9 ms·

The Problem with Believing What We’re Told

84 points by Reedx 7y ago

Reedx 7y ago
> "A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared the spread of fake news and real news on Twitter in a 2018 study published in the journal Science. Looking at 126,000 tweets of news stories over the previous 11 years, they found that fake news stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. Real news took about six times as long to reach a benchmark audience of 1,500 people as fake news did."
- dqpb 7y ago
  I think there is an information theoretic explanation for this. The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely. Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    Wouldn't we just assume "fake news" is optimized for virality, being a contrivance in the first place.
    - Mathnerd314 7y ago
      Fiction is more popular than nonfiction generally, roughly 2x according to https://justpublishingadvice.com/is-writing-non-fiction-more-profitable/ https://justpublishingadvice.com/is-writing-non-fiction-more..., which is about the effect size of the Twitter study.
      - yesenadam 7y ago
        >Fiction is more popular than nonfiction generally, roughly 2x That stat refers to money spent buying new books and ebooks, I think. It excludes e.g. newspapers, journals, magazines, and online reading, like blogs and special-interest websites, doesn't it? An extremely large majority of which is non-fiction, I'm guessing.
    - dqpb 7y ago
      Yes. But the follow-up question is how is this news optimized for virality, moreso then factual news. I'm suggesting that it has a general information theoretic advantage.
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    The spectacle of seeing a nominal fact-checking site go after an overtly satirical one has been an astounding result for our day. I like to point out the rose colored glasses of the early internet, when the awesome signal-to-noise ratio was going to have a catalytic effect on human knowledge. #Whoops
    - kibibu 7y ago
      Do you remember Bonsai Kitten, and the breathlessly horrified email campaigns against it? People have had difficulty determining real from fake for a long time.
      - esmi 7y ago
        It’s way older than that. This is just one I know off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many other, older, examples. https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-today/fake-news-is-nothing-new/ https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-...
        kibibu 7y ago
        Yes of course; but it's the earliest one I remember being a purely online phenomenon that suckered people in. Besides, of course, the stupid lists of factoids that used to get emailed around - duck quacks don't echo etc.
    - rosser 7y ago
      See Brandolini's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      I'm increasingly convinced that what I call "naive fact-checking" misses the forest for the trees. Facts matter, yes. But a false narrative, even, or especially where constructed at least in part on true facts, is vastly more significant. A characteristic of virtually all Big Lie Narratives is that they contain, often major, nuggets of truth. But the arrangement of narrative amonst these, and eventual insertion of false (or at the very least, unverifiable) facts, eventually proves these out. A classic example I've run across is "It's All a Rich Man's Lie", an epic 3h 40m YouTube conspiracy yarn which, at least in its first hour or so, sticks largely to the domain of underlying truths: yes, there are "secret societies" at Ivy League schools, yes, many major US industrial firms maintained operations or divisions in Nazi Germany, etc. But no, actually, Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech (mentioned about 20 minutes in) was not about the Yale Skull & Bones group, but instead about the Soviet Union, and its practice of leveraging unflattering or inconvenient reporting from the US itself against the US. (The question of whether or not Kennedy was right in asking for self-restraint on this basis is a matter for another discussion.) Often the individual elements and false narrative become apparent by pulling back ever so slightly from the presented story, and looking at the greater context of facts offered. A few paragraphs of surrounding context from the Kennedy speech ("catnip for conspiracy nuts" according to one source) make painfully clear that its topic is not what the conspiracy nuts would make it to be. The fact that such checking is expensive and takes time makes the fabricators' job all that much easier, and the debunkers' harder. Another interesting case is the "J.P. Morgan Bankers' Manifesto" hoax, by one Thomas W. Gilruth, first published in 1892, and still making the rounds on social media over 120 years later. I'd run across it by way of an meme whose message appealed to me, though thinking it might be too good to be true, I dug deeper. To my knowledge, this is the most substantial debunking of the Gilruth hoax ever published: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morgan_and_the_bankers_manifesto_of_1892_hoax/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Fake news isn't bound to the limits of truth. Fake news can be generated with far greater volume than truth. Fake news can be specifically engineered to appeal to various cognitive biases promoting virality. Truth serves reality. Falsehood can, and very often does, serve specific partisan interests who have a hand in promoting its spread. These are four powerful factors favouring falsehoods and their dissemination.
