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Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

inflatableDodo 7y ago
Terry Pratchett - >'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it all up.' Bill Gates - >'Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only recieve a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way you can check on someone's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the net than it is in print today.' Well, it appears that a children's comedy novelist had more insight into this subject than the guy who ran Microsoft. How would Bill's mystical reputation system deal with this? edit - I did not think that calling Pratchett a children's comedy novelist would raise so much ire. I think there might be one or two books of his I have not (yet) read and I am currently in a mania of fear and excitement over whether Sky will do justice to 'Good Omens' in the upcoming TV series. For those who think I am denigrating Pratchett in some way by the description, I am put in mind of the quote from C.S. Lewis - “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
- captainredbeard 7y ago
  Maybe Bill is complicit due to the political usefulness of fake news?
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    I was thinking it might just be a fox vs hedgehog thing. http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-better-forecasters-than-hedgehogs/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bette... On tech, Gates is more of a hedgehog and Pratchett is more of a fox, so we might actually expect Pratchett's predictions to be better.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  Gates was a blue-blood capitalist, and literally could not imagine people cooperating in a commons with sophisticated computers, because money. Whatever Gates is referring to in that quote very likely has some hobbled assumptions that are hard to conceptualize in 2020.
- pteraspidomorph 7y ago
  Children's comedy novelist?
  - ptah 7y ago
    are you saying windows is a weak joke?
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    One of the best children's comedy novelists to have ever put ink to paper, in my opinion.
- codingdave 7y ago
  Bill Gates is smart and successful, but that doesn't mean he is omniscient. He has made mistakes and said many things through his career that turned out to be false. As have we all. This isn't a personal flaw, it is just being human. But people do need to remember that his success doesn't make him wise or prescient, just successful.
- goto11 7y ago
  I think what Gates suggest is something like the "web of trust" which W3C was working on as part of the semantic web. The idea is basically if I trust A and A trust B then I can trust news articles written by B. I'm pretty skeptical it is workable online as a technical solution. But basically this is how trust worked in the newspaper age. ("This was published in the reputable newspaper XXX")
- tjoff 7y ago
  Though that's how it works today isn't it? It's just that ads are more important so google and facebook et al couldn't care less.
- 013a 7y ago
  To be fair, there's some accurate insight in Bill's response that shouldn't lead anyone to just conclude that he was totally wrong. Terry correctly predicted fake news, but Bill also correctly predicted our response to it, which would be to form centralized authorities (like what Facebook is doing), algorithmic newsfeeds, sharing systems, reputation systems, etc. He even says "not for long", like he agreed that it would happen but we'd solve it. Though the jury's still out on whether we'll solve it.
- Fellshard 7y ago
  You undersell both Pratchett's target audience and his already-known deep insight into his humanity tends to operate.
- quirmian 7y ago
  > children’s comedy novelist Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story? - A butthurt Discworld fan in his mid 30s.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    >Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story? Wrong person to ask. For me it was a toddler's bedtime story. My dad used to play the radio series for me when I was very little. Though I have read the books countless times since then and used to be able to quote the first one in its entirety.
- josephorjoe 7y ago
  No one who has read Terry Pratchett will be surprised that he has deep insight into human nature. His books are full of explorations of what motivates humans and how humans misunderstand each other. They are also frequently hilarious. Bill Gates quote seems to reveal an expectation that humans would respect authority and be guided by it in their decision making -- which shows a shallow understanding of human nature. The quote also anticipates that information distribution would flow through personal and professional connections and interests rather than being organized in a way to generate the most ad revenue possible.
  - sbmassey 7y ago
    The Pratchett's I have read seem to be full of basic human archetypes, riffed off for comedic effect, rather than anything approximating how real people think. He's no Shakespear/James Joyce/Henry James.
    - ptrott2017 7y ago
      I was not a fan until I recently re-read all his work - but I dont think he ever would have claimed to be a shakespeare or a Henry James. I would say a more apt comparitive group would probably be Rabelais, Swift,Verne, Vonnegut, Voltaire, Wells, Wilde and Woodehouse - all of which he certainly is an equal writer to and his overall body of work sits well with.
- gubbrora 7y ago
  I think they were both kinda right. What Gates didn't foresee was the extent to which trust became centralized and how that created a need to keep the authorities in check and how keeping them in check enabled fake news.
- chongli 7y ago
  children's comedy novelist Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis. Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHack [1] (itself an icon of hacker culture). [1] https://www.nethack.org/download/3.6.0/announce.360 https://www.nethack.org/download/3.6.0/announce.360
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    I do not underestimate the level that Pratchett's comedy can operate at. It took me maybe 15 years for the penny to drop between first reading 'Unseen University' and connecting it to the Invisible College of Robert Boyle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College May I note that being brilliant does not stop someone from being a children's comedy novelist. If people are annoyed by this, perhaps they should think better of children's novelists, rather than insisting I call Pratchett something different so as not to injure the egos of adults who enjoy his writing.
    - dTal 7y ago
      If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? Speaking personally, they were all fairly over my head when I was a child. As an adult, they sparkle.
      - inflatableDodo 7y ago
        >If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? In the sense that novels by people like Joseph Conrad or J. G. Ballard are not. 'Empire of the Sun' was one one of my favourite novels as a young teenager, but it was hard work in comparison to Pratchett. The difference in intended audience was utterly clear.
    - pdpi 7y ago
      That description seems more appropriate for, say, Roald Dahl than it does for Pratchett. Pratchett was, for the most part, a comedy fantasy author. Most of his writing was appropriate for younger audiences (with exceptions, like Monstrous Regiment), but I wouldn’t call it children’s books. The fact that his Tiffany Aching books are specifically aimed at the Young Adult market suggests that he agreed.
- epicide 7y ago
  I mean, Bill wasn't really wrong. Just maybe naive? People have been lying/wrong in print forever. This is not new [0]. What's new is the vast amount of information. He was definitely correct with "for all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text". What he got wrong is that he seemed to have expected these "referees" to grow vertically when they grew horizontally. Instead of multiple levels of referees filtering the output of one another, we ended up with a few players that vastly outpaced the rest [1]. The rest is the same thing that happens anytime you have a monopoly or relatively few big players. The big players get bigger and bigger. The barrier to entry grows with them. Before long, they control the space. That space includes the information and the flow of information within it. Sure, they don't have perfect control, but they control enough of it to shape it to however they need (Facebook is a great example of this). Today, we can all rattle off maybe a dozen companies that clearly control the internet. It is not the wild west anymore. There is the odd exception that might wrestle control of a niche space for a while (e.g. GitHub, Reddit), but once they get big enough to show up on Google's [2] radar, they're bought, threatened, replaced, or somehow otherwise removed. And then there are things like analytics. [0]: No, I don't have a source or example, but surely I don't need it to say "somebody has lied in a book or newspaper before". [1]: Namely, Google. [2]: Or some other Big Internet Company™.
- orpheline 7y ago
  I'm gonna play optimist and note Gates' "not for long" in his response. I think we're still early days in fake news, and I think society has been here before: broadsheets, polemics, and a lack of trust in news sources in the 19th century ultimately drove improvements in the 20th. Now in the 21st that's been destabilized; we'll ultimately craft mechanisms to winnow out the chaff, but it's a reactive process: the problem needed to exist before we could address it.
  - dmfdmf 7y ago
    This is exactly right. We are (still) in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions since the invention of the printing press. The invention of the internet has changed the assumptions behind sources of reliable news, funding journalism and control of the political agenda. It is an open question how this revolution will play out but it is clear that the major newspapers such as NYT, WashPo, WSJ, etc. cannot dominate the social narrative as they did in the past which is one reason why everything seems so divisive and scary today. The current uncertainty is not sustainable, so it won't be sustained. But what will take its place is still not clear and the fading influence (and mistrust) of what used to be reliable news sources is all part of the process. For those interested in this viewpoint I highly recommend reading Clay Shirky's excellent article from 2009 "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"[1]. [1] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
