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This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

Zak 8y ago
The original meaning was literally something that looks like a news report, but reports as fact something that didn't actually happen and isn't obviously satire. As an example, "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump". That was, in fact a fake news story. The fact it asserted had no basis in reality.
guelo 8y ago
That's weird, I constantly see friends spreading outright incorrect, political trolling from clickbait factories like "Daily World Upate" or "America’s Last Line of Defense".
KC8ZKF 8y ago
"Fake news" has become a cure for cognitive dissonance, but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. That certainly was fake, somewhat effective, and toxic. It's still around. Check out qanon, spirtcooking, etc.
- dmix 8y ago
  > but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news. As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources. That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions. I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public. If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites. Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.
  - KC8ZKF 8y ago
    I agree with almost everything you write here, but I just want to make clear that my comment was about the term "fake news", and not reactionary outrage, FUD, attack TV shows, Reddit, or anything else.
EGreg 8y ago
Fake news used to refer to “Hillary Clinton has a body double” or stuff you’d find in the Enquirer. And now the term has been hijacked to mean any new you disagree with.
- protomyth 8y ago
  I was quite fond of the Weekly World News, particularly their article on how there was a gate to Hell in North Dakota and the Governor sending a tactical team to try to kill the devil.
- gowld 8y ago
  The Enquirer is real (gossip/trash) news, at least at the level of carefully worded exaggerated rumor that some real person claimed to have observed. Weekly World News is fictional satire about aliens.
drzaiusapelord 8y ago
>I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The right absolutely makes up stories: https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/ Lots and lots of false statements here.
- deadmetheny 8y ago
  Snopes isn't made up of experts and isn't an unbiased source. It mystifies me that so many people treat it as reliable, let alone infallible. (sorry for pointing this out, but downvoting me doesn't change that it's true)
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - drzaiusapelord 8y ago
    You're welcome to challenge their items on a line by line basis. Type it out, I'll wait. There are also lots of other sources. I think playing up a 'no true scotsman' just empowers the liars because at a certain point you're just arguing that truth cannot be verified by anyone.
    - deadmetheny 8y ago
      They have no valid credentials other than having been on the Internet a long time and having an interest in researching urban legends as laymen. One of the founders, David Mikkelson, couldn't answer questions about fact-checking due to legal issues[1]. If you really want to play the "HN says the names of logical fallacies" game, then I'll do you one better and say that challenging me to refute every single line item is an appeal to authority and we should just trust them because everyone says we should. There's no reason to believe them any more than there's a reason to believe much of anything published on somebody's personal website. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...
trgv 8y ago
I don't think it was ridiculous to begin with (neither was "terrorism") but it's ridiculous now. I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible. You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.
- karmelapple 8y ago
  Would you also consider it news the publisher knows mislead, even if there’s a grain of truth?
craftyguy 8y ago
> I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect Go look at donald trump's twitter feed. It's full of outright incorrect statements being presented as fact.
- ralusek 8y ago
  Donald Trump is not a news source, he's a moron.
jccalhoun 8y ago
There are certainly "facts" that I have heard people say or spread online that were clearly false like millions of illegals voted in the last election (when in reality one article claimed that and had lots of rebuttals and now has a disclaimer at the top of the article) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-election/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-el... or that Hillary Clinton only won 57 counties in the 2016 election https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-counties-clinton-won-57/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-cou... However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.
- deleted 8y ago
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ixtli 8y ago
Its a concerted effort to discredit expert opinion which the shorter term goal of allowing people to equate their own laymen's understanding with that of someone versed in a subject.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  Nate Silver = election expert Me = not an expert on elections Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver. Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine? Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?
  - jonbarker 8y ago
    Disclosure: I am a Nate Silver fan. Nate's expert opinion is only valuable if you accept the premise, which is that prediction science involves a range of possible outcomes. If you accept that premise, which I do, his opinion on the 2016 election, in which he stated several times that the odds of a Trump presidency were actually higher than most of the polls suggested, was arguably a more valuable opinion than either a coin toss, or most of the individual polls.
    - null0pointer 8y ago
      Yeah this seems to be the disconnect. A lot of people will intuitively think (myself included) something like this. "You said Hillary had 90% chance to win, but Trump won. Therefore your prediction was WRONG". It actually takes a little more thought to understand that a Trump victory was a possibility in the model all along. And that you cannot say whether or not a prediction model is accurate based on a SINGLE result.
      - aninhumer 8y ago