    - popularwarfare 7y ago
      What you have to come to terms with is that there is not a single 'objective' truth but multiple often contradictory truths. Individual Perception and psychology in addition to cultural and social norms play a large role as well.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        I am very much at terms with that. There are also deliberate actions, evicenced in documents and testimony, to obscure objective truths. There is a distinction between reasonable differences of opinion, and abject falsehoods. The principle of anekāntavāda is of many sidedness. It is not of any sidedness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        There are many types of events where there exists an objective truth. 'humans went to the moon', for example, is a statement whose truth is objective. You may choose to believe this truth or not, but you can't say 'the truth is more complicated than that'. Of course 'Americans went to the moon to further the human condition' is an example of statement for which there is likely not an objective truth - the terms themselves are fuzzy, people usually have multiple reasons and contradictory feelings about their reasons etc. So if I post a story claiming Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza place basement, that is unequivocally false. If I run a story saying Hillary Clinton is an evil person seeking to lead the country astray, that may or may not be true depending on many different factors, definitions, personal beliefs etc. It would be wrong to label it as fake news,for this reason.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  "A lie can run 'round the world before the truth has got its boots on." There's a novel called The Truth that pokes fun at this idea through a story about the birth of daily newspapers and tabloids in a fictional city-state. The quote that I have in mind is a little long to format here, so I'll pastebin it: https://pastebin.com/T2YjtTN2 https://pastebin.com/T2YjtTN2
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    Praise Terry! Hallowed be thy name! And that hard drive got what it deserved!
  - phs318u 7y ago
    Great money quote: "what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds."
- buboard 7y ago
  Likely the fake news were more sensational
paulsutter 7y ago
This is similar to publication bias for news outlets and even scientific journals, just with progressively lower standards. Each party wants to publish the most interesting things they can, therefore take it as close to the line as their reputation/judgement allows.
rb808 7y ago
I think I have the opposite problem now where I don't believe anything I'm told. Especially from friends and relatives.
- oyebenny 7y ago
  I don't believe you.
  - FillardMillmore 7y ago
    I don't believe you don't believe him.
    - vemv 7y ago
      This is not Reddit.
      - chacha2 7y ago
        I don't believe you.
- esmi 7y ago
  I read through the article and wondered, how did they determine which questions were fake news and which weren’t? That wasn’t really addressed. Oh well, I guess I’ll just believe what I was told by the WSJ...
- eitland 7y ago
  > Especially from friends and relatives. You make me feel extremely lucky.
- DangitBobby 7y ago
  I get the impression that that's the desired effect of foreign-funded fake news compaigns.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
redmaverick 7y ago
Ted Bundy's mom Louise refused to believe her son was a murderer despite all evidence to the contrary. Her son admitted that he was the culprit and only that made her come out of her denial. In a lot of third world countries it is pretty common and even expected that the average Joe will vote for whomever appeals to their emotions. Every sin of the politician is forgotten and forgiven even if the said politician has a history of inciting murder or being corrupted etc. There is a good chance that people who voted for their candidate made up their minds long before any kind of "fake news" hit their newsfeed.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  I think what's important to this statement is that regardless of political opinion everyone is susceptible to it.
- jadell 7y ago
  In a lot of first-world countries, too.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  ...not just in third world countries, the G7 suffers from this too, regardless if you support Trump or Merkel.
RyanAF7 7y ago
Not to mention the political advantage of framing your opponents base as having poor judgment or lacking discernment by producing fake stories you know they are more likely to read, share and believe than your own base. Politics today is far more deceptive because the speed of delivery and feedback for communications allows it to be. Only going to get worse unless a new platform/network/protocol is created for the future of "trustless" news and publications.
- popularwarfare 7y ago
  It's always been this way, politics is a zero sum game.