    - lioeters 7y ago
      That was a relevant and prescient article, especially drawing the parallel between our current uncertain news/media situation with the social changes that occurred after the invention of the printing press. I guess it comes down to how big leaps in information technology act as catalyst for a disruptive reorganization process in society. Interestingly, the transition from paper to digital media is turning out to have unexpectedly larger implications, disrupting institutional power, control of narrative, facts (and "facts"), knowledge, public awareness, intellectual property, ideologies.. --- Pithy lines I liked: "If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?" "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism." Added to my reading list: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Elizabeth Eisenstein)
hirundo 7y ago
> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks. But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I'm not at all sure that's true of news sources.
- metalchianti 7y ago
  This is a fantastic analogy. With so many sources available--mainstream and other--we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.
  - burner831234 7y ago
    Actually its the continued extreme pressure to commercialize this. Technology can enable a diversity of content or it can reinforce you staying on the website by serving up continuously sensationalized or aligned content. It chooses the latter to provide more advertising. This is a serious case for the release of advertising and generation of new revenue models for internet products and presences.
  - batty_alex 7y ago
    > However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases. I just want to point out that the problem is fake news, not biased news. And I also want to point out that people are generally not seeking out these sources, they come to their "News" feeds and are targeted at them because they generate an emotional response. > we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. I'd argue there's so many narratives online and easy discovery of fake, or down-right misleading, narratives that are intended to deceive which has become far easier to come across. Sometimes, I'd rather hear the Fox News spin than about the newest conspiracy theory floating around Facebook when I go to dinner with my folks.
ebg13 7y ago
There's always something magical about the naïveté of thinking that technology can solve people. Bill Gates understood business and technology. Terry Pratchett understood people. Gates is literally arguing in favor of filter bubbles here without the clarity to realize that those bubbles go both ways.
- theoh 7y ago
  I think you are exaggerating the expertise of both men. Gates was successful, but that doesn't mean he had rock-solid knowledge of all aspects of business and technology. Pratchett wrote humorous fiction, but that doesn't make him an expert on sociology. Pratchett's comment didn't require a lot of insight to come up with—it's just the (essentially reactionary) observation that publishing on the internet is a free-for-all. And Gates correctly observed that ranking systems like HITS (or PageRank) would recreate, online, the way information sources gain authority in the offline world. The fake news problem has nothing to do with the web's openness—it thrives on FB. Offline, and independent of the web, the narrative Fox pushes is arguably very close to fake news as well. Neither Pratchett nor Gates displayed significant insight into the that kind of political problem.
  - dTal 7y ago
    And I think you're being a little unfair to Terry. Sure, he wrote humorous fiction, but his grasp of human behavior is the source of much of the observational humor of his books. They are, essentially, spoofs of society.
    - Retra 7y ago
      You assume his understanding of society is accurate because it is popular? Or because he is popular? You can just as well assume Bill Gates understands society for exactly the same reasons. (Gate's business results are not even a spoof of reality.)
    - theoh 7y ago
      This is like the argument that comedians who make funny jokes about human nature must therefore have good insight into politics. Anyone who watches comedy knows that the ability to be funny doesn't equate to having a good analysis of the situation.
moocowtruck 7y ago
lets be real here, isn't it obvious that where there is freedom to do and say what you want in a setting anonymously or even not...a high chance of fake news. Lets be realistic fake news is not new, its just spreads faster on the internet. People have used fake news all throughout history to drive agenda.
crisper 7y ago
Public enemy warned us too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQaVIoEjOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQaVIoEjOM 1:38
ocschwar 7y ago
ocschwar in 1996 would have sided with Bill Gates too, albeit for different reasons. In 1996 we were seeing disinfo activists (such as Holocaust denialists) trying to emerge from the margins and turn Usenet into their space, and being pushed back into the margins where they belonged. Now, we have Twitter, which honestly makes Usenet look like a golden age of enlightened discourse.
flattone 7y ago
Bill forgot to measure the variety of types of character available to the net, which in my current view are a significant contributor to the more alarming instances of fake-news gaining its recent traction. 'Variety of character' example thought process 'this seems totally against all common accepted knowledge but im feeling unique, im going to run with this information as very true.'
vanderZwan 7y ago
Terry Pratchett was a news reporter before he turned writer[0], and IIRC the latter partially happened out of frustration with how little people seemed to care about the truth (of course, the UK tabloids have a particularly notorious reputation here). Although I may have interpreted that last part based on Neil Gaiman's memory of Pratchett as being a very angry man, in a good way[1] In that light it's not that surprising that Pratchett had good insights on how the internet would pan out: he had a very good understanding of the human side of it, and especially a good feeling for the ways in which humanity was going to disappoint him, and all of us. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/sep/12/terry-pratchett-writing-dragons-at-crumbling-castle-childrens-books https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/sep/12... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchet...
- kps 7y ago
  Sir Terry Pratchett (OBE, GNU) was also active on Usenet. He knew ‘social media’ first hand.
dejv 7y ago
Terry Pratchett wrote a book about newspappers that is even more relevant in current age of social media. It is called The Truth.
schnevets 7y ago
Fake news has always existed, and society builds up an immunity whenever it evolves into a new medium. I don't see the illegitimate Wordpress-based sites that peddle lies as any different than the National Enquirer-esque print tabloids or radio conspiracy theorists of yesteryear. Folks who didn't grow up with the internet may have trouble telling the difference, and even Millennials constantly fall for biased social media outlets, but there is already proof that the next generation is seeing through the most flagrant of cheap tricks. I'm not saying society is immune to propaganda, but the most blatant offenders are a bit like a temporary illness until media consumers wise up. EDIT: Added context from my original comment.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Do you have evidence that historical forms of fake news and propaganda became less effective over time?
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    I don't have evidence either way, but one would expect that looking at the history surrounding the introduction of the printing press, the introduction of newspapers, of radio, and television would be a good starting point.
  - schnevets 7y ago
    Outside of looking at history and saying "everything seems to work out", I don't have much. However, there is the phenomenon of Banner Blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness) in frequent web users.
- dgudkov 7y ago
  >a temporary illness until media consumers wise up Not exactly. Media consumers do need to wise up. However expecting the consumers to bear the entire burden of verification is naive. Consumers want someone to do the verification for them (at least partially) because it's tedious and time consuming. That's why reputation paid off back then. That's why before the internet the mechanism of information propagation was built in a way to amplify proved, respectable media. The social media on the internet have created a mechanism that can amplify any information. Even worse than that - it amplifies poor quality information with sensationalist clickbaity headlines significantly better that good quality but not so sensationalist information. Add to the picture the proliferation of click-based advertisement and you will see why sensationalism nowadays pays off more than reputation.
moomin 7y ago
I remember many years ago a journalist at The Register asking Tim Berners-Lee how his semantic web proposals were going to deal with spam. TBL again, just didn’t get it, because he didn’t see the world through a social lens. The problem of “tag spam” was already pretty prevalent when the question was asked. Same article has Bill Gates completely correctly predict the death of VHS and DVD and them being supplanted by something like Netflix/Amazon Video. He was plenty visionary, he just had a technologists lens.
- ljf 7y ago
  I read years ago - that Bills Gates/Microsoft backed HD-DVD as a disrupter for Blu-ray - betting in the long term that video streaming would win out - but not wanting Blu-ray to get too much of a handhold.
  - jahewson 7y ago
    > too much of a handhold A foothold?
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    They were also worried about Sony holding all the cards in video manufacturing with Blu-Ray. DVD was primarily "owned" by Toshiba with a variety of patents spread around a consortium of manufacturers. Sony had all the tech and patents and DRM control in Blu-Ray and were at risk of a dominating monopoly. HD-DVD did at least push Sony to spread more of the patent rights and DRM controls around to other manufacturers and create a (slightly) more open consortium than if there hadn't been a fight at all.
bmmayer1 7y ago
