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"Fake news" is often interpreted as "news I don't agree with". That is not the definition. News can be defined as genuine if it's truthful, in reporting facts,

"Fake news" is often interpreted as "news I don't agree with". That is not the definition. News can be defined as genuine if it's truthful, in reporting facts, in reporting uncertainties & limits of current knowledge, in reporting potential conflicts of interests and finally in explicitely outlining when unproven opinions are put forth, whether by the author or by an interviewee. News is deemed fake when it fails to be truthful. While there can be some grey areas, or perhaps poor journalistic standards, there are plenty of cases where articles fail to disclose conflict of interest, put forth unfounded opinions and intentionally mislead the reader to draw an untruthful conclusion. That is fake news.

lmm 8y ago
> there are plenty of cases where articles fail to disclose conflict of interest, put forth unfounded opinions and intentionally mislead the reader to draw an untruthful conclusion. That is fake news. "Untruthful" is begging the question. For the rest of it, virtually all news articles fail to disclose the writer's personal biases, put forth unfounded opinions, and intentionally lead the reader to draw particular conclusions. Your proposed standard is hardly any better than "news I don't agree with" in practice.
- atomical 8y ago
  Could you give an example? For example, all news articles published by Reuters have an unfounded opinion in them?
  - lmm 8y ago
    Sure. Let's look at the top article on Reuters as I write this, which happens to be https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-germany/new-foreign-secretary-hunt-warns-of-no-deal-brexit-risk-idUKKBN1KD13J https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-germany/new-for... Second paragraph opens "With just over eight months left until Britain is due to leave the EU, there is little clarity about how trade will flow" - sounds like unfounded opinion to me. Third paragraph talks about "a step that could spook financial markets and dislocate trade flows across Europe and beyond." which is either vacuously true (anything "could" anything else - but then why say so?) or baseless speculation. "few diplomats expect the deal to be struck until months later." is unsubstantiated opinion - even if it were possible to verify who these "diplomats" were, having a news article report an opinion second-hand doesn't make it any less an opinion. Likewise "some investors have said such a chaotic scenario would seriously damage both the economies of Britain and the EU over the short term.", and "they cast as a failing German-dominated experiment in European integration.". I doubt the second half (below "DISORDERLY BREXIT?") will be much different. I'm not trying to attack Reuters here - they do better than many news sources - but any kind of substantive reporting requires making judgements on questions that are politicised or, often, inherently political. Even the most skilled journalist will make calls that eventually turn out to be laughable in hindsight. I want committed, engaged journalism - reducing reporting to a bloodless "A said this, B said that, readers at home must make up their own minds" would not be an improvement - but the price of that is that journalists must have the freedom to make honest mistakes. And that in turn means tolerating the dishonest kind, unless and until we can come up with some clear bright lines that separate the one from the other.
ryandrake 8y ago
I’m not a huge fan of Facebook and I definitely don’t want them in charge of deciding what is truth and what is not. Do you really want to give any company that power?
- atomical 8y ago
  In that case shouldn't Facebook prevent users from sharing any links? If they have the power to use algorithms to show one article more than an other they have the power to influence what is considered truth.
neoburkian 8y ago
Today in the NYT Daily podcast, the NYT argued that: """ [Facebook] thinks about free speech the way the US govt. thinks about free speech. There is no rule that that has to be the case... A way of avoiding the choice [about who to censor] altogether is to say free speech is protected in the public sphere so we are going to protect it in the private sphere... We speak about facebook as if it is a democracy, something that has to have a consistent set of values that it applies equally... and there is some principle of fairness and equality that it must apply... facebook is acting as if it is constrained by these American notions... In countries like Germany there are strict hate speech laws. Facebook could be more like Germany... We are asking Zuckerburg to accept the power he has and use it wisely, and he is reluctant to do that... Zuckerburg has to solve this problem that he has created, and if he cant solve it or isn't willing to solve it, maybe he shouldn't have all this power. """[1] The NYT is criticizing facebook for having fair and egalitarian values, and all but calling for regulation if facebook doesn't censor views the NYT doesn't like. The NYT has a HUGE conflict of interest when it comes to facebook. It also has a doubly huge interest in regulating speech, if they can get the government to force companies to de-list NYT's competitors under the guise of fake news that is a huge win for them. Nowhere was that disclosed in this podcast. Under your criteria, that makes this fake news. Should facebook remove links to this podcast now? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-misinformation.html?rref=nytimes.com%2Fthedaily https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/facebo...
- athenot 8y ago
  That's a podcast, not a news article. It's designed to be more entertaining, not just dry facts. The link of the podcast you give, however, has 6 links to background information. Full disclaimer: I subscribe to the NYT. The paper+online editions. But any newspaper has different sections: dry reporting, rushed breaking news, in-depth analyses, op-ed commentaries, etc. The style of each is different. More importantly, the purpose of each type of article is different. A lot of us got used to only reading newspaper articles via google or via our social media feed—appearing between a cat video and a political meme. After a while we start to all consider them the same. Context is lost. To me that is the greatest harm of social media. We strive for efficient use of our time but in the process we lost the context of what we're reading. That's why I'm ok with paying a paper to compile and organize the information for me. Do I agree with every article the NYT puts out? Nope. Do I get irritated at articles written from particular biases? Yes, it happens. But overall the info is of quality and organized in such a way as to be the most efficient use of my time. As a side-note I picked the NYT because I happen to like their in-depth data visualization group (another disclosure: I happen to like d3.js and its creator used to work there). But there are plenty of other quality papers out there who also do original journalistic work.

