5 ms·

> I think the whole "fake news" thingy seems to politicaly motivated. Sure, branding real news as fake news is politically motivated, whereas labeling what is

by notadoc 10y ago

> I think the whole "fake news" thingy seems to politicaly motivated. Sure, branding real news as fake news is politically motivated, whereas labeling what is the clearly the equivalent of the most absurd supermarket tabloids as "fake news" is accurate and appropriate. It is curious that many people are somehow oblivious to tabloid headlines when they appear on the internet, whereas nearly everyone discards the supermarket checkout stand "The Pope is a space alien!" stories.

PierreRochard 10y ago
And then there's everything in between. That's where the actual debate is. Was "WMDs in Iraq!" fake news in 2002, 2003, or 2004?
- Consultant32452 10y ago
  Watching this has helped me, at least somewhat, decipher what is said in the media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmoXze-Higc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmoXze-Higc Of course, it doesn't help for outright lies like WMDs in Iraq.
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    Though your broader point holds, they did in fact find WMDs in Iraq, but it wasn't really big news (or especially serious weapons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Post-war_discoveries_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...
    - PierreRochard 10y ago
      Wow! This is interesting. I thought the "WMDs in Iraq" was fake news, turns out the "no WMDs in Iraq" is fake news! So much fake news, hard to sort everything out.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - diogenescynic 10y ago
      The WMDs that Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfield, and Colin Powell were referring to were nuclear weapons [1] though, not chemical weapons. We already knew he had chemical weapons: >President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration's doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/opinion/remember-that-mushroom-cloud.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/opinion/remember-that-mush...
      - JBReefer 10y ago
        Oh you're definitely correct, I was just surprised when I learned that fact, and there's a bit of a "No WMDs at all!" echo chamber.
        abritinthebay 10y ago
        By that tho they use WMDs as shorthand for "none of the WMDs they claimed were there, were". Almost exclusively. Which is true.
      - golergka 10y ago
        That's the first time I hear about nuclear weapons in this context - I was always under impression that this was about chemical weapons, which they found a lot of evidence of after the invasion.
        Consultant32452 10y ago
        I specifically recall LOTS of talk about "mushroom clouds" from the Bush administration leading up to the war. We knew they had chemical weapons because we sold them to them.
        diogenescynic 10y ago
Consultant32452 10y ago
The problem is that people understand that real news isn't real. It might not be a lie, but it does a significant disservice to the American people. The morning after Trump launched the most recent attacks against Syria the top 5 newspapers in the country had 18 stories on it. Not a single one was an opposition piece. We found out from Wikileaks that toppling Assad was a plan put in place in 2006 by Israel and Saudi Arabia and is primarily about trade and an oil pipeline. The plan was to trick Assad into thinking he was being attacked and get him to use chemical weapons so the US could come in and take him out. The fact that more Americans are knowledgeable about the fact that some brown people got their travel plans interrupted by a stupid EO than they are about the fact that Obama has the blood of a million Syrians on his hands over an oil pipeline is all the evidence you need to know that "real news" isn't "real." That's why people are fleeing to all of these "fake" news sources, because we know we're being lied to in the "real" news.
- notadoc 10y ago
  Have you read Manufacturing Consent? You might find it interesting.
- mistermann 10y ago
  The interesting part to me is that it tends to be the lesser educated that sense that there's something wrong with the news they are fed on TV & newspapers. I think this is likely because college educated people tend to use more pure intellectual horsepower (which is easy to fool) whereas the lesser educated use more "intuition". That said, simultaneously the lesser educated can be far more easily led astray by laughable obvious fake propaganda (usually right wing) that an educated person would never fall for. But the thing is, those whose job it is to manipulate public opinion are experts in where weaknesses are in each type - different tactics for different audiences.
  - letmein 10y ago