If you read the interview, Bill Gates rightly predicted the rise of sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell you what is worth reading and what isn't. It's no one's fault that no one listens to those recommendations--it's just human nature to be predisposed to confirmation bias. But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of authority on equal terms--is patently false today. Everyone knows how to filter for content they should believe and content they shouldn't. The only problem is, everyone's opinion of what is 'fake' is different.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  One other problem is, everyone's opinion of what is 'news' is different.
- noobiemcfoob 7y ago
  > sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell you what is worth reading Didn't this happen? Some versions more formalized by others but isn't this what people mean by an individual's bubble? The concern being that these bubbles can be so different as to be incompatible with others.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It's no one's fault that no one listens to those recommendations People do, in fact, listen to the recommendations. Those gatekeepers, however, are just as heavily biased as the “news sources”, which themselves are actually just gatekeepers for freelance writers and press release mills. Whatever point in the network is influential is, obviously, the highest value target for corruption, and more layers of gatekeepers with no greater inherent resistance to corruption don't change anything. > But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of authority on equal terms--is patently false today. No, it's not. > Everyone knows how to filter for content they should believe and content they shouldn't. Yeah, everyone knows how to select the gatekeepers that reinforce their preconceived biases.
imtringued 7y ago
Fake news has always existed. The only difference between today and hundreds of years ago is who had the most reach. Back in the past only the church and royalty had the power to spread (fake) news. Nowadays anyone can go on social media and do the same.
- blancheneige 7y ago
  > Back in the past only the church and royalty had the power to spread (fake) news. How so? Do you have an example in mind? I can think of a lot of fake news or misleading propaganda deliberately disseminated by seditious and revolutionary groups during the French and American revolutions.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    The church and royalty had power to arbitrarily execute those that spoke out against them. Inquisition against heretics is one example.
    - blancheneige 7y ago
      You're stretching the definition of fake news to encompass instances that would otherwise not fit. Parent also states that only the church and the royalty had such power. If we are going to extend the definition of fake news to include defamation and false accusations, then the church hardly had a monopoly on the matter since they often responded to such allegations when spread by the commoners. The overwhelming majority of such cases started as tips or accusations of indulging in superstition (at best) or poisoning and murder (at worst). If false, they would in fact be a prime example of fake news spread by the lower class. The case against Galileo or other re-interpretations of the Bible are outliers if you read actual trial and testimonies. Therefore I re-iterate my question: what concrete example(s) support OP's assertion regarding this exclusive power of fake news dissemination?
      - manfredo 7y ago
        I suppose if you're really want to be pedantic this wasn't completely limited to the church and monarchs. If enough people in a village wanted to suppress some information, or promulgate some falsehood, they could intimidate others into compliance. Plenty of Italian city-states had power structures more centered around wealthy merchants rather than nobility. So sure, it wasn't entirely limited to the church and nobility. But the church and nobility were undoubtedly in the most effective positions to carry out such deception. The key observation is that when communication technology is primitive, then the ability to spread information is limited to a handful of people. Namely, those that either have the social position to spread their interpretation of the world and what is happening in it, or those that have the power to intimidate and force people into silence or compliance. Throughout much of history, this was religion (easy to spread information when people go to one of your institutions every Sunday, and your priests make up a huge portion of literate society) and the nobility (you control the armed forces and have more or less unilateral control over employment them). And on a side note, I don't see why false accusations of crime or violation of social norms don't count as fake news. Such accusations are probably some of the most common instances of fake news.
jordigh 7y ago
I think it's extremely important to remember what "fake news" is. It's not misleading reporting, it's not yellow journalism, it's not honest errors in reporting, it's not rumours. Fake news is fraudulent websites passing themselves as other news sources reporting the craziest Onion-like fabrications out of whole cloth with the hopes of swaying public opinion. Fake news is about a site with a domain name like cnnews.com or abcnewstoday.com with the same logo as ABC news or CNN, making up stories, with no pretense of reality, with hopes of getting shared on Facebook. The term was coined in 2016 to refer to all of the fake news websites that were popping up during the US election cycle. But by the time people recognised these fake news websites and Trump got a hold of them, he didn't bother trying to understand what fake news was and nobody else did. He said, no fake news, no fake news, you're fake news, and now everyone thinks that fake news is something we've had forever. No, fake news is a very recent phenomenon, requiring domain squatting and social media to proliferate. It's not the same kind of problem as before. We already had names and discussions of things like slant, editorial oversight, propaganda, gossip, and errata. Fake news should not be lumped with all of those. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites
jaggednad 7y ago
So did vernor vinge in his sci fi book A Fire Upon the Deep, which is worth a read regardless
dejaime 7y ago
Fake news have existed for millennia. This is so stupid.
argd678 7y ago
The internet increased the synchronization of what people believe at what time, fake or real. It’s like around the world everyone knows the same 30 news stores every day and has one of just a few standard opinions about them. That then influences what a huge number of people think and do in all aspects of their lives at the same time. I think before it was more out of sync at what time people knew something and that knowledge started affecting what they do.
haberman 7y ago
I think they both missed the mark. Pratchett says: "there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up." But that's not really true. It's not hard to evaluate fantastical claims by cross-checking them with other sources. What I think both men missed is that people would be happy to believe fake or misleading news without cross-checking it if it reinforced their world view.
techntoke 7y ago
Reminds me of that time I worked at Microsoft and they grabbed datasets from social media to be processed by GPUs to ensure that their brand reputation was strong. TLDR: Microsoft uses bots and other means to try to control narratives and opinions on social media.
johnchristopher 7y ago
why is there a video of the LotR on autoplay o_O ? It's getting ridiculous.
zzzeek 7y ago
Gates was right, there are authorities that are curating this information. Unfortunately the authorities are called Facebook and they do not give a fuck.
gdubs 7y ago
There’s a great book on the counterculture roots of personal computing and the internet by John Markoff. [1] Arguably we are in some ways living through the end result of a thought experiment conceived by a bunch of LSD tripping hippies in the 60s: “what if we wired a billion brains together? That’d be far out, right?” Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. Just interesting to think about in historical context. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
  I also strongly recommend you to read From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner [0] together with What the Dormouse Said. The two books are really an eye-opener and revealed how everything connected together. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_(author) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_(author) > Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. Yes! Recently, David Perell wrote an excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], which examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and part of the article has a similar argument just like mine. [1] https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on --- It's interesting to see that the personal computing and the Internet was envisioned by our pioneers as an open, peer-to-peer, decentralized structure, and they hope to bring the world to a freer and more egalitarian future (Cyber-utopianism). They were the people who laid out the crucial groundwork of everything (PC, Web, microchips, crypto, etc) throughout the 70s. In the 80s, this Cyber-utopianism evolved into Cyberdelic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic) and cyberpunk, computer was seen as the new LSD. The cyberpunks of the 1980s and 1990s embraced technology and the hacker ethics. They believed that the Internet could help human beings overcome limits, liberating us from authority (crypto-anarchism) and even enabling us to transcend space, time, and body (transhumanism). Later, a group of entrepreneurs absorbed this idealism (see the early Wired magazine, it was fascinating!) and transformed it into the Californian Ideology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) and created the dotCom bubble in the 90s, finally bringing us to the present world. But if we compare the original vision to the web dominated by Silicon Valley today, one would say that the Valley already betrayed this vision at large. What the FAANG empire have claimed to do, is not what they were/are actually doing. (On the bright side, the Free Software Movement succeed, and the Electronics Frontier Foundation is still going strong, but both with little influence compared to the megacorps.) What happened? Ideologically speaking, the most straightforward explanation is that the idealism has been sold out to corporations and capitalism for profit. I think this idea is fine and it can explain a lot, but this