  - RyanAF7 7y ago
    All things are zero-sum if you try hard enough.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Wait, so you mean Dorian won’t hit Alabama!?
pjc50 7y ago
Something very important with reading news: you have to understand reported speech. If you see "a spokesman for the president says the moon is made of green cheese", and that spokesman did actually say that, that passes a fact check. The fact that the moon is not made of green cheese is not considered to be in the remit of journalism.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Reminds me a bit of “peer reviewed” vs. “reproduced.” One would hope those journalists would employ some type of standards on what they choose to report, and how deep they investigate it to avoid confusion.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    Peer review can be pretty shit too, and should be viewed as a spam-filter more than anything. There isn't really a fast way to know if some work is good and reliable if its about something new.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  No, that's overreacting: there is like an entire industry about reporting false statements made by Trump so its not that bad. Of course, there is also a industry dedicated to reporting how the false statements can be interpreted as almost true...
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Of course he could have said it in any number of context that are not a statement of fact, which will be omitted so you can be manipulated.
dredmorbius 7y ago
The conclusion of this WSJ piece -- organ of the Murdoch disinformation empire, though generally the WSJ's news reportage continues to enjoy a reputation no longer afforded its opinion pages -- is that we need better media literacy. That is: it's a plea for a dodge of responsibility by media organisations themselves. My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions. The idea that a media channel, editorially controlled, AI heuristics driven, or "wisdom-of-the-crowd" determined, can act in complete disregard (or open opposition) to the truth and reality, and fail to be held to account, is a key problem. To those who respond with "but who then would determine the truth": these institutions are already determining at least the perception of truth, through what they promote. Repetition, as the WSJ article and its cited research show, create impression of truth. And whilst not all ground truths can be known, some can be well established, as can be deliberate campaigns to obviate and obscure truth. Dante's deepest circle of hell was reserved for the betrayers of others. But immediately above this was the circle reserved for the bearers of false witness. An arrangement in an age where virtually all information was conveyed through witness, either oral or spoken testimony. Much of the social, religious, and communications institution of the time was devoted to establishing the importance of truth, and the consequences for falsehood, where independent verification was difficult or impossible. Advances in information technology have offered increased opportunities for verification, but also broken down many of the foundations of trust in individuals and institutions. Some recent tools -- Bitcoin comes to mind -- are expressly founded on removing the role of trust within sectors of activity. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, two of the principle ones being that trust itself has an extreme function in improving efficiency, and that its removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally. We need to reestablish trust, adherence to trust, accountability to trust, and institutional trust. Information technology to date has worked in the opposite direction. This ends poorly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rntz 7y ago
  > The conclusion of this WSJ piece [...] is that we need better media literacy. > My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions. I've noticed that on issues that provoke strong feeling, folks often put things in opposition that really aren't opposed. This is a great example. These aren't opposites. They're simply two different approaches to the same problem. They're not mutually exclusive in the least. Nothing about teaching people to think critically harms or opposes holding media institutions to account for what they say or vice versa. Anyway, I don't think more accountability for media institutions is a bad idea, but I can't help thinking it alone won't fix the problem. The internet isn't going away, and it's fundamentally a many-to-many medium. Unless some authority systematically censors and reviews public fora --- I'm talking about everyday conversations and posts on Facebook, reddit, chatrooms, HN, Slack --- we're not going to be able to go back to the days when fact-checked journalism could keep misinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theorizing at bay. (Hell, I guess those days never existed, but I think these problems have gotten worse.) Perhaps the best point of comparison for the effect of the internet as a new medium is the invention of the printing press. Generally regarded as a good thing in the long run, but it led almost directly to centuries of religious warfare in Europe. Not a heartening thought.
empath75 7y ago
It’s a rare parent that wants their children questioning what they’re told. It’s one of the reasons the Greeks killed Socrates. That’s the fundamental aspect of human nature that needs to somehow be changed. It’s not that hard to develop critical thinking skills — but parents don’t want it, corporations don’t want it, politicians don’t want it. Where is the constituency that is going to push for and pay for critical thinking skills in childhood education?
