4 ms·

ITT: a lot of criticism toward NewsGuard. Though it does seem that it has some pretty glaring flaws. I'm curious what ideas people have to combat the problem m

ITT: a lot of criticism toward NewsGuard. Though it does seem that it has some pretty glaring flaws. I'm curious what ideas people have to combat the problem more effectively? Solutions like "people should just l2thinkcritically" don't seem practical to me. I think crowdsourced approaches will just degenerate into partisan feuds. Relying on a central authority just paves the way for the nation-states/illuminati/"globalists"/evil-sentient-penguins to manipulate public opinion on a grand scale. So, what else is there?

repolfx 8y ago
Your first task is to prove there's a problem at all. Kodablah (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290) is not the only one with serious doubts that there's any such thing as a problem that needs to be combatted. Let's review a quick timeline. The term "fake news" was hardly used until recently: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... The huge spike corresponds exactly with the election of Trump and Britain voting for Brexit. Suddenly, fake news was supposedly everywhere and the problem of the moment. Before mid 2016 though, nobody talked about it. To any outside observer it's very clear what has happened here. Several problems have intersected. Firstly, a huge chunk of the left wing population doesn't really understand conservatism - not why people think like that, or even what they think at all. This isn't some idle speculation, it's actually been studied at scale: https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/ https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva... Conservatives understand liberals at scale but not the other way around - Republicans may as well be an alien race, as far as many Democrats are concerned. So of course they look for explanations of why people can hold such obviously 'wrong' set of beliefs. And they find it in the belief that the population is as easily programmable as your TV set. Rewind the clock a few years and you can find a lot of rhetoric about campaign spending. Citizens United and Obama saying there should be a constitutional amendment. The belief was simple - whoever spends the most on advertising wins over the weak minded and wins the election. Huge swathes of voters don't think for themselves, they simply vote for whoever they saw advertised the most. Because conservatives were backed by big business, allowing businesses to spend money on political advertising would doom the correct way of thinking to oblivion. 2016 rendered that idea completely untenable. In America Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and in the UK the Remain campaign obliterated the Leave campaign in terms of resources and spending. Remain spent more on a single leaflet campaign than the entire Leave campaign combined. Yet both sides lost. So now the money=winning line is proven false, what can be the explanation? There has to be something else brainwashing the weak minded population other than obvious political advertising. The conundrum was solved with the idea of "fake news" and the Russian bogeyman, who used ... Twitter ... to have an even bigger impact than political advertising. The fervour that was previously directed at the idea of unlimited ad spend was now turned on the idea of news sources that didn't cooperate and support Clinton (like Wikileaks). The problem with this worldview is that it's as wrong as the previous belief. At least political advertising had a concrete definition which allowed it to be studied, and found to have little impact once people became informed about an election and who the candidates are: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth/442076 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth... "We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero. First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in gen- eral elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These exper- iments’ average effect is also zero." But nobody can quite identify what fake news really means, hence the arguments over what is and isn't fake. It's probably the case that if Clinton and Remain had won, nobody would be talking about fake news or Russia at all.
- samcday 8y ago
  You’ve raised a lot of points here and it’s kinda hard to tackle them all. I’ll try to keep my response terse. For one, the search trend for “fake news” means absolutely nothing to me. That term only entered the zeitgeist when it was popularised during the 2016 elections. I truly believe that even the organisations with the most integrity can be accused of blatant partisan bias. And as far as I can tell from my (albeit limited) investigations, it’s been that way since mass media was born. You don’t have to fabricate news. You can omit certain facts, or frame the story a certain way to drive the narrative you want. I agree the money expenditure during a campaign isn’t the ultimate measure of impact. Remember the Leave slogan on the side of the bus during Brexit? I doubt that cost much. Outright lies aren’t terribly expensive, most of the time. TL;DR - I strongly disagree with the idea that there isn’t a problem at all. People are curating their own echo chambers every day, and our existing establishments and platforms are encouraging them to do so.
zanny 8y ago
The fairness doctrine by the FCC had a lot of issues but simply removing it with no replacement sowed the seeds for blatant manipulation of people via media and "news". There are a scant few independent non-profits I'd consider trusting with determining "fairness" or fact. The US government certainly isn't qualified anymore with how corrupted and disconnected from the people it is, corporations by definition are amoral, and power corrupts. Giving anyone the determination of what is "fake" makes them a vector for exploitation and abuse. The answer should be you need a new, legitimately representative and democratic government, to oversee regulation on those who claim to be news in order to more closely guarantee honesty. Thats a bit bigger of a problem to approach than the mass-deception and manipulation of a society by monied interests, though.
- samcday 8y ago
  The answer should be you need a new, legitimately representative and democratic government We went from “how do we improve the media situation?” to “we need revolution” awfully fast! Jokes aside, you might be right. If you are though, it probably means we won’t make any meaningful strides towards a better system for quite a while.
  - zanny 8y ago
    Its why anything political, which ends up being just about everything, feels like a distraction. All these problems fundamentally trace back to a lack of representation and influence in government by the commoner, and that requires radical alterations to the government to give them their voice/back. Everything else is just speculative hearsay about what ifs and could bes.

