational journalism" ? A fake news detector isn't going to do anything by itself to solve the problem. Fake news consumers are going to guzzle the junk regardless of warning tags, scores, or nutritional labeling. In the hands of a skilled journalist/activist/thought-leader whose abilities are "augmented" by this tool, however, it could really be a powerful antidote.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r_6hBIX71Y&t=111s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r_6hBIX71Y&t=111s I saw an interesting talk the other day (talks at google); Often there is a problem with misrepresentation of facts; (i think the general standard of journalism is quite low); amazing how a subtle editorial slant can twist things... Will Moy is speaking for an organization that does some fact checking and is giving some examples in the talk.
- MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  I think people start to notice these old editorial tricks more these days so that there is an impression that all news are fake - at least to some extent.
lend000 10y ago
> The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm. News is a product, but it should be noted that fraud is a crime in a free market. Not that it discounts the rest of what you're saying.
- Retra 10y ago
  That doesn't really work very well. News as a product means you give the customers what they ask for, not what they need. If they ask for lies, it's not fraud. However, news as a public service has standards of liability to the public in general, not just to your own customers. It is an obligation to society, not to the buyer.
  - lend000 10y ago
    Most consumers don't sign an agreement to receive fake news that fits their beliefs when they purchase cable -- if that was the case, then it would be fine (it can also be fraud to have something hidden in the fine print, although it usually requires a class action).
dalbasal 10y ago
I don't know if I'd class that as a capitalism-paradigm problem. If the press is free, choices exist and you can find news that tells you what you want to hear. I think if we compare today's new to a decade ago's, the change is not more capitalism (ie, for-profit, corporate, quarterly-report focused...). The change is more choice, more information, more volume and the chaotic, many-to-many distribution systems of the social internet. The clickbait imperative has got a quasi-capitalist single mindedness to it, but I think we'll be chasing down the wrong culprit by characterising the problem as a capitalist one. In fact, I think it's best if we try not to jump to conclusions at all. We're hitting some problems with the way our democracies work and I haven't really heard a narrative yet that feels satisfying. Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.
- untog 10y ago
  > Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it. Is a great justification for doing nothing, ever. It feels like we are entering a very much unprecedented era in America, where the President freezes out news organisations that do not report on him favorably, and is actively attacking the media with the aim of establishing the official government narrative as the only one voters should listen to. This is extremely dangerous. I'm not saying that we should rush to judgement, but we shouldn't just sit back and wait to see how it all unfolds either. This is an issue to be investigated and worked on, urgently.
Kenji 10y ago
Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear. I don't see the problem. I don't want to hear lies, therefore I create a demand for true news. I don't need a nanny facebook/google/state telling me what news I like, and neither does the rest of the population.
RandyRanderson 10y ago
Noam called it manufacturing consent and it's been a thing for quite a while[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Interesting that his propaganda model [1] actually breaks a bit with the age of internet. Social media, news aggregators, small independent bloggers and small independent news outlets don't have the described biases. Algorithmic filters are somehow unbiased. Independent person/outlet can question the government, capitalism, doesn't have to trust government's spokesmen, doesn't have to publish them, doesn't even have to make money. In a way all those "news bubbles" and "fake news" are actually anti-bubbles and make "democracy" more "democratic". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
  - intended 10y ago
    No it doesn't work that way. It's a nice theory, but I've been a mod on a national sub for a while, and I've been on forums since around/before slashdot. You can very easily overwhelm the signal with noise. The plethora of independents means nothing if only a few of them get heard. Matter of fact, with some pushing, you can have one "independent" dominate a large portion of the channel. At some juncture the network effect takes over and the process becomes self sustaining, you just need to play on people's/your target markets biases well. This is a people problem, and people are getting way too good and understanding and manipulating the biases of other people.
imron 10y ago
> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country Really, because not more than a few weeks ago I remember a whole bunch of people believing the "we can't verify, but we're going to press anyway" stories about Trump and golden showers in Russia, not to mention a whole bunch of other similar fake news regarding Trump and Trump supporters. I think you (and many others) are selectively applying a bias to what is and isn't fake news and the type of people who believe it based on your own political preferences. And therein lies the real problem.
- intended 10y ago
  There's a marked difference between those statements 1) media agencies on all sides had the dossier and didn't publish it since t was unverifiable 2) when buzfeed or whomever linked the dossier, it forced other firms to do so as well or lose out on a critical story. 3) the adaptation to deal with this is to not report the dossier as fact, but as claims. And of course, it spiraled downhill from there, In this scenario it's important to note that media firms avoided reporting on this issue because it was crap. For global warming, ah man where do we start. Firstly, it's unfair to lambast people for believing it's a hoax. Since the 80s and before, a long, intelligent and concerted effort to spread FUD has been active in America. It is today successful enough to spread around the world. If people were old enough, they would remember that initially scientists would not give the time of day to global warming conspiracist/deniers. It was correctly believed that doing so actually gave cranks and loons the patina of credibility, when they should be allowed to die out. Unfortunately, these cranks and loons were cultivated and nurtured, and given airtime. In particular there is one news network that I recall had a more active role in this and it was not CNN. Eventually scientists were forced to engage, and by engaging they lost. Scientists, (and people on HN) are constantly making the error that this is about facts. It's about entertainment and playing with human emotions. Scientists walked in expecting a debate, when it was about showmanship, with one side reporting things unevenly. As a result there are people today who will be anti global warming because they are being manipulated. Fake news is a new problem
  - imron 10y ago
microcolonel 10y ago
If you don't pay for the news, who does the news agency have a responsibility to? Certainly not you. You can see this right now. The mainstream media falsifies or omits the truth on behalf of their backers or the organizations they fear: major political parties, subsidiaries of their parent companies, major investors, etc. I would argue that they do this because the public is not their customer, it's their target demographic.

