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> 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

> 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.
- harry8 7y ago
  Really? You have clocks you know to be right and clocks you know aren't. Sadly the same can't be said of news sources. The New York Times is probably the best newspaper in the world. And sometimes they do fake news. Do it regularly. And they bitch about the internet being the problem. It isn't. The problem for them is they get caught out in ways that we find out about now. We used not to. When a big story breaks, set up a twitter a/c. Follow people who are involved in the story and the reporting of it. Read the links that come up. Use your intelligence and education to assess sources, look for corroborating evidence etc and see how far your opinion strays from what you thought of the quality of the nyt reports. No time? Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, The Donald (may fleas infest his toupee) being an actual russian agent. You can't make this stuff up. But it was made up. And not in supermarket tabloids and faked facebrick screenshots. Anonymous government sources, insiders, reputable news sources. The NYT is better because sometimes, not always, but sometimes the do correct and do the right thing, however late. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-about-burning-humanitarian-trucks-in-venezuela-shows-how-us-govt-and-media-spread-fake-news/ https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-... Fox is entirely fake news. MSNBC is entirely fake news. They should be prosecuted for fraudulently having the word "news" in their advertising. Uncle George's Racist Blog on facebrick is no better or worse but nobody with half a dozen firing neurones takes the latter at all seriously the way some seem to with the excrement that is MSNBC, Fox and their high-school cheerleaders impersonating tv journalists. It's like complaining you found out someone lies to you when it suits them and you preferred life when you didn't know that. Nixon was a war criminal, J. Edgar Hoover was psychotic criminal at best, JFK tried to set records for the number of women he bedded and had the FBI and secret service cruise chicks for him. People knew who weren't beholden to a political side (eg NYT, Wash Post, WSJ etc) and didn't publish, instead they published fake news. All Zuckerberg's fault of course.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    The stuff that [we're aware that] New York Times gets wrong in the modern era barely even holds a candle to what they got wrong in the past. Particularly the case where the NYT was publishing Soviet genocide denying propaganda as though it were fact. The responsible "journalist", Walter Duranty, even won a Pulitzer Prize for his service as Stalin's uncritical mouthpiece. The NYT didn't denounce him publicly until 1990. For decades, Holodomor denial in the west was defended and perpetuate by people citing the New York Times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Denial_outside_the_USSR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Denial...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
flattone 7y ago
Well - certainly there is the rational that we collectively have no absolute knowable truth in which news sources are valid. But as much as clocks we are still utilizing/referencing them either in passing/conversational thoughts and ideas. I propose go the other way with the take away: 1) With the increased awareness of fake news comes increased social penetration of FN. 2) We more widely know of fake news existing and simultaneously are more exposed to it.
umvi 7y ago
This is a great analogy. The scary thing is, there are countries that do only have one clock (totalitarian regimes that control the press), but that's worse than having multiple clocks.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Actually it can be much better. As has been argued time and again (including by people who have suffered both), with a totalitarian regimes that controls the press means the population knows to distrust the press. A "free press" instead, while still controlled by the elites (press empires, their politician buddies, corporatism, etc), on the other hand, gives the false impression of pluralism and trust...
gregmac 7y ago
Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct. If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem. However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  The Internet has the problem that it has many easily available untrustworthy sources and the information needed to verify what they say is harder to find or not there at all. We have a world of shallow information at our fingertips, but deeper learning and research is still in the realm of paywalls and undigitised content.
- dmurray 7y ago
  > they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be. People do exactly this with clocks, too. If I had one clock reading 9:10 pm and one reading 1:45pm, and I just had lunch, I'd assume the second one was right rather than look for a third source.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Then you notice it's dark outside... ;)
    - saemil 7y ago
      And then see that a solar eclipse was predicted for today.
      - mont 7y ago
        At 9AM!
coldtea 7y ago
>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. It's also that those in power would love it for their opinions to be the "authoritative" ones and only ones permitted to be heard. Same for mainstream media (though for them it's their business model). The internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions. Imagine everybody being able to criticize the Vietnam War in the sixties, or e.g. segregation in the 40s, or prohibition in the 20s, or the war on drugs in the 80s, or McCarthyism, on a platform that could get equal eyeballs as the Time or TIME LIFE or NYT. All those critiques would be discarded as "fake news", "propaganda" and so on too (in fact whatever little was, e.g. in underground papers and so on, got exactly those labels). Of course people would also be able to voice their support those things, but that we be business as usual. People touting the elite's opinions were never without a soapbox in the mainstream media. The revolution is in the ability of the "unwashed masses" to speak for themselves.
- krapp 7y ago
  The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites. The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.
  - XCabbage 7y ago
