6 ms·

It's not as hard as you're making out I think. If people have access to Facebook, they have access to other websites and sources of information to crosscheck an

It's not as hard as you're making out I think. If people have access to Facebook, they have access to other websites and sources of information to crosscheck any fake news.

scruple 8y ago
It is too hard, though... The average person is not going to spend the time and energy it takes to seek out and understand dissenting information. I see this behavior in myself, my family, my friends, professionals that I interact with, acquaintances, and colleagues. Cognitive bias is a hell of a drug. Case in point: There's an article near the top of HN /active _right now_ where if you click through the sources you'll arrive at the conclusion that the article is a) an opinion piece passed off as fact, b) quite literally fake news. And, yet, that thread has something like 130 comments talking earnestly about the so-called "statistics" presented in the article (derived from a single voluntary digital survey executed by a company owned by an international private equity firm, with the survey data strategically placed in articles alongside actual US Government BLS data points to wash the stink off). The headline is juicy and people can't resist.
- Moodles 8y ago
  I agree that those sorts of cases are very hard to deal with. However, I think the "fake news" the MPs are trying to combat is actually really trivial stuff that pretty much nobody on HN would pay attention to. Stuff like: "Yoko Ono: ‘I Had An Affair with Hillary Clinton in the ’70s’". Just absolute nonsense where anyone with a modicum of critical thinking would realize that such a story would be on multiple news sites. I think it's possible to at least eradicate basic fake news like that with education. We can try our best to teach kids statistics and how to analyze them, but I agree that is a very hard problem as many people are just mathematically illiterate in general anyway.
  - scruple 8y ago
    Yes, and you're right, of course. There is certainly a lot of blatantly incorrect tabloid-esque stuff floating around today that people take as fact at the headline-level. I suppose, in my defense, that it's easy to forget those sorts of things exist in digital form if you don't come across them frequently.

It's not as hard as you're making out I think. If people have access to Facebook, they have access to other websites and sources of information to crosscheck any fake news.

scruple 8y ago

It is too hard, though... The average person is not going to spend the time and energy it takes to seek out and understand dissenting information. I see this behavior in myself, my family, my friends, professionals that I interact with, acquaintances, and colleagues. Cognitive bias is a hell of a drug. Case in point: There's an article near the top of HN /active _right now_ where if you click through the sources you'll arrive at the conclusion that the article is a) an opinion piece passed off as fact, b) quite literally fake news. And, yet, that thread has something like 130 comments talking earnestly about the so-called "statistics" presented in the article (derived from a single voluntary digital survey executed by a company owned by an international private equity firm, with the survey data strategically placed in articles alongside actual US Government BLS data points to wash the stink off). The headline is juicy and people can't resist.

Moodles 8y ago
I agree that those sorts of cases are very hard to deal with. However, I think the "fake news" the MPs are trying to combat is actually really trivial stuff that pretty much nobody on HN would pay attention to. Stuff like: "Yoko Ono: ‘I Had An Affair with Hillary Clinton in the ’70s’". Just absolute nonsense where anyone with a modicum of critical thinking would realize that such a story would be on multiple news sites. I think it's possible to at least eradicate basic fake news like that with education. We can try our best to teach kids statistics and how to analyze them, but I agree that is a very hard problem as many people are just mathematically illiterate in general anyway.
- scruple 8y ago
  Yes, and you're right, of course. There is certainly a lot of blatantly incorrect tabloid-esque stuff floating around today that people take as fact at the headline-level. I suppose, in my defense, that it's easy to forget those sorts of things exist in digital form if you don't come across them frequently.