5 ms·

Trump has conflated biased news with fake news. Google is running off the 2016 definition of fake news - remember what it meant way back half a year ago? It me

Trump has conflated biased news with fake news. Google is running off the 2016 definition of fake news - remember what it meant way back half a year ago? It means headlines like "Shocking - senate hearing erupts into fistfight" or "Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 million" Fake - written by Moldovans for Facebook revenue. Not simply biased.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cookiecaper 9y ago
What you're calling "fake news" has been called "spam" for a long time. If they're talking about spam, why do they need to color it under some new action instead of just saying "We're detecting more spam"? It's because they know that "spam" is not a credible way to censor the voices that they want to censor. "Fake news" emanated from John Oliver. It was the excuse the establishment offered for the mainstream media's horrendous and transparently detached coverage of the election cycle, assuring the public that a Clinton victory was a near-certainty, engaging in fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. Oliver said to his followers, on behalf of the whole broadcast establishment (CNN and HBO are both owned by Time Warner), "It's not us, it's them." It is, after all, probably the only logical thing to say. In predictable but hilarious fashion, the "fake news" mantra almost immediately backfired on the establishment, as the same masses that elected Trump instantly (and appropriately) applied the label to reporting from the MSM, which had just been proven vibrantly "fake" by the election outcome that they refused to acknowledge as a possibility. Approximately half of the American public is stubbornly conservative. It greatly irritates the broadcast media that it's no longer simple to control the narrative; their propaganda is now challenged and rejected by online voices. This makes the establishment very unhappy, so they've attempted to label all such challenges as "fake news".
- xapata 9y ago
  > fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. I do, on occasion, feel like I'm living in a dystopian nightmare. I'm certainly wondering about the ethics of having children, knowing that they'd live to see dramatic climate change and all the horrors of it. Colbert's "truthiness" was eerily prescient, meant in satire, yet followed by Conway's "alternative facts" without irony.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    >Colbert's "truthiness" was eerily prescient, meant in satire, yet followed by Conway's "alternative facts" without irony. "Alternative facts" is an irrelevant quibble over wording. Everyone understood the intention. It's exactly these quibbles over technicalities that everyone thought would end Trump's campaign, but it doesn't work; if anything, it generates more sympathy for the speaker. Conway was not saying there is no such thing as objective reality (a belief called "relativism", which is much more repugnant to the conservative side of the aisle than the liberal one). Rather, she meant "we have different sources". Come now, that's not really such a crazy thing to express, is it? The MSM heartily strains at these gnats to try to promote their agenda (not surprisingly, it seems Democratic politicians rarely make such snafus). They are apparently unconscious that all they're doing is spreading the message that these strategic gaffers want spread.
    - xapata 9y ago
      > different sources That's not how I understood it. I find the alternative facts and related screed to be more similar to wearing your team's colors than expressing an opinion. Some years ago, back when Bush was in office, I tried to argue/discuss politics with someone who held quite different beliefs than mine. We went back and forth for a while as I tried to find some common ground. At one point, I realized he had asserted something that was false, according to several sources. I showed him the relevant Wikipedia article. He laughed and replied, "You got me, I lied." I suddenly realized he had no intention of finding anything to agree on, but simply wanted to "win."
      - cookiecaper 9y ago
        Sorry to be daft, but I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Yes, one can choose to interpret the statements of politicians either charitably or uncharitably. Yes, some people are interested only in tribalism. How is this related to demanding Conway's statement be interpreted as a credo of relativism instead of a) an unfortunate turn of phrase with accidentally-negative connotations; or b) a gaffe intentionally planted with the expectation that the media would seize upon it and spend 3 days nitpicking a technicality, unaware that they're only broadcasting the intended message to the open-minded listeners in the public, who will disregard the media's hostile spin? Liberal use of (b) is exactly how and why Trump won. He beat the media at their game by allowing them to think that foaming at the mouth over technicalities of his ambiguous wording was doing him damage, when it was actually helping.