    Ultimately, I see the root cause of this dichotomy as a side-effect of The Death of The Expert. Edumucated Folk live in one Universe, and Working Joe on Main St lives in another Universe. By the time you finish 10 years of secondary education, you think you're smart, but mostly all you've done is chain together countless memorized assumptions about how various model parameters should work to over-fit your mental interpolator of the Map of the World. You become so educated that you filter our more than you realize. You don't even notice, like a fish never notices the ocean in which it swims. The Academically credentialed refer to others just like themselves, because Authority only works if you mutually vouch for each other, by adhering to the same rules. Outsiders are Othered, smugly laughed at and ignored like Morlocks. Look at any big example where The Experts not only were off, but were Not Even Wrong, turning a Moonshot into a Neptune shot, then trying to cover up their mistakes to save face so they won't be de-credentialed and forced to go live in the sewers under Metropolis. Pick any major World event, and you'll find The Smartest Guys in the Room, who earn more in 1 year than Joe on Main St will in his entire life, and who COMPLETELY BUNGLED what ever they claimed they knew with near absolute certainty, because they are Scientists who use Evidence and Math that nobody can proof read, but trust us buddy, you dudn't get a PhD from MIT like all of us did. 1. Iraq WMD: look how spectacularly wrong were the several thousand Experts from 100's of Professional Fields. 2. 2008 Depression. 20,000 Genius Quants and Nobel Prize Winners and top billionaires and the Gods Upon Mount Olympus all bet their reputations that a 1-in-60 trillion Outlier event could never, ever happen. This Time It's Different. The price of houses will never go down, so it's a AAA double certified bet to use it as collateral to take out huge loans by increasing the multiple by which you are leveraged in your hedged bets. And it all blew up. 3. Syria. All the idiot Experts yet again assembled to recommend the real solution is covertly arm ISIS to topple Assad, then send in the Marines to whack ISIS and install some new puppet. All the experts yet again were so blindly certain that their models were the Territory that they stopped looking at the newest changes on the Map. Oh, now ISIS declared War on the West? Well that fact can't possibly fit into our Narrative that we Experts know is scientifically true, so let's just ignore it. Oh, what's this, hundreds of thousands of social media accounts are joining ISIS and threating to overthrow us in our own Nations? Well that's just preposterous, we know with absolute certainty that 99.9999999% of Muslims are Peaceful. Therefore, let's invite 10, then 20, then 100 million of them to cross our borders and live next door, all so we can retain our Cognitive Dissonance that we are The Experts, we can't be wrong because otherwise why should I have a PhD and earn 20x more than you, a mere Uber driver with no credentials? 4. As Programmers, we are the Enlightened Class, we build the future while Joe Blow on Main St just lives in the Minecrafted Utopia which we sculpt for him. We are Urban Liberal Atheist/Pagans with refined intellectual pursuits, we love Truth and Equality and by golly we really are going to CHANGE THE WORLD, hold hands, sing Kumbaya We Are The World around the SpaceX AI Rocket that will take us all to our new life awaiting us on Mars. Meanwhile, out of 18,000,000 or so code monkeys on Earth, not even a handful have any idea that all of our computer security is fake, the NSA quite literally records and decrypts everything, using 10,000 new 0day per year which they purchase from Respectable Programmers like you who have a bright future and just want to do the right thing by cooperating with the NSA for a well earned comfortable upper-middle-class salary. Then Snowden appears and pops your Truman Show bubbke like Copernicus deprecated Ptolomy. All The Experts assemble like Avengers yet again. They all recommend, everything is fine Mr Joe Blow, we paid a vendor millions for a pretty dashboard of Analytics Big Data charts to tell us that everythibg's fine. We're in The Cloud, we're patched, we use 2FA on E2E with Axolotl Rachets stacked to the Moon and we're Lifetime Gold Donors to the EFF and several Houses of Fierce, Intrepid Journalism. 5. Guccifer the Shadowbroker hacked the shit out of everything. You name it, it's compromised. VPN, ssh, every web, email, file, chat, dns, ntp, database, all of it is now known to be hijacked. Can we still trust the banks, the utilities, the telcoes, the defense contractors, the media conglomerates, the entertainment, the software, the OEMs, etc? You say Trust Us, we're the Experts. See how this works? Processions of Expert Pied Pipers lead us off a cliff into the ocean like lemmings. Is Joe Blow on Main St a dumb racist redneck for taking one look at that ol' Bull you're selling, but instead flipping the Series of Tubes to check out what Alex Jones and /pol/ and UFO chasers and Chentrails kooks and Reptillian Agenda paranoids and monetized Youtubers have to say about The Real News? From where I'm at, living in a card board box on Main St with no future, I'm going with what Joe says he saw Alex say about the Pizzagate-Soros-Globalists. I may not be an Expert beyond Main St, but I do know the only person who never lied to me was the hacker who leaked all the Expert's shit to Wikileaks. It's not a perfect Map of the World, but it's a helluva lot more accurate than the total disasters we got by listening to The Experts.

by notadoc 10y ago

PierreRochard 10y ago

And then there's everything in between. That's where the actual debate is. Was "WMDs in Iraq!" fake news in 2002, 2003, or 2004?