        Moreover, if someone makes a lot of predictions of people having "90% chance to win" and all of them win, that is a less accurate prediction than if roughly 10% of them lose.
at-fates-hands 8y ago
I'll just give you a few just from January and February of this year after Trump's inauguration: 1. Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates following the election results. Twitterverse and Facebook exploded after Out editor-at-large Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor. No evidence to date has been found to support this story. 2. Tri-state hacking conspiracy. Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. By the time Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight explained it was actually just demographics, the damage had already been done. 3. The MLK bust removal Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. When in fact, it had simply been moved. However, Miller didn't even ask anybody and the story went viral before Miller issued his correction. 4. Betsy Davos Grizzly comment Davos was asked whether schools should have guns on their campus. Her reply? "As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies." Different states, different needs, she merely stated there isn't a one sized fits all strategy. How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox) 5. The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration. Totally fake and untrue. As is the custom, all politically appointed officers submit a letter of resignation when the new administration comes in. Rogin's story was misleading and totally fake. 6. The Travel Ban Lie On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration. The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order. Just one problem? It was a total lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. Nobody did any research, they just took the story and ran with it. I could go on and on, but you get the point. These are not just "oops, the headline was poorly written." These are purposely fake and misleading stories meant to create a certain narrative and these people bank on the fact people are lazy and will simply run with it until it gets called out. Keep in mind these are JUST FROM TWO MONTHS, imagine the amount of stories I could dig up if I actually wanted to put in the time and vetted all of the MSM's articles? It's obvious this is a protracted, deliberate attempt to push negative stories about Trump and his administration, there's no other way to spin this.
JoshCole 8y ago
Bombs hit Syria vs bombs intercepted. Gassing by Syria vs false flag by Britain. Clearly, we do run into situations where multiple sets of facts are put forward. So fake news is not a ridiculous thing that never happens. Suggesting that it is because not all news is intentionally fake is like saying there is no such thing as war because we don't often see people killing each other. Moving away from extreme cases, things are still wrong enough to cause trouble. False information is inherently surprising when presented as true, because it isn't expected. It follows that false information lends itself better to clickbait titles. This in turn leads to false information having better click through and sharing metrics. Sharing metrics and engagement metrics are used to power recommendation systems. So it follows that recommendation systems are biased toward recommending false information. Compounding the issue, content producers know this. They optimize their content for an environment which promotes false information, which biases content in a way that generates the sort of speculative conclusions you mention. As a natural consequence of the flawed environment, this flawed content is then seen by a greater number of people. That out news system isn't as good as would like is just true. I still remember the TED talk when I found out about how much better the world was doing by most metrics. All those educated and rich people who could afford to attend a TED talk and yet the majority had no idea as to the true state of the world. If the news wasn't biased such that it presents a false narrative, then why such glaring ignorance among the educated?
BookmarkSaver 8y ago
There is an entire world of straight-up fabricated "journalism" disguised as reputable reporting which gets immense circulation on social media networks. It is very easy to not experience this sort of thing, using fairly basic but overall uncommon steps. For instance, I don't use Twitter and I've filtered all my random acquaintances (e.g. random people I knew in high school) from my FB feed years ago. But there are patently false links being passed around at an enormous rate on these sites, and people that don't personally invest themselves into that sort of social media, or simply don't discriminate between who they see stuff from, get exposed to it a lot.
soundwave106 8y ago
The definition of "fake news" when I first heard the term more or less dealt with sites parroting outright falsehoods. It didn't necessarily have to be explicitly political. False gossip sites, outrage-inducing headlines to the wild side of the tabloids, fake business news (http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/fake-news-sites-local-businesses/ http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/fake-news-sites-local-business...), troll-ish article sites (ala the National Report), homeopathy woo (ala Natural News), and other conspiracy oriented venues (eg GlobalResearch, Infowars) were among the many types of "fake news" out there. The political angle it has taken is unfortunate -- due to the prominence of "fake news" in the last US election; the net effect has been a devolution of the word into a snarl word for "I don't like your particular political point of view". IMHO what you are describing -- a news organization has a bias or opinion (strong or not), but still tries to maintain some degree of connection with factual data -- is not fake news.
deleted 8y ago
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Zak 8y ago

The original meaning was literally something that looks like a news report, but reports as fact something that didn't actually happen and isn't obviously satire. As an example, "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump". That was, in fact a fake news story. The fact it asserted had no basis in reality.

guelo 8y ago

That's weird, I constantly see friends spreading outright incorrect, political trolling from clickbait factories like "Daily World Upate" or "America’s Last Line of Defense".