    But is it equally unjustified? I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there: * If they report on what's said in a new government report, they'll avoid including a link to it or even including its name, to avoid you Googling for it. * If they attack a politician over a short snippet of a speech he gave, they'll only embed the snippet and won't link to a video showing the full context, thus ensuring you can't verify that the removal of context hasn't changed the meaning. * If they report on an academic paper, they won't mention its title or link to it, nor report on any of the raw data or explain its methodology - they will report only the conclusion (or their spin on it) The alternative media is more trustworthy, because it has links, which means you can independently verify its claims. The mainstream media is unique in having a strict standard of not permitting rigorous substantiation and referencing of claims made in its articles, maximising the difficulty of auditing them for truth. They deserve the distrust the public directs at them for that reason alone.
loceng 7y ago
I like the clock analogy - especially when tying in the solution of having digitally transmitted clocks from a source we trust, and so points to solutions that we must each decide which source(s) of trust we subscribe to. The issue then becomes funds being allocated to support this - and I like Andrew Yang's solution relating to supporting democracy (and countering impact of larger contributions by individuals or organizations), of using tax money giving everyone $100 to contribute to any party they want - we could do the same with journalism, and perhaps one in the same with journalism - do it also with allowing organizations to be funded who curate and moderate content for us. There is some foreseeable scary potential to this though: if say 30 million of your population have been manipulated and contribute their $3 billion to fund the campaign of a pathological liar, someone on the path towards tyranny - perhaps a puppet of bad actors from other nations, then how could that unfold? Perhaps it would balance out however if the remaining population aren't in propaganda media silos and the amount of funds contributed to their campaigns are enough to fund enough action to respond.
- ChikkaChiChi 7y ago
  The clock analogy really hit me pretty hard. At some point, even those of us who question everything ascribe authority to things that we consider to be trustworthy. When you start to look at the world through that lens, it's easy to see how so many people believe things that others find ludicrous.
dfxm12 7y ago
Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. I wonder what's easier: Curbing the dissemination of fake news on the web or understanding the allure of & preventing people from wanting to believe fake news in the first place. I honestly think it is the former, so I think there is value in combating it from that angle (in addition to others).
- neuronic 7y ago
  The problem with the second approach is that it plays heavily into psychology, confirmation bias and such. What if people don't want to consume fake news but are instead incapable of recognizing or admitting that it is fake? Even in the face of facts and reality? There are psychological pathologies which display similar behavior - narcissism being one of those where reality is conveniently rejected in favor of what works for you.
afandian 7y ago
Does the clock show today's date as 30th May 2019 or 24 Ramadan 1440?
- pjc50 7y ago
  I'm not sure what line of reasoning you're following here, other than that time is socially constructed?
  - afandian 7y ago
    Yeah, basically that. I was responding to: > But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I'm not at all sure that's true of news sources. Time isn't as absolute as everyone would like to think. At many levels, from relativity through to measurement through to systems of representation through to cultural interpretations. And even if much of the western world has converged on SI, Gregorian etc, there are still big differing views. I have a feeling that, whilst it's tempting to think that there are any absolutes in the universe, there are none. With facts, like the time, you have to pick what level you're comfortable calling a baseline. So maybe 'time' and 'facts' are closer than the GP suggests. A vaue line of reasoning, for sure.
ryanmcbride 7y ago
This is such a good analogy.
kingkawn 7y ago
I am grateful to the internet for exposing how deeply our social consensus was dependent on a particular culture and ruling class owning the means of disseminating information, ie newspapers and tv channels. With the means to distribute ideas more openly available there has come both a broader range of views across the population and a noticeable weakening of the ruling class’s ability to direct public attention and belief toward strategic conclusions.
- justinmchase 7y ago
  That's a great way of putting it, thanks for that non-ruling class view.
- CM30 7y ago
  Agreed. There are tons of important stories that only came out because the internet democratised the media and let independent voices get heard, and it's brought just as many reliable sources as it has fake news sites. That's not always been a good thing sure, but it's at least shown the world that no, not everything was 'fine' and that the political and social systems in play now have failed a lot of people.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  This hasn't changed at all, only that the way the ruling classes exert influence. One just needs to look at Facebook to understand how the field has changed and I would argue for the objective worse. The so-called broadening of ideas isnt the result of giving a voice to the voiceless, but strategically decrying science and research in the pursuit of profits. This is the heart of the argument against climate change and has resulted in a noticable weakening of science as a basis for truth and rationale.
  - kingkawn 7y ago
    Science institutionally wed itself so completely to the previous ruling social structure that it is natural that it would be undermined as collateral damage in the battle for cultural influence.
hirundo 7y ago
Also, as soon as two clocks are subject to different acceleration they can display different times that are equally accurate ... as the truth of a news story can depend on your path to it.
spinach 7y ago
Terry wasn't arguing that there wasn't fake news before the internet, but that it would be easier to create and make it seem legitimate. Harder to suss out the origins than you would something in real life. And it's not just biased news, like the way two clocks might give a slightly different time, but actual fake news and 'facts'.
- YjSe2GMQ 7y ago
  This is not true. There are fake news that have existed for thousands of years (religion), and the mass communication seems to have a negative impact even on those strongholds of fiction.
reaperducer 7y ago
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 The difference is, before the internet you had one or two or three clocks, and they were off by a minute or two. With the internet, there are seven million clocks, and some show the time for days and places that don't exist.