Consultant32452 10y ago
Watching this has helped me, at least somewhat, decipher what is said in the media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmoXze-Higc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmoXze-Higc Of course, it doesn't help for outright lies like WMDs in Iraq.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Though your broader point holds, they did in fact find WMDs in Iraq, but it wasn't really big news (or especially serious weapons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Post-war_discoveries_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...
  - PierreRochard 10y ago
    Wow! This is interesting. I thought the "WMDs in Iraq" was fake news, turns out the "no WMDs in Iraq" is fake news! So much fake news, hard to sort everything out.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - diogenescynic 10y ago
    The WMDs that Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfield, and Colin Powell were referring to were nuclear weapons [1] though, not chemical weapons. We already knew he had chemical weapons: >President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration's doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/opinion/remember-that-mushroom-cloud.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/opinion/remember-that-mush...
    - JBReefer 10y ago
      Oh you're definitely correct, I was just surprised when I learned that fact, and there's a bit of a "No WMDs at all!" echo chamber.
      - abritinthebay 10y ago
        By that tho they use WMDs as shorthand for "none of the WMDs they claimed were there, were". Almost exclusively. Which is true.
    - golergka 10y ago
      That's the first time I hear about nuclear weapons in this context - I was always under impression that this was about chemical weapons, which they found a lot of evidence of after the invasion.
      - Consultant32452 10y ago
        I specifically recall LOTS of talk about "mushroom clouds" from the Bush administration leading up to the war. We knew they had chemical weapons because we sold them to them.
      - diogenescynic 10y ago

Consultant32452 10y ago

The problem is that people understand that real news isn't real. It might not be a lie, but it does a significant disservice to the American people. The morning after Trump launched the most recent attacks against Syria the top 5 newspapers in the country had 18 stories on it. Not a single one was an opposition piece. We found out from Wikileaks that toppling Assad was a plan put in place in 2006 by Israel and Saudi Arabia and is primarily about trade and an oil pipeline. The plan was to trick Assad into thinking he was being attacked and get him to use chemical weapons so the US could come in and take him out. The fact that more Americans are knowledgeable about the fact that some brown people got their travel plans interrupted by a stupid EO than they are about the fact that Obama has the blood of a million Syrians on his hands over an oil pipeline is all the evidence you need to know that "real news" isn't "real." That's why people are fleeing to all of these "fake" news sources, because we know we're being lied to in the "real" news.