- okreallywtf 9y ago
  The mainstream media is fake because enough people believed it to be so? Are you serious? Fake news is made up, it has no evidence to support it and can often be proven to be false very easily but it can (and is) produced in enough quantities that it can't be disprove fast enough. You can believe the MSM is biased or trying to control the narrative but if you choose to live in your own reality where you can simply decide what is true without any corroborating information don't try to pretend that you are vindicated simply by the outcome of an election. Hitler was elected, does that make everything he said true because people believed it? Would you allow this kind of reasoning in any other areas? Would you accept courts that worked this way or business decisions made like this? What would happen if science and engineering worked on the same principals? I would cite sources but I think that would be a waste of time for both of us.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    >The mainstream media is fake because enough people believed it to be so? Are you serious? Uh, no? I didn't say this. Insofar as they were reporting on the people's will during the 2016 election, the reality they painted was disastrously inaccurate and it was colorfully and blatantly disproven on election night. It's hard to believe that honest people could've gotten it so wrong. The MSM lost huge amounts of credibility, and the "fake news" crusade is their attempt to salvage some by pointing the finger somewhere else. When the subject of the report is the aggregate state of the people's will, then yes, the people's will, the real state of that variable, is the determinate factor in its accuracy. >Hitler was elected, does that make everything he said true because people believed it? I have to congratulate you on a seriously hyperextended invocation of Godwin's Law. The media is supposed to be a neutral entity that gives "just the facts" and allows the reader to make up his mind. The veracity of any political arguments are immaterial to the quality of the reporting. The MSM all but guaranteed a Clinton victory on election night. They sold it hard. They thought there was no way Trump could win and dedicated much airtime and page real estate to discussing this. The NYTimes Election Map started out with Clinton at a 99% likelihood of victory -- leaving the marginal 1% chance only for plausible deniability. The MSM was blatantly, absolutely wrong, and you cannot get around that no matter how often you try to shoehorn a long-dead dictator into the dialog. Now they believe they have the authority to label which news is "fake". >Would you accept courts that worked this way or business decisions made like this? Courts DO work like media should. An impartial forum gives both sides the opportunity to make their case, cross-examine witnesses, etc. etc. In the end, after a fair hearing, the jury makes their determination. The MSM plays the role of the "court" in this analogy, and it failed disastrously. >What would happen if science and engineering worked on the same principals? It'd work fine. If you're reporting on the will of the people, and the will of the people is not anywhere close to what your reports said, you should lose credibility. Unfortunately, far too often science and engineering don't work this way, because people want to believe certain things instead of believing the true things that the data bares out. This is what we see when people try to insist that it's someone else's fault the MSM was ridiculously incorrect, and that we should allow them to dictate truth arbitrarily so that they're not bitter anymore.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cookiecaper 9y ago

What you're calling "fake news" has been called "spam" for a long time. If they're talking about spam, why do they need to color it under some new action instead of just saying "We're detecting more spam"? It's because they know that "spam" is not a credible way to censor the voices that they want to censor. "Fake news" emanated from John Oliver. It was the excuse the establishment offered for the mainstream media's horrendous and transparently detached coverage of the election cycle, assuring the public that a Clinton victory was a near-certainty, engaging in fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. Oliver said to his followers, on behalf of the whole broadcast establishment (CNN and HBO are both owned by Time Warner), "It's not us, it's them." It is, after all, probably the only logical thing to say. In predictable but hilarious fashion, the "fake news" mantra almost immediately backfired on the establishment, as the same masses that elected Trump instantly (and appropriately) applied the label to reporting from the MSM, which had just been proven vibrantly "fake" by the election outcome that they refused to acknowledge as a possibility. Approximately half of the American public is stubbornly conservative. It greatly irritates the broadcast media that it's no longer simple to control the narrative; their propaganda is now challenged and rejected by online voices. This makes the establishment very unhappy, so they've attempted to label all such challenges as "fake news".

xapata 9y ago
> fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. I do, on occasion, feel like I'm living in a dystopian nightmare. I'm certainly wondering about the ethics of having children, knowing that they'd live to see dramatic climate change and all the horrors of it. Colbert's "truthiness" was eerily prescient, meant in satire, yet followed by Conway's "alternative facts" without irony.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  >Colbert's "truthiness" was eerily prescient, meant in satire, yet followed by Conway's "alternative facts" without irony. "Alternative facts" is an irrelevant quibble over wording. Everyone understood the intention. It's exactly these quibbles over technicalities that everyone thought would end Trump's campaign, but it doesn't work; if anything, it generates more sympathy for the speaker. Conway was not saying there is no such thing as objective reality (a belief called "relativism", which is much more repugnant to the conservative side of the aisle than the liberal one). Rather, she meant "we have different sources". Come now, that's not really such a crazy thing to express, is it? The MSM heartily strains at these gnats to try to promote their agenda (not surprisingly, it seems Democratic politicians rarely make such snafus). They are apparently unconscious that all they're doing is spreading the message that these strategic gaffers want spread.
