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The problem is that "fake news" is undefined. It could be pure lies partial truth / known lies partial truth / unprovable assertions conjec
by crankylinuxuser 8y ago
The problem is that "fake news" is undefined. It could be
pure lies
partial truth / known lies
partial truth / unprovable assertions
conjecture passed as news
limited snippets biasing intended viewpoint
commentary (Fox "news")
Disagree with assertions
Propaganda by state actor
And those are what I could think of in a few minutes. Worse yet, who's to be the arbiter of "truth"? What credentials do they have? And why would we believe them to be transparent with truthiness ratings? They will have bias - will we be able to discern? Doubtful.
The underlying thing, is that when things are bought to light, the truth surfaces. Yet now, the attack is on the very definition of "truth", playing the ultimate word definition game.
- buboard 8y agoOf those, only the first two qualify as "fake news", i.e. false news. To claim that "real news" do not contain the rest is ludicrous.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoYou made my point, that the definition of "fake news" is undefined. Pretty much anything can be pointed at and yelled "Fake News". And that's what we're seeing.
- syntheticcdo 8y agoFake news is news that is fake -- aka entirely fabricated with no basis in reality. "13 Obama supporters arrested for terrorist plot"-- boom, just made that up. That's fake news. Anything with a basis in reality is not.
- zorga 8y agoI think you're being a bit literal, fake news is just a modern name for propaganda and you can do it without lying simply by not telling the whole truth to mislead people. Misleading biased news is fake news even if no facts are wrong if they've clearly left out relevant and necessary facts that don't support the agenda.