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.
harry8 7y ago
Really? You have clocks you know to be right and clocks you know aren't. Sadly the same can't be said of news sources. The New York Times is probably the best newspaper in the world. And sometimes they do fake news. Do it regularly. And they bitch about the internet being the problem. It isn't. The problem for them is they get caught out in ways that we find out about now. We used not to. When a big story breaks, set up a twitter a/c. Follow people who are involved in the story and the reporting of it. Read the links that come up. Use your intelligence and education to assess sources, look for corroborating evidence etc and see how far your opinion strays from what you thought of the quality of the nyt reports. No time? Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, The Donald (may fleas infest his toupee) being an actual russian agent. You can't make this stuff up. But it was made up. And not in supermarket tabloids and faked facebrick screenshots. Anonymous government sources, insiders, reputable news sources. The NYT is better because sometimes, not always, but sometimes the do correct and do the right thing, however late. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-about-burning-humanitarian-trucks-in-venezuela-shows-how-us-govt-and-media-spread-fake-news/ https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-... Fox is entirely fake news. MSNBC is entirely fake news. They should be prosecuted for fraudulently having the word "news" in their advertising. Uncle George's Racist Blog on facebrick is no better or worse but nobody with half a dozen firing neurones takes the latter at all seriously the way some seem to with the excrement that is MSNBC, Fox and their high-school cheerleaders impersonating tv journalists. It's like complaining you found out someone lies to you when it suits them and you preferred life when you didn't know that. Nixon was a war criminal, J. Edgar Hoover was psychotic criminal at best, JFK tried to set records for the number of women he bedded and had the FBI and secret service cruise chicks for him. People knew who weren't beholden to a political side (eg NYT, Wash Post, WSJ etc) and didn't publish, instead they published fake news. All Zuckerberg's fault of course.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  The stuff that [we're aware that] New York Times gets wrong in the modern era barely even holds a candle to what they got wrong in the past. Particularly the case where the NYT was publishing Soviet genocide denying propaganda as though it were fact. The responsible "journalist", Walter Duranty, even won a Pulitzer Prize for his service as Stalin's uncritical mouthpiece. The NYT didn't denounce him publicly until 1990. For decades, Holodomor denial in the west was defended and perpetuate by people citing the New York Times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Denial_outside_the_USSR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Denial...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