digler999 10y ago

> A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached. How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? Or elderly people who become vulnerable and fall prey to exploitation (because they believe phone scams, or sob stories from strangers, etc) ? (Edit: or young people who think they're going to grow up and be an astronaut or NBA star). There will always be a sizable proportion of the population who believes wacky stories. I know you weren't implying this, but NYT and WaPo's hands aren't clean either. I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. That's predatory on the same level: take advantage of the nebulous word "hacking" and misapply it to something that doesn't even rely on computers, do some hand-waiving, and voila, there's some "fake news" to dish up to the masses [which is ironic when your other stories are about the spread of "fake news"].

wybiral 10y ago
> How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point. > I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. I never got the impression that those news orgs were saying that actual voting counts were being hacked. But the emails were hacked and leaked. They jumped the gun on blaming Russia, but that wasn't fake news (provided you believe prominent members of US intelligence). Even Trump seemed to think it was plausible... At least plausible enough to publicly ask Russia to hack Hilary's emails [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ
- digler999 10y ago
  > I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point. my point is that there have always legions of people who believe ridiculous things. They've been around for every single previous election. So we shouldn't be surprised when the scientific community says "civilization has changed the climate" but people still don't believe it (even when the claim is supported by evidence).
- garanduss 10y ago
  The point is that "election hacking" is an intentionally misleading phrase. A Pew poll found that, after this media circus, half of Hillary voters believed that Russia had tampered with vote tallies. The NYT and WaPo (among others) are incredibly biased, and much of the problem is that their support base is too sheltered to understand how. I've said more on this in previous comments.
  - wybiral 10y ago
    I found the Pew poll regarding Russian involvement in the email hack but not one involving direct hacking of tallies. Do you have a link? I followed the election from a variety of sources (WaPo and NYT included) and never got that impression. But I agree that it was a circus from all angles.
    - 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

khana 10y ago

"The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm" Boom! Precisely.

tokenizer 10y ago

And yet, I'm sure none of your news, your sources, have been compromised. I'm sure one of these anti science boogeymen you've created would think you are equally brainwashed and they are equally correct in their views...