is a cliche and there's enough criticisms based on this approach that one could found online, so I will stop here and explain it from other perspectives. Technologically speaking, the whole thing didn't come without warnings from the inside. The first warning came in 1984, from the Free Software Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_movement), it said the objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if the software running on a computer grants freedoms to users, otherwise it would create a dystopia instead; The second warning came from the Cypherpunks Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk) in the late 80s, it said objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if the computer and network systems are explicitly designed to preserve the security and privacy of the users by utilizing cryptography, otherwise it would create a dystopia instead; the third warning came in late 1990s, from Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Common movement. He wrote a book called "Code is Law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_and_Other_Laws_of_Cyberspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_and_Other_Laws_of_Cybersp...), arguing the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically have the liberating properties by itself (envisioned by the original utopianist), but it was actually an effect created by the running code. Whoever controls the code can completely reshape the cyberspace and transform it to a dystopia instead, we must make sure that our democracy, freedom, human rights is coded properly into the computer programs, to achieve this, the government must enforce heavy regulations of the code and the Internet by passing strict laws. This is controversial, but he got the idea (the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically have the liberating properties by itself, we must implement them explicitly), just like the free software hackers or the Cypherpunks. But unfounately, neither solution has been implemented at a large scale. Finally, I would try replying to the original question: why do we have a problem of "Fake News" newadays? I believe part of the answer is the limitation of all the elitism from the forementioned things. The ideology of the Internet, more or less, has an element of populism. People believed we could change the world by empowering the individuals by freeing computing powers from institutions to the people, and connect them via the Internet, eventually, we can create... > a postpolitical, non-hierarchical society made possible by cyberware, in which the computer-literate, super-intelligent, open-minded, change-oriented, self-reliant, irreverent free-thinker is the norm and the person who is not internetted and does not think for him or herself and does not question authority is the "problem person". And it looked pretty good: things appeared to be moving to this direction - the emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove this point. This was seen as the case even before 2010, when we had the Occupy Movement and The Arab Spring. But it turns out, 1. It was the populism of the elites. Yes, they were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism played a positive role, it bought us the free software movement, for example. But after all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, the same populism would stop playing the original positive role. 2. The development of the Internet was done in the beginning of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism. From the 1980s to 2007, the world was following this trend, so there was no major social conflicts that contradicted the idealism of the Internet manifested itself through the web. When the middle east politics started getting destabilized, people celebrated because the revolution was liberal. There was even the "cute cat theory of digital activism", which says when there are funny memes involved, people are more likely to join the political protest of Internet freedom. And it was seen as a good thing - a faceless dictatorial government was overthrown by lolcat. Isn't it the miracle of the postmodern Internet? But post-2010, this world order started to disintegrate. Now it's clear, that "The Internet is an inherently platform of democracy and equality, which empowered the individuals to be free from the establishment", this narrative from the 80s has been proven to be wishful thinking. This is when the entire thing started to get out of control. Now it has been clear that ANY idea, can by popularized and supported by a free Internet. Now in the current age of deglobalization and political and economic failure, naturally, extreme post-truth and nationalistic ideas are getting more and more popular support, just like the Arab Spring, both was supported by a number of people who were frustrated by the status quo. I guess this is how we suddenly got the "Fake News" in recent years. It was simply because the world politics created a big market of the reactionary populism, and the web is the best tool to sell it. It wasn't a significant problem because the market was not as big as today. The grassroot nature of the Internet started to revolt against its own founding principle, democracy and equality, which made the grassroot nature of the Internet possible in the first place.
gopher2 7y ago
Fake news is a pendulum. Now we have it, we start to know what it is, we start to understand how it's created and distributed. Things can start swinging the other way. But this takes time. If you really wanted to end fake news and had unlimited time and money, a great way to do it would be to publish as much completely fake news as possible, so that people figure out that they need to use reputable, trusted sources, or end up a fool. Out of money, out of time, and that what they believed after learning about it on a Facebook group or reddit was wrong. People learn from painful experiences the most, unfortunately. So some people have learned from Trump getting elected. Others haven't learned, some probably won't. It's very easy to be fooled. If you think of fake news like a virus, then publishing more fake news acts kind of like an anti-virus. Distributing a version of the problem that is easier for the immune system to detect and combat and won't kill anyone - to inoculate against the real thing. Bill Gates is right. He's just early.
- shadofx 7y ago
  Painful experiences that are the direct result of believing fake news simply gets misattributed to something totally irrelevant after consuming more fake news. People don't like admitting that they're gullible.
wyldfire 7y ago
> You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. Sad, but true. Gates was right: Facebook and other mediums propagate misinformation. By virtue of it appearing on FB, it does mean something, just not something necessarily beneficial.
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
The reason fake news can still propagate, is because we have no "Vouching" system, by which a citizen can vouch for a piece of information -or even another citizen/organisation. Where there inheritance of trust, and one weak link in this chain, the social media plattforms would be very quiet. Advertising - beyond local, would not be seen. Seeing all content equally, would be a active choice against this model. The truth is, we could return to this medieval world, where the wise men vouch for information given, or proofs of work vouch for the information, or publishers pay you a cent for reading. But the powers that be would be undone by this. Thus it will not happen, unless integrated sneakily into a add blocker.
c3534l 7y ago
I love that Bill Gates thought fake news wouldn't be a problem because Clippy would tell you what to believe.
AnthonyWnC 7y ago
Fake news has been with us for a long time.. Along with various religions/churches and superstition/customs, humans had always believed in various level of fake things.
load-of-shit 7y ago
Fake news isn't real. And by that, I mean, it is not influential, and never has been. No one buys fake news. No one crafts a decision based on tripe. It's laughable to believe that there's any clout in nonsense.
macspoofing 7y ago
Lucky guess. I wouldn't put any stock into Pratchett's ability to predict the future. In 90s there was no way to predict how the internet would shape out and what challenges we would struggle with, and which ones were non-issues. The flip side of Pratchett prediction is Krugman's famous statement that the internet would not have a bigger effect on the economy than the fax machine. He was obviously hilariously wrong, but when he made that prediction he could have been right. Closer to home, I see people making all kinds of predictions on the great impact that cryptocurrencies will have but it's also reasonable to think they are a fad. We'll see.
ghc 7y ago
“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.” “I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.” “That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?” “How do you mean?” “Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis (1945)
- vbuwivbiu 7y ago
  looks like the problem described in the last paragraph has been solved... very weird book. Similarities with Cold Lazarus
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dang 7y ago
Url changed from https://www.nme.com/news/film/terry-pratchett-warned-bill-gates-fake-news-back-90s-2502712#SUaW1AkKV2tYhwei.99 https://www.nme.com/news/film/terry-pratchett-warned-bill-ga..., which points to this.
al_chemist 7y ago
How do we know that "Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)" is not fake news? Author says it's in "GQ (UK edition), July 1995, p21", but before now, I've never heard about GQ and I've no way to acquire it. QC wikipedia doesn't even mention Gates nor Pratchett. Pratchett wikipedia never mentions Gates nor GQ. It mention "he was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s" and as a best-selling author, would he work for beauty-and-fashion magazine?
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  You could start by clicking on the actual links and seeing that there are photos of the magazine in question in the tweets.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > but before now, I've never heard about GQ and I've no way to acquire it. https://www.crazyaboutmagazines.com/ourshop/cat_56713-GQ-UK-cc-pg_3.html https://www.crazyaboutmagazines.com/ourshop/cat_56713-GQ-UK-...
primitivesuave 7y ago
To anyone interested in a compelling analysis of fake news since the invention of the printing press, Niall Ferguson’s most recent book The Square and the Tower is an excellent read.