repolfx 8y ago

Your first task is to prove there's a problem at all. Kodablah (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290) is not the only one with serious doubts that there's any such thing as a problem that needs to be combatted. Let's review a quick timeline. The term "fake news" was hardly used until recently: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... The huge spike corresponds exactly with the election of Trump and Britain voting for Brexit. Suddenly, fake news was supposedly everywhere and the problem of the moment. Before mid 2016 though, nobody talked about it. To any outside observer it's very clear what has happened here. Several problems have intersected. Firstly, a huge chunk of the left wing population doesn't really understand conservatism - not why people think like that, or even what they think at all. This isn't some idle speculation, it's actually been studied at scale: https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/ https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva... Conservatives understand liberals at scale but not the other way around - Republicans may as well be an alien race, as far as many Democrats are concerned. So of course they look for explanations of why people can hold such obviously 'wrong' set of beliefs. And they find it in the belief that the population is as easily programmable as your TV set. Rewind the clock a few years and you can find a lot of rhetoric about campaign spending. Citizens United and Obama saying there should be a constitutional amendment. The belief was simple - whoever spends the most on advertising wins over the weak minded and wins the election. Huge swathes of voters don't think for themselves, they simply vote for whoever they saw advertised the most. Because conservatives were backed by big business, allowing businesses to spend money on political advertising would doom the correct way of thinking to oblivion. 2016 rendered that idea completely untenable. In America Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and in the UK the Remain campaign obliterated the Leave campaign in terms of resources and spending. Remain spent more on a single leaflet campaign than the entire Leave campaign combined. Yet both sides lost. So now the money=winning line is proven false, what can be the explanation? There has to be something else brainwashing the weak minded population other than obvious political advertising. The conundrum was solved with the idea of "fake news" and the Russian bogeyman, who used ... Twitter ... to have an even bigger impact than political advertising. The fervour that was previously directed at the idea of unlimited ad spend was now turned on the idea of news sources that didn't cooperate and support Clinton (like Wikileaks). The problem with this worldview is that it's as wrong as the previous belief. At least political advertising had a concrete definition which allowed it to be studied, and found to have little impact once people became informed about an election and who the candidates are: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth/442076 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth... "We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero. First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in gen- eral elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These exper- iments’ average effect is also zero." But nobody can quite identify what fake news really means, hence the arguments over what is and isn't fake. It's probably the case that if Clinton and Remain had won, nobody would be talking about fake news or Russia at all.

samcday 8y ago
You’ve raised a lot of points here and it’s kinda hard to tackle them all. I’ll try to keep my response terse. For one, the search trend for “fake news” means absolutely nothing to me. That term only entered the zeitgeist when it was popularised during the 2016 elections. I truly believe that even the organisations with the most integrity can be accused of blatant partisan bias. And as far as I can tell from my (albeit limited) investigations, it’s been that way since mass media was born. You don’t have to fabricate news. You can omit certain facts, or frame the story a certain way to drive the narrative you want. I agree the money expenditure during a campaign isn’t the ultimate measure of impact. Remember the Leave slogan on the side of the bus during Brexit? I doubt that cost much. Outright lies aren’t terribly expensive, most of the time. TL;DR - I strongly disagree with the idea that there isn’t a problem at all. People are curating their own echo chambers every day, and our existing establishments and platforms are encouraging them to do so.

zanny 8y ago

The fairness doctrine by the FCC had a lot of issues but simply removing it with no replacement sowed the seeds for blatant manipulation of people via media and "news". There are a scant few independent non-profits I'd consider trusting with determining "fairness" or fact. The US government certainly isn't qualified anymore with how corrupted and disconnected from the people it is, corporations by definition are amoral, and power corrupts. Giving anyone the determination of what is "fake" makes them a vector for exploitation and abuse. The answer should be you need a new, legitimately representative and democratic government, to oversee regulation on those who claim to be news in order to more closely guarantee honesty. Thats a bit bigger of a problem to approach than the mass-deception and manipulation of a society by monied interests, though.

samcday 8y ago
The answer should be you need a new, legitimately representative and democratic government We went from “how do we improve the media situation?” to “we need revolution” awfully fast! Jokes aside, you might be right. If you are though, it probably means we won’t make any meaningful strides towards a better system for quite a while.
- zanny 8y ago
  Its why anything political, which ends up being just about everything, feels like a distraction. All these problems fundamentally trace back to a lack of representation and influence in government by the commoner, and that requires radical alterations to the government to give them their voice/back. Everything else is just speculative hearsay about what ifs and could bes.