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I agree with the parent but I began reading the New York Times every morning at the age of 12, wondering to myself "why is there so much speculation going on around Iraq and WMDs? We haven't found anything so why does everybody want to invade?" I still like the Times to an extent, but they like many other papers get it wrong from time to time. Doesn't mean I should leave and never look back, but instead I have taken to critically thinking about every story I read from every source to come to a conclusion about an issue. I don't think fake news or poor journalism is a problem. The problem is people and their lack of critical thinking, often substituted for blind acceptance of a narrative that fits their preferred reality.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people. It's because their sources were wrong and the journalists didn't do a good enough job verifying the information. Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.
  - untog 10y ago
    You're getting downvoted for this and I don't think you should be. The recent flood of fake news is very different to honest reporting that fails, and even very different to opinion-led reporting that presents a side. It is deliberately factually incorrect news, created and promoted simply to get clicks and profit from advertising. There is absolutely no journalistic merit to it.

ConfuciusSay02 10y ago

The problem is that we ever believed the nonsense that there's some information source that is NOT a product, complete with biases and agendas. The day the printing press was invented was the day print journalism was subverted to push agendas.

dgrealy 10y ago

Classification is still very needed. I'm interested to see what comes out of this. Especially with regard to eliminating biases of a classification system. Capitalism isn't going anywhere obviously and shouldn't. On the other end is state-run media, e.g. North Korea. We wouldn't want things to swing in that direction or even toward RT or many other examples. I think we should be looking to replicate whatever magic is and has been in PBS, early BBC, ITN, and other earlier UK and French programming.

nkkar 10y ago

> On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?" > All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories It goes both ways I think. Consider the possibility that there are more people that believe that other 'stupid' people believe these stories than there are 'stupid' people who actually believe these stories.

enknamel 10y ago

> The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm. I would say a huge part of the problem is that news is no longer news. It's all commentary. News organizations are not only incentivized to to sensationalize stories to make money but they are also ran by people who have extreme political views and want to essentially mind control the population. They don't want to report the facts of a story. They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts. A great example is how different news organizations cover the recent executive order on immigration. Depending on where you get your news you were told there was a Muslim ban, a ban from 7 Muslim majority countries, only accepting Christian refugees from the Middle East, 7 countries that harbor terrorists were banned, etc. Wherever you fall on that issue there is a news org trying to force you into a certain viewpoint one way or the other.

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
> They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts. Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them. It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be accepted as par for the course. The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal" for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government "to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.
- woah 10y ago
  I'm personally opposed to almost everything Trump is trying to do, but don't act like it's only a problem on the right. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?

spdustin 10y ago

Apple News does try to increase visibility of sources/topic you read a lot. If you swipe the story tile to the left, you can see more actions for that source.

crispyambulance 10y ago

Forgive me if I exercise a brand new buzzword but this project might better be classified as an exercise in "computational journalism" ? A fake news detector isn't going to do anything by itself to solve the problem. Fake news consumers are going to guzzle the junk regardless of warning tags, scores, or nutritional labeling. In the hands of a skilled journalist/activist/thought-leader whose abilities are "augmented" by this tool, however, it could really be a powerful antidote.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r_6hBIX71Y&t=111s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r_6hBIX71Y&t=111s I saw an interesting talk the other day (talks at google); Often there is a problem with misrepresentation of facts; (i think the general standard of journalism is quite low); amazing how a subtle editorial slant can twist things... Will Moy is speaking for an organization that does some fact checking and is giving some examples in the talk.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago
I think people start to notice these old editorial tricks more these days so that there is an impression that all news are fake - at least to some extent.

lend000 10y ago

> The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm. News is a product, but it should be noted that fraud is a crime in a free market. Not that it discounts the rest of what you're saying.

Retra 10y ago
That doesn't really work very well. News as a product means you give the customers what they ask for, not what they need. If they ask for lies, it's not fraud. However, news as a public service has standards of liability to the public in general, not just to your own customers. It is an obligation to society, not to the buyer.
- lend000 10y ago
  Most consumers don't sign an agreement to receive fake news that fits their beliefs when they purchase cable -- if that was the case, then it would be fine (it can also be fraud to have something hidden in the fine print, although it usually requires a class action).