flattone 7y ago

Well - certainly there is the rational that we collectively have no absolute knowable truth in which news sources are valid. But as much as clocks we are still utilizing/referencing them either in passing/conversational thoughts and ideas. I propose go the other way with the take away: 1) With the increased awareness of fake news comes increased social penetration of FN. 2) We more widely know of fake news existing and simultaneously are more exposed to it.

umvi 7y ago

This is a great analogy. The scary thing is, there are countries that do only have one clock (totalitarian regimes that control the press), but that's worse than having multiple clocks.

coldtea 7y ago
Actually it can be much better. As has been argued time and again (including by people who have suffered both), with a totalitarian regimes that controls the press means the population knows to distrust the press. A "free press" instead, while still controlled by the elites (press empires, their politician buddies, corporatism, etc), on the other hand, gives the false impression of pluralism and trust...

gregmac 7y ago

Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct. If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem. However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
The Internet has the problem that it has many easily available untrustworthy sources and the information needed to verify what they say is harder to find or not there at all. We have a world of shallow information at our fingertips, but deeper learning and research is still in the realm of paywalls and undigitised content.
dmurray 7y ago
> they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be. People do exactly this with clocks, too. If I had one clock reading 9:10 pm and one reading 1:45pm, and I just had lunch, I'd assume the second one was right rather than look for a third source.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Then you notice it's dark outside... ;)
  - saemil 7y ago
    And then see that a solar eclipse was predicted for today.
    - mont 7y ago
      At 9AM!

coldtea 7y ago

>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. It's also that those in power would love it for their opinions to be the "authoritative" ones and only ones permitted to be heard. Same for mainstream media (though for them it's their business model). The internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions. Imagine everybody being able to criticize the Vietnam War in the sixties, or e.g. segregation in the 40s, or prohibition in the 20s, or the war on drugs in the 80s, or McCarthyism, on a platform that could get equal eyeballs as the Time or TIME LIFE or NYT. All those critiques would be discarded as "fake news", "propaganda" and so on too (in fact whatever little was, e.g. in underground papers and so on, got exactly those labels). Of course people would also be able to voice their support those things, but that we be business as usual. People touting the elite's opinions were never without a soapbox in the mainstream media. The revolution is in the ability of the "unwashed masses" to speak for themselves.

krapp 7y ago
The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites. The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.
- XCabbage 7y ago
  But is it equally unjustified? I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there: * If they report on what's said in a new government report, they'll avoid including a link to it or even including its name, to avoid you Googling for it. * If they attack a politician over a short snippet of a speech he gave, they'll only embed the snippet and won't link to a video showing the full context, thus ensuring you can't verify that the removal of context hasn't changed the meaning. * If they report on an academic paper, they won't mention its title or link to it, nor report on any of the raw data or explain its methodology - they will report only the conclusion (or their spin on it) The alternative media is more trustworthy, because it has links, which means you can independently verify its claims. The mainstream media is unique in having a strict standard of not permitting rigorous substantiation and referencing of claims made in its articles, maximising the difficulty of auditing them for truth. They deserve the distrust the public directs at them for that reason alone.

loceng 7y ago

I like the clock analogy - especially when tying in the solution of having digitally transmitted clocks from a source we trust, and so points to solutions that we must each decide which source(s) of trust we subscribe to. The issue then becomes funds being allocated to support this - and I like Andrew Yang's solution relating to supporting democracy (and countering impact of larger contributions by individuals or organizations), of using tax money giving everyone $100 to contribute to any party they want - we could do the same with journalism, and perhaps one in the same with journalism - do it also with allowing organizations to be funded who curate and moderate content for us. There is some foreseeable scary potential to this though: if say 30 million of your population have been manipulated and contribute their $3 billion to fund the campaign of a pathological liar, someone on the path towards tyranny - perhaps a puppet of bad actors from other nations, then how could that unfold? Perhaps it would balance out however if the remaining population aren't in propaganda media silos and the amount of funds contributed to their campaigns are enough to fund enough action to respond.