KC8ZKF 8y ago

"Fake news" has become a cure for cognitive dissonance, but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. That certainly was fake, somewhat effective, and toxic. It's still around. Check out qanon, spirtcooking, etc.

dmix 8y ago
> but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news. As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources. That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions. I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public. If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites. Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.
- KC8ZKF 8y ago
  I agree with almost everything you write here, but I just want to make clear that my comment was about the term "fake news", and not reactionary outrage, FUD, attack TV shows, Reddit, or anything else.

EGreg 8y ago

Fake news used to refer to “Hillary Clinton has a body double” or stuff you’d find in the Enquirer. And now the term has been hijacked to mean any new you disagree with.

protomyth 8y ago
I was quite fond of the Weekly World News, particularly their article on how there was a gate to Hell in North Dakota and the Governor sending a tactical team to try to kill the devil.
gowld 8y ago
The Enquirer is real (gossip/trash) news, at least at the level of carefully worded exaggerated rumor that some real person claimed to have observed. Weekly World News is fictional satire about aliens.

drzaiusapelord 8y ago

>I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The right absolutely makes up stories: https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/ Lots and lots of false statements here.

deadmetheny 8y ago
Snopes isn't made up of experts and isn't an unbiased source. It mystifies me that so many people treat it as reliable, let alone infallible. (sorry for pointing this out, but downvoting me doesn't change that it's true)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- drzaiusapelord 8y ago
  You're welcome to challenge their items on a line by line basis. Type it out, I'll wait. There are also lots of other sources. I think playing up a 'no true scotsman' just empowers the liars because at a certain point you're just arguing that truth cannot be verified by anyone.
  - deadmetheny 8y ago
    They have no valid credentials other than having been on the Internet a long time and having an interest in researching urban legends as laymen. One of the founders, David Mikkelson, couldn't answer questions about fact-checking due to legal issues[1]. If you really want to play the "HN says the names of logical fallacies" game, then I'll do you one better and say that challenging me to refute every single line item is an appeal to authority and we should just trust them because everyone says we should. There's no reason to believe them any more than there's a reason to believe much of anything published on somebody's personal website. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

trgv 8y ago

I don't think it was ridiculous to begin with (neither was "terrorism") but it's ridiculous now. I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible. You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.

karmelapple 8y ago
Would you also consider it news the publisher knows mislead, even if there’s a grain of truth?

craftyguy 8y ago

> I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect Go look at donald trump's twitter feed. It's full of outright incorrect statements being presented as fact.

ralusek 8y ago
Donald Trump is not a news source, he's a moron.

jccalhoun 8y ago

There are certainly "facts" that I have heard people say or spread online that were clearly false like millions of illegals voted in the last election (when in reality one article claimed that and had lots of rebuttals and now has a disclaimer at the top of the article) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-election/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-el... or that Hillary Clinton only won 57 counties in the 2016 election https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-counties-clinton-won-57/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-cou... However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.

deleted 8y ago
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ixtli 8y ago

Its a concerted effort to discredit expert opinion which the shorter term goal of allowing people to equate their own laymen's understanding with that of someone versed in a subject.

patrickg_zill 8y ago
Nate Silver = election expert Me = not an expert on elections Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver. Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine? Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?
- jonbarker 8y ago
  Disclosure: I am a Nate Silver fan. Nate's expert opinion is only valuable if you accept the premise, which is that prediction science involves a range of possible outcomes. If you accept that premise, which I do, his opinion on the 2016 election, in which he stated several times that the odds of a Trump presidency were actually higher than most of the polls suggested, was arguably a more valuable opinion than either a coin toss, or most of the individual polls.
  - null0pointer 8y ago
    Yeah this seems to be the disconnect. A lot of people will intuitively think (myself included) something like this. "You said Hillary had 90% chance to win, but Trump won. Therefore your prediction was WRONG". It actually takes a little more thought to understand that a Trump victory was a possibility in the model all along. And that you cannot say whether or not a prediction model is accurate based on a SINGLE result.
    - aninhumer 8y ago
      Moreover, if someone makes a lot of predictions of people having "90% chance to win" and all of them win, that is a less accurate prediction than if roughly 10% of them lose.