dalbasal 10y ago

I don't know if I'd class that as a capitalism-paradigm problem. If the press is free, choices exist and you can find news that tells you what you want to hear. I think if we compare today's new to a decade ago's, the change is not more capitalism (ie, for-profit, corporate, quarterly-report focused...). The change is more choice, more information, more volume and the chaotic, many-to-many distribution systems of the social internet. The clickbait imperative has got a quasi-capitalist single mindedness to it, but I think we'll be chasing down the wrong culprit by characterising the problem as a capitalist one. In fact, I think it's best if we try not to jump to conclusions at all. We're hitting some problems with the way our democracies work and I haven't really heard a narrative yet that feels satisfying. Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.

untog 10y ago
> Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it. Is a great justification for doing nothing, ever. It feels like we are entering a very much unprecedented era in America, where the President freezes out news organisations that do not report on him favorably, and is actively attacking the media with the aim of establishing the official government narrative as the only one voters should listen to. This is extremely dangerous. I'm not saying that we should rush to judgement, but we shouldn't just sit back and wait to see how it all unfolds either. This is an issue to be investigated and worked on, urgently.

Kenji 10y ago

Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear. I don't see the problem. I don't want to hear lies, therefore I create a demand for true news. I don't need a nanny facebook/google/state telling me what news I like, and neither does the rest of the population.

RandyRanderson 10y ago

Noam called it manufacturing consent and it's been a thing for quite a while[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

zzzcpan 10y ago
Interesting that his propaganda model [1] actually breaks a bit with the age of internet. Social media, news aggregators, small independent bloggers and small independent news outlets don't have the described biases. Algorithmic filters are somehow unbiased. Independent person/outlet can question the government, capitalism, doesn't have to trust government's spokesmen, doesn't have to publish them, doesn't even have to make money. In a way all those "news bubbles" and "fake news" are actually anti-bubbles and make "democracy" more "democratic". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
- intended 10y ago
  No it doesn't work that way. It's a nice theory, but I've been a mod on a national sub for a while, and I've been on forums since around/before slashdot. You can very easily overwhelm the signal with noise. The plethora of independents means nothing if only a few of them get heard. Matter of fact, with some pushing, you can have one "independent" dominate a large portion of the channel. At some juncture the network effect takes over and the process becomes self sustaining, you just need to play on people's/your target markets biases well. This is a people problem, and people are getting way too good and understanding and manipulating the biases of other people.

imron 10y ago

> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country Really, because not more than a few weeks ago I remember a whole bunch of people believing the "we can't verify, but we're going to press anyway" stories about Trump and golden showers in Russia, not to mention a whole bunch of other similar fake news regarding Trump and Trump supporters. I think you (and many others) are selectively applying a bias to what is and isn't fake news and the type of people who believe it based on your own political preferences. And therein lies the real problem.

intended 10y ago
There's a marked difference between those statements 1) media agencies on all sides had the dossier and didn't publish it since t was unverifiable 2) when buzfeed or whomever linked the dossier, it forced other firms to do so as well or lose out on a critical story. 3) the adaptation to deal with this is to not report the dossier as fact, but as claims. And of course, it spiraled downhill from there, In this scenario it's important to note that media firms avoided reporting on this issue because it was crap. For global warming, ah man where do we start. Firstly, it's unfair to lambast people for believing it's a hoax. Since the 80s and before, a long, intelligent and concerted effort to spread FUD has been active in America. It is today successful enough to spread around the world. If people were old enough, they would remember that initially scientists would not give the time of day to global warming conspiracist/deniers. It was correctly believed that doing so actually gave cranks and loons the patina of credibility, when they should be allowed to die out. Unfortunately, these cranks and loons were cultivated and nurtured, and given airtime. In particular there is one news network that I recall had a more active role in this and it was not CNN. Eventually scientists were forced to engage, and by engaging they lost. Scientists, (and people on HN) are constantly making the error that this is about facts. It's about entertainment and playing with human emotions. Scientists walked in expecting a debate, when it was about showmanship, with one side reporting things unevenly. As a result there are people today who will be anti global warming because they are being manipulated. Fake news is a new problem
- imron 10y ago

microcolonel 10y ago

If you don't pay for the news, who does the news agency have a responsibility to? Certainly not you. You can see this right now. The mainstream media falsifies or omits the truth on behalf of their backers or the organizations they fear: major political parties, subsidiaries of their parent companies, major investors, etc. I would argue that they do this because the public is not their customer, it's their target demographic.