notadoc 10y ago
Have you read Manufacturing Consent? You might find it interesting.
mistermann 10y ago
The interesting part to me is that it tends to be the lesser educated that sense that there's something wrong with the news they are fed on TV & newspapers. I think this is likely because college educated people tend to use more pure intellectual horsepower (which is easy to fool) whereas the lesser educated use more "intuition". That said, simultaneously the lesser educated can be far more easily led astray by laughable obvious fake propaganda (usually right wing) that an educated person would never fall for. But the thing is, those whose job it is to manipulate public opinion are experts in where weaknesses are in each type - different tactics for different audiences.
- letmein 10y ago
  Ultimately, I see the root cause of this dichotomy as a side-effect of The Death of The Expert. Edumucated Folk live in one Universe, and Working Joe on Main St lives in another Universe. By the time you finish 10 years of secondary education, you think you're smart, but mostly all you've done is chain together countless memorized assumptions about how various model parameters should work to over-fit your mental interpolator of the Map of the World. You become so educated that you filter our more than you realize. You don't even notice, like a fish never notices the ocean in which it swims. The Academically credentialed refer to others just like themselves, because Authority only works if you mutually vouch for each other, by adhering to the same rules. Outsiders are Othered, smugly laughed at and ignored like Morlocks. Look at any big example where The Experts not only were off, but were Not Even Wrong, turning a Moonshot into a Neptune shot, then trying to cover up their mistakes to save face so they won't be de-credentialed and forced to go live in the sewers under Metropolis. Pick any major World event, and you'll find The Smartest Guys in the Room, who earn more in 1 year than Joe on Main St will in his entire life, and who COMPLETELY BUNGLED what ever they claimed they knew with near absolute certainty, because they are Scientists who use Evidence and Math that nobody can proof read, but trust us buddy, you dudn't get a PhD from MIT like all of us did. 1. Iraq WMD: look how spectacularly wrong were the several thousand Experts from 100's of Professional Fields. 2. 2008 Depression. 20,000 Genius Quants and Nobel Prize Winners and top billionaires and the Gods Upon Mount Olympus all bet their reputations that a 1-in-60 trillion Outlier event could never, ever happen. This Time It's Different. The price of houses will never go down, so it's a AAA double certified bet to use it as collateral to take out huge loans by increasing the multiple by which you are leveraged in your hedged bets. And it all blew up. 3. Syria. All the idiot Experts yet again assembled to recommend the real solution is covertly arm ISIS to topple Assad, then send in the Marines to whack ISIS and install some new puppet. All the experts yet again were so blindly certain that their models were the Territory that they stopped looking at the newest changes on the Map. Oh, now ISIS declared War on the West? Well that fact can't possibly fit into our Narrative that we Experts know is scientifically true, so let's just ignore it. Oh, what's this, hundreds of thousands of social media accounts are joining ISIS and threating to overthrow us in our own Nations? Well that's just preposterous, we know with absolute certainty that 99.9999999% of Muslims are Peaceful. Therefore, let's invite 10, then 20, then 100 million of them to cross our borders and live next door, all so we can retain our Cognitive Dissonance that we are The Experts, we can't be wrong because otherwise why should I have a PhD and earn 20x more than you, a mere Uber driver with no credentials? 4. As Programmers, we are the Enlightened Class, we build the future while Joe Blow on Main St just lives in the Minecrafted Utopia which we sculpt for him. We are Urban Liberal Atheist/Pagans with refined intellectual pursuits, we love Truth and Equality and by golly we really are going to CHANGE THE WORLD, hold hands, sing Kumbaya We Are The World around the SpaceX AI Rocket that will take us all to our new life awaiting us on Mars. Meanwhile, out of 18,000,000 or so code monkeys on Earth, not even a handful have any idea that all of our computer security is fake, the NSA quite literally records and decrypts everything, using 10,000 new 0day per year which they purchase from Respectable Programmers like you who have a bright future and just want to do the right thing by cooperating with the NSA for a well earned comfortable upper-middle-class salary. Then Snowden appears and pops your Truman Show bubbke like Copernicus deprecated Ptolomy. All The Experts assemble like Avengers yet again. They all recommend, everything is fine Mr Joe Blow, we paid a vendor millions for a pretty dashboard of Analytics Big Data charts to tell us that everythibg's fine. We're in The Cloud, we're patched, we use 2FA on E2E with Axolotl Rachets stacked to the Moon and we're Lifetime Gold Donors to the EFF and several Houses of Fierce, Intrepid Journalism. 5. Guccifer the Shadowbroker hacked the shit out of everything. You name it, it's compromised. VPN, ssh, every web, email, file, chat, dns, ntp, database, all of it is now known to be hijacked. Can we still trust the banks, the utilities, the telcoes, the defense contractors, the media conglomerates, the entertainment, the software, the OEMs, etc? You say Trust Us, we're the Experts. See how this works? Processions of Expert Pied Pipers lead us off a cliff into the ocean like lemmings. Is Joe Blow on Main St a dumb racist redneck for taking one look at that ol' Bull you're selling, but instead flipping the Series of Tubes to check out what Alex Jones and /pol/ and UFO chasers and Chentrails kooks and Reptillian Agenda paranoids and monetized Youtubers have to say about The Real News? From where I'm at, living in a card board box on Main St with no future, I'm going with what Joe says he saw Alex say about the Pizzagate-Soros-Globalists. I may not be an Expert beyond Main St, but I do know the only person who never lied to me was the hacker who leaked all the Expert's shit to Wikileaks. It's not a perfect Map of the World, but it's a helluva lot more accurate than the total disasters we got by listening to The Experts.