  - xapata 9y ago
    > different sources That's not how I understood it. I find the alternative facts and related screed to be more similar to wearing your team's colors than expressing an opinion. Some years ago, back when Bush was in office, I tried to argue/discuss politics with someone who held quite different beliefs than mine. We went back and forth for a while as I tried to find some common ground. At one point, I realized he had asserted something that was false, according to several sources. I showed him the relevant Wikipedia article. He laughed and replied, "You got me, I lied." I suddenly realized he had no intention of finding anything to agree on, but simply wanted to "win."
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      Sorry to be daft, but I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Yes, one can choose to interpret the statements of politicians either charitably or uncharitably. Yes, some people are interested only in tribalism. How is this related to demanding Conway's statement be interpreted as a credo of relativism instead of a) an unfortunate turn of phrase with accidentally-negative connotations; or b) a gaffe intentionally planted with the expectation that the media would seize upon it and spend 3 days nitpicking a technicality, unaware that they're only broadcasting the intended message to the open-minded listeners in the public, who will disregard the media's hostile spin? Liberal use of (b) is exactly how and why Trump won. He beat the media at their game by allowing them to think that foaming at the mouth over technicalities of his ambiguous wording was doing him damage, when it was actually helping.
okreallywtf 9y ago
The mainstream media is fake because enough people believed it to be so? Are you serious? Fake news is made up, it has no evidence to support it and can often be proven to be false very easily but it can (and is) produced in enough quantities that it can't be disprove fast enough. You can believe the MSM is biased or trying to control the narrative but if you choose to live in your own reality where you can simply decide what is true without any corroborating information don't try to pretend that you are vindicated simply by the outcome of an election. Hitler was elected, does that make everything he said true because people believed it? Would you allow this kind of reasoning in any other areas? Would you accept courts that worked this way or business decisions made like this? What would happen if science and engineering worked on the same principals? I would cite sources but I think that would be a waste of time for both of us.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  >The mainstream media is fake because enough people believed it to be so? Are you serious? Uh, no? I didn't say this. Insofar as they were reporting on the people's will during the 2016 election, the reality they painted was disastrously inaccurate and it was colorfully and blatantly disproven on election night. It's hard to believe that honest people could've gotten it so wrong. The MSM lost huge amounts of credibility, and the "fake news" crusade is their attempt to salvage some by pointing the finger somewhere else. When the subject of the report is the aggregate state of the people's will, then yes, the people's will, the real state of that variable, is the determinate factor in its accuracy. >Hitler was elected, does that make everything he said true because people believed it? I have to congratulate you on a seriously hyperextended invocation of Godwin's Law. The media is supposed to be a neutral entity that gives "just the facts" and allows the reader to make up his mind. The veracity of any political arguments are immaterial to the quality of the reporting. The MSM all but guaranteed a Clinton victory on election night. They sold it hard. They thought there was no way Trump could win and dedicated much airtime and page real estate to discussing this. The NYTimes Election Map started out with Clinton at a 99% likelihood of victory -- leaving the marginal 1% chance only for plausible deniability. The MSM was blatantly, absolutely wrong, and you cannot get around that no matter how often you try to shoehorn a long-dead dictator into the dialog. Now they believe they have the authority to label which news is "fake". >Would you accept courts that worked this way or business decisions made like this? Courts DO work like media should. An impartial forum gives both sides the opportunity to make their case, cross-examine witnesses, etc. etc. In the end, after a fair hearing, the jury makes their determination. The MSM plays the role of the "court" in this analogy, and it failed disastrously. >What would happen if science and engineering worked on the same principals? It'd work fine. If you're reporting on the will of the people, and the will of the people is not anywhere close to what your reports said, you should lose credibility. Unfortunately, far too often science and engineering don't work this way, because people want to believe certain things instead of believing the true things that the data bares out. This is what we see when people try to insist that it's someone else's fault the MSM was ridiculously incorrect, and that we should allow them to dictate truth arbitrarily so that they're not bitter anymore.