ChikkaChiChi 7y ago
The clock analogy really hit me pretty hard. At some point, even those of us who question everything ascribe authority to things that we consider to be trustworthy. When you start to look at the world through that lens, it's easy to see how so many people believe things that others find ludicrous.

dfxm12 7y ago

Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. I wonder what's easier: Curbing the dissemination of fake news on the web or understanding the allure of & preventing people from wanting to believe fake news in the first place. I honestly think it is the former, so I think there is value in combating it from that angle (in addition to others).

neuronic 7y ago
The problem with the second approach is that it plays heavily into psychology, confirmation bias and such. What if people don't want to consume fake news but are instead incapable of recognizing or admitting that it is fake? Even in the face of facts and reality? There are psychological pathologies which display similar behavior - narcissism being one of those where reality is conveniently rejected in favor of what works for you.

afandian 7y ago

Does the clock show today's date as 30th May 2019 or 24 Ramadan 1440?

pjc50 7y ago
I'm not sure what line of reasoning you're following here, other than that time is socially constructed?
- afandian 7y ago
  Yeah, basically that. I was responding to: > But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I'm not at all sure that's true of news sources. Time isn't as absolute as everyone would like to think. At many levels, from relativity through to measurement through to systems of representation through to cultural interpretations. And even if much of the western world has converged on SI, Gregorian etc, there are still big differing views. I have a feeling that, whilst it's tempting to think that there are any absolutes in the universe, there are none. With facts, like the time, you have to pick what level you're comfortable calling a baseline. So maybe 'time' and 'facts' are closer than the GP suggests. A vaue line of reasoning, for sure.

ryanmcbride 7y ago

This is such a good analogy.

kingkawn 7y ago

I am grateful to the internet for exposing how deeply our social consensus was dependent on a particular culture and ruling class owning the means of disseminating information, ie newspapers and tv channels. With the means to distribute ideas more openly available there has come both a broader range of views across the population and a noticeable weakening of the ruling class’s ability to direct public attention and belief toward strategic conclusions.

justinmchase 7y ago
That's a great way of putting it, thanks for that non-ruling class view.
CM30 7y ago
Agreed. There are tons of important stories that only came out because the internet democratised the media and let independent voices get heard, and it's brought just as many reliable sources as it has fake news sites. That's not always been a good thing sure, but it's at least shown the world that no, not everything was 'fine' and that the political and social systems in play now have failed a lot of people.
fzeroracer 7y ago
This hasn't changed at all, only that the way the ruling classes exert influence. One just needs to look at Facebook to understand how the field has changed and I would argue for the objective worse. The so-called broadening of ideas isnt the result of giving a voice to the voiceless, but strategically decrying science and research in the pursuit of profits. This is the heart of the argument against climate change and has resulted in a noticable weakening of science as a basis for truth and rationale.
- kingkawn 7y ago
  Science institutionally wed itself so completely to the previous ruling social structure that it is natural that it would be undermined as collateral damage in the battle for cultural influence.

hirundo 7y ago

Also, as soon as two clocks are subject to different acceleration they can display different times that are equally accurate ... as the truth of a news story can depend on your path to it.

spinach 7y ago

Terry wasn't arguing that there wasn't fake news before the internet, but that it would be easier to create and make it seem legitimate. Harder to suss out the origins than you would something in real life. And it's not just biased news, like the way two clocks might give a slightly different time, but actual fake news and 'facts'.

YjSe2GMQ 7y ago
This is not true. There are fake news that have existed for thousands of years (religion), and the mass communication seems to have a negative impact even on those strongholds of fiction.

reaperducer 7y ago

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 The difference is, before the internet you had one or two or three clocks, and they were off by a minute or two. With the internet, there are seven million clocks, and some show the time for days and places that don't exist.