Terry Pratchett - >'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it all up.' Bill Gates - >'Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only recieve a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way you can check on someone's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the net than it is in print today.' Well, it appears that a children's comedy novelist had more insight into this subject than the guy who ran Microsoft. How would Bill's mystical reputation system deal with this? edit - I did not think that calling Pratchett a children's comedy novelist would raise so much ire. I think there might be one or two books of his I have not (yet) read and I am currently in a mania of fear and excitement over whether Sky will do justice to 'Good Omens' in the upcoming TV series. For those who think I am denigrating Pratchett in some way by the description, I am put in mind of the quote from C.S. Lewis - “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”

captainredbeard 7y ago
Maybe Bill is complicit due to the political usefulness of fake news?
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  I was thinking it might just be a fox vs hedgehog thing. http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-better-forecasters-than-hedgehogs/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bette... On tech, Gates is more of a hedgehog and Pratchett is more of a fox, so we might actually expect Pratchett's predictions to be better.
mistrial9 7y ago
Gates was a blue-blood capitalist, and literally could not imagine people cooperating in a commons with sophisticated computers, because money. Whatever Gates is referring to in that quote very likely has some hobbled assumptions that are hard to conceptualize in 2020.
pteraspidomorph 7y ago
Children's comedy novelist?
- ptah 7y ago
  are you saying windows is a weak joke?
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  One of the best children's comedy novelists to have ever put ink to paper, in my opinion.
codingdave 7y ago
Bill Gates is smart and successful, but that doesn't mean he is omniscient. He has made mistakes and said many things through his career that turned out to be false. As have we all. This isn't a personal flaw, it is just being human. But people do need to remember that his success doesn't make him wise or prescient, just successful.
goto11 7y ago
I think what Gates suggest is something like the "web of trust" which W3C was working on as part of the semantic web. The idea is basically if I trust A and A trust B then I can trust news articles written by B. I'm pretty skeptical it is workable online as a technical solution. But basically this is how trust worked in the newspaper age. ("This was published in the reputable newspaper XXX")
tjoff 7y ago
Though that's how it works today isn't it? It's just that ads are more important so google and facebook et al couldn't care less.
013a 7y ago
To be fair, there's some accurate insight in Bill's response that shouldn't lead anyone to just conclude that he was totally wrong. Terry correctly predicted fake news, but Bill also correctly predicted our response to it, which would be to form centralized authorities (like what Facebook is doing), algorithmic newsfeeds, sharing systems, reputation systems, etc. He even says "not for long", like he agreed that it would happen but we'd solve it. Though the jury's still out on whether we'll solve it.
Fellshard 7y ago
You undersell both Pratchett's target audience and his already-known deep insight into his humanity tends to operate.
quirmian 7y ago
> children’s comedy novelist Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story? - A butthurt Discworld fan in his mid 30s.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story? Wrong person to ask. For me it was a toddler's bedtime story. My dad used to play the radio series for me when I was very little. Though I have read the books countless times since then and used to be able to quote the first one in its entirety.
josephorjoe 7y ago
No one who has read Terry Pratchett will be surprised that he has deep insight into human nature. His books are full of explorations of what motivates humans and how humans misunderstand each other. They are also frequently hilarious. Bill Gates quote seems to reveal an expectation that humans would respect authority and be guided by it in their decision making -- which shows a shallow understanding of human nature. The quote also anticipates that information distribution would flow through personal and professional connections and interests rather than being organized in a way to generate the most ad revenue possible.
- sbmassey 7y ago
  The Pratchett's I have read seem to be full of basic human archetypes, riffed off for comedic effect, rather than anything approximating how real people think. He's no Shakespear/James Joyce/Henry James.
  - ptrott2017 7y ago
    I was not a fan until I recently re-read all his work - but I dont think he ever would have claimed to be a shakespeare or a Henry James. I would say a more apt comparitive group would probably be Rabelais, Swift,Verne, Vonnegut, Voltaire, Wells, Wilde and Woodehouse - all of which he certainly is an equal writer to and his overall body of work sits well with.
gubbrora 7y ago
I think they were both kinda right. What Gates didn't foresee was the extent to which trust became centralized and how that created a need to keep the authorities in check and how keeping them in check enabled fake news.
chongli 7y ago
children's comedy novelist Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis. Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHack [1] (itself an icon of hacker culture). [1] https://www.nethack.org/download/3.6.0/announce.360 https://www.nethack.org/download/3.6.0/announce.360
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  I do not underestimate the level that Pratchett's comedy can operate at. It took me maybe 15 years for the penny to drop between first reading 'Unseen University' and connecting it to the Invisible College of Robert Boyle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College May I note that being brilliant does not stop someone from being a children's comedy novelist. If people are annoyed by this, perhaps they should think better of children's novelists, rather than insisting I call Pratchett something different so as not to injure the egos of adults who enjoy his writing.
  - dTal 7y ago
    If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? Speaking personally, they were all fairly over my head when I was a child. As an adult, they sparkle.
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      >If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? In the sense that novels by people like Joseph Conrad or J. G. Ballard are not. 'Empire of the Sun' was one one of my favourite novels as a young teenager, but it was hard work in comparison to Pratchett. The difference in intended audience was utterly clear.
  - pdpi 7y ago
    That description seems more appropriate for, say, Roald Dahl than it does for Pratchett. Pratchett was, for the most part, a comedy fantasy author. Most of his writing was appropriate for younger audiences (with exceptions, like Monstrous Regiment), but I wouldn’t call it children’s books. The fact that his Tiffany Aching books are specifically aimed at the Young Adult market suggests that he agreed.
epicide 7y ago
I mean, Bill wasn't really wrong. Just maybe naive? People have been lying/wrong in print forever. This is not new [0]. What's new is the vast amount of information. He was definitely correct with "for all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text". What he got wrong is that he seemed to have expected these "referees" to grow vertically when they grew horizontally. Instead of multiple levels of referees filtering the output of one another, we ended up with a few players that vastly outpaced the rest [1]. The rest is the same thing that happens anytime you have a monopoly or relatively few big players. The big players get bigger and bigger. The barrier to entry grows with them. Before long, they control the space. That space includes the information and the flow of information within it. Sure, they don't have perfect control, but they control enough of it to shape it to however they need (Facebook is a great example of this). Today, we can all rattle off maybe a dozen companies that clearly control the internet. It is not the wild west anymore. There is the odd exception that might wrestle control of a niche space for a while (e.g. GitHub, Reddit), but once they get big enough to show up on Google's [2] radar, they're bought, threatened, replaced, or somehow otherwise removed. And then there are things like analytics. [0]: No, I don't have a source or example, but surely I don't need it to say "somebody has lied in a book or newspaper before". [1]: Namely, Google. [2]: Or some other Big Internet Company™.
orpheline 7y ago
I'm gonna play optimist and note Gates' "not for long" in his response. I think we're still early days in fake news, and I think society has been here before: broadsheets, polemics, and a lack of trust in news sources in the 19th century ultimately drove improvements in the 20th. Now in the 21st that's been destabilized; we'll ultimately craft mechanisms to winnow out the chaff, but it's a reactive process: the problem needed to exist before we could address it.
- dmfdmf 7y ago
  This is exactly right. We are (still) in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions since the invention of the printing press. The invention of the internet has changed the assumptions behind sources of reliable news, funding journalism and control of the political agenda. It is an open question how this revolution will play out but it is clear that the major newspapers such as NYT, WashPo, WSJ, etc. cannot dominate the social narrative as they did in the past which is one reason why everything seems so divisive and scary today. The current uncertainty is not sustainable, so it won't be sustained. But what will take its place is still not clear and the fading influence (and mistrust) of what used to be reliable news sources is all part of the process. For those interested in this viewpoint I highly recommend reading Clay Shirky's excellent article from 2009 "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"[1]. [1] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
  - lioeters 7y ago
    That was a relevant and prescient article, especially drawing the parallel between our current uncertain news/media situation with the social changes that occurred after the invention of the printing press. I guess it comes down to how big leaps in information technology act as catalyst for a disruptive reorganization process in society. Interestingly, the transition from paper to digital media is turning out to have unexpectedly larger implications, disrupting institutional power, control of narrative, facts (and "facts"), knowledge, public awareness, intellectual property, ideologies.. --- Pithy lines I liked: "If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?" "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism." Added to my reading list: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Elizabeth Eisenstein)