lmm 8y ago

> there are plenty of cases where articles fail to disclose conflict of interest, put forth unfounded opinions and intentionally mislead the reader to draw an untruthful conclusion. That is fake news. "Untruthful" is begging the question. For the rest of it, virtually all news articles fail to disclose the writer's personal biases, put forth unfounded opinions, and intentionally lead the reader to draw particular conclusions. Your proposed standard is hardly any better than "news I don't agree with" in practice.

atomical 8y ago
Could you give an example? For example, all news articles published by Reuters have an unfounded opinion in them?
- lmm 8y ago
  Sure. Let's look at the top article on Reuters as I write this, which happens to be https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-germany/new-foreign-secretary-hunt-warns-of-no-deal-brexit-risk-idUKKBN1KD13J https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-germany/new-for... Second paragraph opens "With just over eight months left until Britain is due to leave the EU, there is little clarity about how trade will flow" - sounds like unfounded opinion to me. Third paragraph talks about "a step that could spook financial markets and dislocate trade flows across Europe and beyond." which is either vacuously true (anything "could" anything else - but then why say so?) or baseless speculation. "few diplomats expect the deal to be struck until months later." is unsubstantiated opinion - even if it were possible to verify who these "diplomats" were, having a news article report an opinion second-hand doesn't make it any less an opinion. Likewise "some investors have said such a chaotic scenario would seriously damage both the economies of Britain and the EU over the short term.", and "they cast as a failing German-dominated experiment in European integration.". I doubt the second half (below "DISORDERLY BREXIT?") will be much different. I'm not trying to attack Reuters here - they do better than many news sources - but any kind of substantive reporting requires making judgements on questions that are politicised or, often, inherently political. Even the most skilled journalist will make calls that eventually turn out to be laughable in hindsight. I want committed, engaged journalism - reducing reporting to a bloodless "A said this, B said that, readers at home must make up their own minds" would not be an improvement - but the price of that is that journalists must have the freedom to make honest mistakes. And that in turn means tolerating the dishonest kind, unless and until we can come up with some clear bright lines that separate the one from the other.

ryandrake 8y ago

I’m not a huge fan of Facebook and I definitely don’t want them in charge of deciding what is truth and what is not. Do you really want to give any company that power?

atomical 8y ago
In that case shouldn't Facebook prevent users from sharing any links? If they have the power to use algorithms to show one article more than an other they have the power to influence what is considered truth.

neoburkian 8y ago

Today in the NYT Daily podcast, the NYT argued that: """ [Facebook] thinks about free speech the way the US govt. thinks about free speech. There is no rule that that has to be the case... A way of avoiding the choice [about who to censor] altogether is to say free speech is protected in the public sphere so we are going to protect it in the private sphere... We speak about facebook as if it is a democracy, something that has to have a consistent set of values that it applies equally... and there is some principle of fairness and equality that it must apply... facebook is acting as if it is constrained by these American notions... In countries like Germany there are strict hate speech laws. Facebook could be more like Germany... We are asking Zuckerburg to accept the power he has and use it wisely, and he is reluctant to do that... Zuckerburg has to solve this problem that he has created, and if he cant solve it or isn't willing to solve it, maybe he shouldn't have all this power. """[1] The NYT is criticizing facebook for having fair and egalitarian values, and all but calling for regulation if facebook doesn't censor views the NYT doesn't like. The NYT has a HUGE conflict of interest when it comes to facebook. It also has a doubly huge interest in regulating speech, if they can get the government to force companies to de-list NYT's competitors under the guise of fake news that is a huge win for them. Nowhere was that disclosed in this podcast. Under your criteria, that makes this fake news. Should facebook remove links to this podcast now? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-misinformation.html?rref=nytimes.com%2Fthedaily https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/facebo...

athenot 8y ago
That's a podcast, not a news article. It's designed to be more entertaining, not just dry facts. The link of the podcast you give, however, has 6 links to background information. Full disclaimer: I subscribe to the NYT. The paper+online editions. But any newspaper has different sections: dry reporting, rushed breaking news, in-depth analyses, op-ed commentaries, etc. The style of each is different. More importantly, the purpose of each type of article is different. A lot of us got used to only reading newspaper articles via google or via our social media feed—appearing between a cat video and a political meme. After a while we start to all consider them the same. Context is lost. To me that is the greatest harm of social media. We strive for efficient use of our time but in the process we lost the context of what we're reading. That's why I'm ok with paying a paper to compile and organize the information for me. Do I agree with every article the NYT puts out? Nope. Do I get irritated at articles written from particular biases? Yes, it happens. But overall the info is of quality and organized in such a way as to be the most efficient use of my time. As a side-note I picked the NYT because I happen to like their in-depth data visualization group (another disclosure: I happen to like d3.js and its creator used to work there). But there are plenty of other quality papers out there who also do original journalistic work.