at-fates-hands 8y ago

I'll just give you a few just from January and February of this year after Trump's inauguration: 1. Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates following the election results. Twitterverse and Facebook exploded after Out editor-at-large Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor. No evidence to date has been found to support this story. 2. Tri-state hacking conspiracy. Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. By the time Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight explained it was actually just demographics, the damage had already been done. 3. The MLK bust removal Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. When in fact, it had simply been moved. However, Miller didn't even ask anybody and the story went viral before Miller issued his correction. 4. Betsy Davos Grizzly comment Davos was asked whether schools should have guns on their campus. Her reply? "As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies." Different states, different needs, she merely stated there isn't a one sized fits all strategy. How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox) 5. The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration. Totally fake and untrue. As is the custom, all politically appointed officers submit a letter of resignation when the new administration comes in. Rogin's story was misleading and totally fake. 6. The Travel Ban Lie On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration. The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order. Just one problem? It was a total lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. Nobody did any research, they just took the story and ran with it. I could go on and on, but you get the point. These are not just "oops, the headline was poorly written." These are purposely fake and misleading stories meant to create a certain narrative and these people bank on the fact people are lazy and will simply run with it until it gets called out. Keep in mind these are JUST FROM TWO MONTHS, imagine the amount of stories I could dig up if I actually wanted to put in the time and vetted all of the MSM's articles? It's obvious this is a protracted, deliberate attempt to push negative stories about Trump and his administration, there's no other way to spin this.

JoshCole 8y ago

Bombs hit Syria vs bombs intercepted. Gassing by Syria vs false flag by Britain. Clearly, we do run into situations where multiple sets of facts are put forward. So fake news is not a ridiculous thing that never happens. Suggesting that it is because not all news is intentionally fake is like saying there is no such thing as war because we don't often see people killing each other. Moving away from extreme cases, things are still wrong enough to cause trouble. False information is inherently surprising when presented as true, because it isn't expected. It follows that false information lends itself better to clickbait titles. This in turn leads to false information having better click through and sharing metrics. Sharing metrics and engagement metrics are used to power recommendation systems. So it follows that recommendation systems are biased toward recommending false information. Compounding the issue, content producers know this. They optimize their content for an environment which promotes false information, which biases content in a way that generates the sort of speculative conclusions you mention. As a natural consequence of the flawed environment, this flawed content is then seen by a greater number of people. That out news system isn't as good as would like is just true. I still remember the TED talk when I found out about how much better the world was doing by most metrics. All those educated and rich people who could afford to attend a TED talk and yet the majority had no idea as to the true state of the world. If the news wasn't biased such that it presents a false narrative, then why such glaring ignorance among the educated?

BookmarkSaver 8y ago

There is an entire world of straight-up fabricated "journalism" disguised as reputable reporting which gets immense circulation on social media networks. It is very easy to not experience this sort of thing, using fairly basic but overall uncommon steps. For instance, I don't use Twitter and I've filtered all my random acquaintances (e.g. random people I knew in high school) from my FB feed years ago. But there are patently false links being passed around at an enormous rate on these sites, and people that don't personally invest themselves into that sort of social media, or simply don't discriminate between who they see stuff from, get exposed to it a lot.

soundwave106 8y ago

The definition of "fake news" when I first heard the term more or less dealt with sites parroting outright falsehoods. It didn't necessarily have to be explicitly political. False gossip sites, outrage-inducing headlines to the wild side of the tabloids, fake business news (http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/fake-news-sites-local-businesses/ http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/fake-news-sites-local-business...), troll-ish article sites (ala the National Report), homeopathy woo (ala Natural News), and other conspiracy oriented venues (eg GlobalResearch, Infowars) were among the many types of "fake news" out there. The political angle it has taken is unfortunate -- due to the prominence of "fake news" in the last US election; the net effect has been a devolution of the word into a snarl word for "I don't like your particular political point of view". IMHO what you are describing -- a news organization has a bias or opinion (strong or not), but still tries to maintain some degree of connection with factual data -- is not fake news.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]