hirundo 7y ago

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks. But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I'm not at all sure that's true of news sources.

metalchianti 7y ago
This is a fantastic analogy. With so many sources available--mainstream and other--we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.
- burner831234 7y ago
  Actually its the continued extreme pressure to commercialize this. Technology can enable a diversity of content or it can reinforce you staying on the website by serving up continuously sensationalized or aligned content. It chooses the latter to provide more advertising. This is a serious case for the release of advertising and generation of new revenue models for internet products and presences.
- batty_alex 7y ago
  > However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases. I just want to point out that the problem is fake news, not biased news. And I also want to point out that people are generally not seeking out these sources, they come to their "News" feeds and are targeted at them because they generate an emotional response. > we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. I'd argue there's so many narratives online and easy discovery of fake, or down-right misleading, narratives that are intended to deceive which has become far easier to come across. Sometimes, I'd rather hear the Fox News spin than about the newest conspiracy theory floating around Facebook when I go to dinner with my folks.

ebg13 7y ago

There's always something magical about the naïveté of thinking that technology can solve people. Bill Gates understood business and technology. Terry Pratchett understood people. Gates is literally arguing in favor of filter bubbles here without the clarity to realize that those bubbles go both ways.

theoh 7y ago
I think you are exaggerating the expertise of both men. Gates was successful, but that doesn't mean he had rock-solid knowledge of all aspects of business and technology. Pratchett wrote humorous fiction, but that doesn't make him an expert on sociology. Pratchett's comment didn't require a lot of insight to come up with—it's just the (essentially reactionary) observation that publishing on the internet is a free-for-all. And Gates correctly observed that ranking systems like HITS (or PageRank) would recreate, online, the way information sources gain authority in the offline world. The fake news problem has nothing to do with the web's openness—it thrives on FB. Offline, and independent of the web, the narrative Fox pushes is arguably very close to fake news as well. Neither Pratchett nor Gates displayed significant insight into the that kind of political problem.
- dTal 7y ago
  And I think you're being a little unfair to Terry. Sure, he wrote humorous fiction, but his grasp of human behavior is the source of much of the observational humor of his books. They are, essentially, spoofs of society.
  - Retra 7y ago
    You assume his understanding of society is accurate because it is popular? Or because he is popular? You can just as well assume Bill Gates understands society for exactly the same reasons. (Gate's business results are not even a spoof of reality.)
  - theoh 7y ago
    This is like the argument that comedians who make funny jokes about human nature must therefore have good insight into politics. Anyone who watches comedy knows that the ability to be funny doesn't equate to having a good analysis of the situation.

moocowtruck 7y ago

lets be real here, isn't it obvious that where there is freedom to do and say what you want in a setting anonymously or even not...a high chance of fake news. Lets be realistic fake news is not new, its just spreads faster on the internet. People have used fake news all throughout history to drive agenda.

crisper 7y ago

Public enemy warned us too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQaVIoEjOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQaVIoEjOM 1:38

ocschwar 7y ago

ocschwar in 1996 would have sided with Bill Gates too, albeit for different reasons. In 1996 we were seeing disinfo activists (such as Holocaust denialists) trying to emerge from the margins and turn Usenet into their space, and being pushed back into the margins where they belonged. Now, we have Twitter, which honestly makes Usenet look like a golden age of enlightened discourse.

flattone 7y ago

Bill forgot to measure the variety of types of character available to the net, which in my current view are a significant contributor to the more alarming instances of fake-news gaining its recent traction. 'Variety of character' example thought process 'this seems totally against all common accepted knowledge but im feeling unique, im going to run with this information as very true.'

vanderZwan 7y ago

Terry Pratchett was a news reporter before he turned writer[0], and IIRC the latter partially happened out of frustration with how little people seemed to care about the truth (of course, the UK tabloids have a particularly notorious reputation here). Although I may have interpreted that last part based on Neil Gaiman's memory of Pratchett as being a very angry man, in a good way[1] In that light it's not that surprising that Pratchett had good insights on how the internet would pan out: he had a very good understanding of the human side of it, and especially a good feeling for the ways in which humanity was going to disappoint him, and all of us. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/sep/12/terry-pratchett-writing-dragons-at-crumbling-castle-childrens-books https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/sep/12... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchet...

kps 7y ago
Sir Terry Pratchett (OBE, GNU) was also active on Usenet. He knew ‘social media’ first hand.

dejv 7y ago

Terry Pratchett wrote a book about newspappers that is even more relevant in current age of social media. It is called The Truth.

schnevets 7y ago

Fake news has always existed, and society builds up an immunity whenever it evolves into a new medium. I don't see the illegitimate Wordpress-based sites that peddle lies as any different than the National Enquirer-esque print tabloids or radio conspiracy theorists of yesteryear. Folks who didn't grow up with the internet may have trouble telling the difference, and even Millennials constantly fall for biased social media outlets, but there is already proof that the next generation is seeing through the most flagrant of cheap tricks. I'm not saying society is immune to propaganda, but the most blatant offenders are a bit like a temporary illness until media consumers wise up. EDIT: Added context from my original comment.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Do you have evidence that historical forms of fake news and propaganda became less effective over time?
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  I don't have evidence either way, but one would expect that looking at the history surrounding the introduction of the printing press, the introduction of newspapers, of radio, and television would be a good starting point.
- schnevets 7y ago
  Outside of looking at history and saying "everything seems to work out", I don't have much. However, there is the phenomenon of Banner Blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness) in frequent web users.
dgudkov 7y ago
>a temporary illness until media consumers wise up Not exactly. Media consumers do need to wise up. However expecting the consumers to bear the entire burden of verification is naive. Consumers want someone to do the verification for them (at least partially) because it's tedious and time consuming. That's why reputation paid off back then. That's why before the internet the mechanism of information propagation was built in a way to amplify proved, respectable media. The social media on the internet have created a mechanism that can amplify any information. Even worse than that - it amplifies poor quality information with sensationalist clickbaity headlines significantly better that good quality but not so sensationalist information. Add to the picture the proliferation of click-based advertisement and you will see why sensationalism nowadays pays off more than reputation.

moomin 7y ago

I remember many years ago a journalist at The Register asking Tim Berners-Lee how his semantic web proposals were going to deal with spam. TBL again, just didn’t get it, because he didn’t see the world through a social lens. The problem of “tag spam” was already pretty prevalent when the question was asked. Same article has Bill Gates completely correctly predict the death of VHS and DVD and them being supplanted by something like Netflix/Amazon Video. He was plenty visionary, he just had a technologists lens.

ljf 7y ago
I read years ago - that Bills Gates/Microsoft backed HD-DVD as a disrupter for Blu-ray - betting in the long term that video streaming would win out - but not wanting Blu-ray to get too much of a handhold.
- jahewson 7y ago
  > too much of a handhold A foothold?
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  They were also worried about Sony holding all the cards in video manufacturing with Blu-Ray. DVD was primarily "owned" by Toshiba with a variety of patents spread around a consortium of manufacturers. Sony had all the tech and patents and DRM control in Blu-Ray and were at risk of a dominating monopoly. HD-DVD did at least push Sony to spread more of the patent rights and DRM controls around to other manufacturers and create a (slightly) more open consortium than if there hadn't been a fight at all.

bmmayer1 7y ago

If you read the interview, Bill Gates rightly predicted the rise of sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell you what is worth reading and what isn't. It's no one's fault that no one listens to those recommendations--it's just human nature to be predisposed to confirmation bias. But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of authority on equal terms--is patently false today. Everyone knows how to filter for content they should believe and content they shouldn't. The only problem is, everyone's opinion of what is 'fake' is different.

kgwxd 7y ago
One other problem is, everyone's opinion of what is 'news' is different.
noobiemcfoob 7y ago
> sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell you what is worth reading Didn't this happen? Some versions more formalized by others but isn't this what people mean by an individual's bubble? The concern being that these bubbles can be so different as to be incompatible with others.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> It's no one's fault that no one listens to those recommendations People do, in fact, listen to the recommendations. Those gatekeepers, however, are just as heavily biased as the “news sources”, which themselves are actually just gatekeepers for freelance writers and press release mills. Whatever point in the network is influential is, obviously, the highest value target for corruption, and more layers of gatekeepers with no greater inherent resistance to corruption don't change anything. > But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of authority on equal terms--is patently false today. No, it's not. > Everyone knows how to filter for content they should believe and content they shouldn't. Yeah, everyone knows how to select the gatekeepers that reinforce their preconceived biases.

imtringued 7y ago

Fake news has always existed. The only difference between today and hundreds of years ago is who had the most reach. Back in the past only the church and royalty had the power to spread (fake) news. Nowadays anyone can go on social media and do the same.

blancheneige 7y ago
> Back in the past only the church and royalty had the power to spread (fake) news. How so? Do you have an example in mind? I can think of a lot of fake news or misleading propaganda deliberately disseminated by seditious and revolutionary groups during the French and American revolutions.
- manfredo 7y ago
  The church and royalty had power to arbitrarily execute those that spoke out against them. Inquisition against heretics is one example.
  - blancheneige 7y ago
    You're stretching the definition of fake news to encompass instances that would otherwise not fit. Parent also states that only the church and the royalty had such power. If we are going to extend the definition of fake news to include defamation and false accusations, then the church hardly had a monopoly on the matter since they often responded to such allegations when spread by the commoners. The overwhelming majority of such cases started as tips or accusations of indulging in superstition (at best) or poisoning and murder (at worst). If false, they would in fact be a prime example of fake news spread by the lower class. The case against Galileo or other re-interpretations of the Bible are outliers if you read actual trial and testimonies. Therefore I re-iterate my question: what concrete example(s) support OP's assertion regarding this exclusive power of fake news dissemination?
    - manfredo 7y ago
      I suppose if you're really want to be pedantic this wasn't completely limited to the church and monarchs. If enough people in a village wanted to suppress some information, or promulgate some falsehood, they could intimidate others into compliance. Plenty of Italian city-states had power structures more centered around wealthy merchants rather than nobility. So sure, it wasn't entirely limited to the church and nobility. But the church and nobility were undoubtedly in the most effective positions to carry out such deception. The key observation is that when communication technology is primitive, then the ability to spread information is limited to a handful of people. Namely, those that either have the social position to spread their interpretation of the world and what is happening in it, or those that have the power to intimidate and force people into silence or compliance. Throughout much of history, this was religion (easy to spread information when people go to one of your institutions every Sunday, and your priests make up a huge portion of literate society) and the nobility (you control the armed forces and have more or less unilateral control over employment them). And on a side note, I don't see why false accusations of crime or violation of social norms don't count as fake news. Such accusations are probably some of the most common instances of fake news.

jordigh 7y ago

I think it's extremely important to remember what "fake news" is. It's not misleading reporting, it's not yellow journalism, it's not honest errors in reporting, it's not rumours. Fake news is fraudulent websites passing themselves as other news sources reporting the craziest Onion-like fabrications out of whole cloth with the hopes of swaying public opinion. Fake news is about a site with a domain name like cnnews.com or abcnewstoday.com with the same logo as ABC news or CNN, making up stories, with no pretense of reality, with hopes of getting shared on Facebook. The term was coined in 2016 to refer to all of the fake news websites that were popping up during the US election cycle. But by the time people recognised these fake news websites and Trump got a hold of them, he didn't bother trying to understand what fake news was and nobody else did. He said, no fake news, no fake news, you're fake news, and now everyone thinks that fake news is something we've had forever. No, fake news is a very recent phenomenon, requiring domain squatting and social media to proliferate. It's not the same kind of problem as before. We already had names and discussions of things like slant, editorial oversight, propaganda, gossip, and errata. Fake news should not be lumped with all of those. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites

jaggednad 7y ago

So did vernor vinge in his sci fi book A Fire Upon the Deep, which is worth a read regardless

dejaime 7y ago

Fake news have existed for millennia. This is so stupid.

argd678 7y ago

The internet increased the synchronization of what people believe at what time, fake or real. It’s like around the world everyone knows the same 30 news stores every day and has one of just a few standard opinions about them. That then influences what a huge number of people think and do in all aspects of their lives at the same time. I think before it was more out of sync at what time people knew something and that knowledge started affecting what they do.

haberman 7y ago

I think they both missed the mark. Pratchett says: "there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up." But that's not really true. It's not hard to evaluate fantastical claims by cross-checking them with other sources. What I think both men missed is that people would be happy to believe fake or misleading news without cross-checking it if it reinforced their world view.

techntoke 7y ago

Reminds me of that time I worked at Microsoft and they grabbed datasets from social media to be processed by GPUs to ensure that their brand reputation was strong. TLDR: Microsoft uses bots and other means to try to control narratives and opinions on social media.

johnchristopher 7y ago

why is there a video of the LotR on autoplay o_O ? It's getting ridiculous.

zzzeek 7y ago

Gates was right, there are authorities that are curating this information. Unfortunately the authorities are called Facebook and they do not give a fuck.

gdubs 7y ago

There’s a great book on the counterculture roots of personal computing and the internet by John Markoff. [1] Arguably we are in some ways living through the end result of a thought experiment conceived by a bunch of LSD tripping hippies in the 60s: “what if we wired a billion brains together? That’d be far out, right?” Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. Just interesting to think about in historical context. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
I also strongly recommend you to read From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner [0] together with What the Dormouse Said. The two books are really an eye-opener and revealed how everything connected together. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_(author) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_(author) > Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. Yes! Recently, David Perell wrote an excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], which examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and part of the article has a similar argument just like mine. [1] https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on --- It's interesting to see that the personal computing and the Internet was envisioned by our pioneers as an open, peer-to-peer, decentralized structure, and they hope to bring the world to a freer and more egalitarian future (Cyber-utopianism). They were the people who laid out the crucial groundwork of everything (PC, Web, microchips, crypto, etc) throughout the 70s. In the 80s, this Cyber-utopianism evolved into Cyberdelic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic) and cyberpunk, computer was seen as the new LSD. The cyberpunks of the 1980s and 1990s embraced technology and the hacker ethics. They believed that the Internet could help human beings overcome limits, liberating us from authority (crypto-anarchism) and even enabling us to transcend space, time, and body (transhumanism). Later, a group of entrepreneurs absorbed this idealism (see the early Wired magazine, it was fascinating!) and transformed it into the Californian Ideology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) and created the dotCom bubble in the 90s, finally bringing us to the present world. But if we compare the original vision to the web dominated by Silicon Valley today, one would say that the Valley already betrayed this vision at large. What the FAANG empire have claimed to do, is not what they were/are actually doing. (On the bright side, the Free Software Movement succeed, and the Electronics Frontier Foundation is still going strong, but both with little influence compared to the megacorps.) What happened? Ideologically speaking, the most straightforward explanation is that the idealism has been sold out to corporations and capitalism for profit. I think this idea is fine and it can explain a lot, but this is a cliche and there's enough criticisms based on this approach that one could found online, so I will stop here and explain it from other perspectives. Technologically speaking, the whole thing didn't come without warnings from the inside. The first warning came in 1984, from the Free Software Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_movement), it said the objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if the software running on a computer grants freedoms to users, otherwise it would create a dystopia instead; The second warning came from the Cypherpunks Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk) in the late 80s, it said objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if the computer and network systems are explicitly designed to preserve the security and privacy of the users by utilizing cryptography, otherwise it would create a dystopia instead; the third warning came in late 1990s, from Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Common movement. He wrote a book called "Code is Law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_and_Other_Laws_of_Cyberspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_and_Other_Laws_of_Cybersp...), arguing the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically have the liberating properties by itself (envisioned by the original utopianist), but it was actually an effect created by the running code. Whoever controls the code can completely reshape the cyberspace and transform it to a dystopia instead, we must make sure that our democracy, freedom, human rights is coded properly into the computer programs, to achieve this, the government must enforce heavy regulations of the code and the Internet by passing strict laws. This is controversial, but he got the idea (the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically have the liberating properties by itself, we must implement them explicitly), just like the free software hackers or the Cypherpunks. But unfounately, neither solution has been implemented at a large scale. Finally, I would try replying to the original question: why do we have a problem of "Fake News" newadays? I believe part of the answer is the limitation of all the elitism from the forementioned things. The ideology of the Internet, more or less, has an element of populism. People believed we could change the world by empowering the individuals by freeing computing powers from institutions to the people, and connect them via the Internet, eventually, we can create... > a postpolitical, non-hierarchical society made possible by cyberware, in which the computer-literate, super-intelligent, open-minded, change-oriented, self-reliant, irreverent free-thinker is the norm and the person who is not internetted and does not think for him or herself and does not question authority is the "problem person". And it looked pretty good: things appeared to be moving to this direction - the emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove this point. This was seen as the case even before 2010, when we had the Occupy Movement and The Arab Spring. But it turns out, 1. It was the populism of the elites. Yes, they were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism played a positive role, it bought us the free software movement, for example. But after all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, the same populism would stop playing the original positive role. 2. The development of the Internet was done in the beginning of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism. From the 1980s to 2007, the world was following this trend, so there was no major social conflicts that contradicted the idealism of the Internet manifested itself through the web. When the middle east politics started getting destabilized, people celebrated because the revolution was liberal. There was even the "cute cat theory of digital activism", which says when there are funny memes involved, people are more likely to join the political protest of Internet freedom. And it was seen as a good thing - a faceless dictatorial government was overthrown by lolcat. Isn't it the miracle of the postmodern Internet? But post-2010, this world order started to disintegrate. Now it's clear, that "The Internet is an inherently platform of democracy and equality, which empowered the individuals to be free from the establishment", this narrative from the 80s has been proven to be wishful thinking. This is when the entire thing started to get out of control. Now it has been clear that ANY idea, can by popularized and supported by a free Internet. Now in the current age of deglobalization and political and economic failure, naturally, extreme post-truth and nationalistic ideas are getting more and more popular support, just like the Arab Spring, both was supported by a number of people who were frustrated by the status quo. I guess this is how we suddenly got the "Fake News" in recent years. It was simply because the world politics created a big market of the reactionary populism, and the web is the best tool to sell it. It wasn't a significant problem because the market was not as big as today. The grassroot nature of the Internet started to revolt against its own founding principle, democracy and equality, which made the grassroot nature of the Internet possible in the first place.

gopher2 7y ago

Fake news is a pendulum. Now we have it, we start to know what it is, we start to understand how it's created and distributed. Things can start swinging the other way. But this takes time. If you really wanted to end fake news and had unlimited time and money, a great way to do it would be to publish as much completely fake news as possible, so that people figure out that they need to use reputable, trusted sources, or end up a fool. Out of money, out of time, and that what they believed after learning about it on a Facebook group or reddit was wrong. People learn from painful experiences the most, unfortunately. So some people have learned from Trump getting elected. Others haven't learned, some probably won't. It's very easy to be fooled. If you think of fake news like a virus, then publishing more fake news acts kind of like an anti-virus. Distributing a version of the problem that is easier for the immune system to detect and combat and won't kill anyone - to inoculate against the real thing. Bill Gates is right. He's just early.

shadofx 7y ago
Painful experiences that are the direct result of believing fake news simply gets misattributed to something totally irrelevant after consuming more fake news. People don't like admitting that they're gullible.

wyldfire 7y ago

> You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. Sad, but true. Gates was right: Facebook and other mediums propagate misinformation. By virtue of it appearing on FB, it does mean something, just not something necessarily beneficial.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

The reason fake news can still propagate, is because we have no "Vouching" system, by which a citizen can vouch for a piece of information -or even another citizen/organisation. Where there inheritance of trust, and one weak link in this chain, the social media plattforms would be very quiet. Advertising - beyond local, would not be seen. Seeing all content equally, would be a active choice against this model. The truth is, we could return to this medieval world, where the wise men vouch for information given, or proofs of work vouch for the information, or publishers pay you a cent for reading. But the powers that be would be undone by this. Thus it will not happen, unless integrated sneakily into a add blocker.

c3534l 7y ago

I love that Bill Gates thought fake news wouldn't be a problem because Clippy would tell you what to believe.

AnthonyWnC 7y ago

Fake news has been with us for a long time.. Along with various religions/churches and superstition/customs, humans had always believed in various level of fake things.

load-of-shit 7y ago

Fake news isn't real. And by that, I mean, it is not influential, and never has been. No one buys fake news. No one crafts a decision based on tripe. It's laughable to believe that there's any clout in nonsense.

macspoofing 7y ago

Lucky guess. I wouldn't put any stock into Pratchett's ability to predict the future. In 90s there was no way to predict how the internet would shape out and what challenges we would struggle with, and which ones were non-issues. The flip side of Pratchett prediction is Krugman's famous statement that the internet would not have a bigger effect on the economy than the fax machine. He was obviously hilariously wrong, but when he made that prediction he could have been right. Closer to home, I see people making all kinds of predictions on the great impact that cryptocurrencies will have but it's also reasonable to think they are a fad. We'll see.

ghc 7y ago

“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.” “I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.” “That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?” “How do you mean?” “Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis (1945)

vbuwivbiu 7y ago
looks like the problem described in the last paragraph has been solved... very weird book. Similarities with Cold Lazarus

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dang 7y ago

Url changed from https://www.nme.com/news/film/terry-pratchett-warned-bill-gates-fake-news-back-90s-2502712#SUaW1AkKV2tYhwei.99 https://www.nme.com/news/film/terry-pratchett-warned-bill-ga..., which points to this.

al_chemist 7y ago

How do we know that "Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)" is not fake news? Author says it's in "GQ (UK edition), July 1995, p21", but before now, I've never heard about GQ and I've no way to acquire it. QC wikipedia doesn't even mention Gates nor Pratchett. Pratchett wikipedia never mentions Gates nor GQ. It mention "he was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s" and as a best-selling author, would he work for beauty-and-fashion magazine?

vanderZwan 7y ago
You could start by clicking on the actual links and seeing that there are photos of the magazine in question in the tweets.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> but before now, I've never heard about GQ and I've no way to acquire it. https://www.crazyaboutmagazines.com/ourshop/cat_56713-GQ-UK-cc-pg_3.html https://www.crazyaboutmagazines.com/ourshop/cat_56713-GQ-UK-...

primitivesuave 7y ago

To anyone interested in a compelling analysis of fake news since the invention of the printing press, Niall Ferguson’s most recent book The Square and the Tower is an excellent read.