- klingonopera 7y ago
  Add religious leaders to that list, too.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  > corporations don’t want it, politicians don’t want it Hmm, the question that then arises in my mind is: are parents that do encourage their children to question them properly preparing those children for a society that will disregard them with that attitude? (Working from your assumptions here - I'm not necessarily sure how widespread the disregard for a questioning attitude is.)
turk73 7y ago
I read all the comments on here. I think you're all barking up the wrong trees. You're missing the bigger point: There is no truth. There are no facts. Not in the way you think there are. Never have been, never will be. The world you perceive is a lie told to you by your brain. Humans have studied these flaws for decades now and they are extremely good at exploiting the flaws in our physiology. Once you internalize what I just said everything is much easier. Media will never be reformed and history will repeat itself it many twisted ways. Man is imperfect, fallen, and his institutions will never be anything but the same way. This is why humans invented gods--to have something perfect to aspire to. But it can never be that way. Never. Perhaps we can create spiritual machines that can achieve such perfection, but I doubt it because ultimately they came from us and our own imperfections.
popularwarfare 7y ago
The real lie is the implied premise that if people only knew the 'the truth' it would somehow cause them to act in a certain way. Which is categorically and empirically false. But I don't want to be too hard on them, they are journalists after all.
rkagerer 7y ago
I tend to be very skeptical and have a good sense of whether somebody's feeding me bullsh*t. I'm genuinely surprised by some of the things I see those around me just blindly accept. I hope when I'm a parent, I can instill a healthy sense skepticism in my child.
- abraae 7y ago
  My proudest moment of parenting so far was when my son told me how much he appreciated being brought up to question and not to blindly accept groupthink.
vbsteven 7y ago
The first part of Neal Stephensons latest novel “Fall, or Dodge in hell” explores exactly this topic in the context of social media. The possible consequences of a post-truth world where people cannot agree on facts are stunning. An interesting read.
mch82 7y ago
The correct term is “propaganda”. We shouldn’t use the term “fake news”, which is a term designed to undermine trust in news institutions. When we use the term, we contribute to the undermining.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  That is confusing terms. Propaganda can and usually is built out of true news as well as fake stories - true news presented selectively, given a specific interpretation etc. can be a very powerful tool. Fake stories and their spread are a different matter - they can be a form of propaganda as well, but they can also serve other properties (selling ads, such as in spam, is a major reason for fake stories).
  - cjslep 7y ago
    I've been using the word "paltering" or "to palter" to help make this distinction. Once "lying by being truthful" has a concrete name like paltering, it is easier to get others to start to see the different kinds of propaganda and label them. Paltering is what Chomsky rails against in traditional media in his books such as Manufacturing Consent. Ex: tortured Polish Solidarity Catholic priests in the USSR get national headlines, but Catholic Priests murdered by US-funded death squads in Guatemala do not.
- keiferski 7y ago
  Considering the behavior of top news organizations over the past ±20 years, I have no problem calling them both propaganda and fake news.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 7y ago
  "All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods." "It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying." - Hitler Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, is generally credited with scaling up the "big lie" technique. He had access to radio broadcasting, which was new then, and pushed mass production of radio receivers. With those powerful tools, propaganda became far more effective.
JacKTrocinskI 7y ago
I think a lot of people don't really care or want to know what is going on in the world, they prefer watching "entertaining" high speed car chases, tornado reports, animal rescues, special guest "experts" that shout ideas over one another, and whatever other wild things the news can come up with these days. I'm in Poland right now, the latest "big" news was that the son of some rich guy died jet skiing and that a thunderstorm killed some people in the mountains, not the crisis in Venezuela or protests going on in Hong Kong. I recommend Anchorman 2, if you haven't watched it already, great comedy and commentary about the state of the current news.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > I think a lot of people don't really care or want to know what is going on in the world, they prefer watching "entertaining" high speed car chases, tornado reports, animal rescues, special guest "experts" that shout ideas over one another, and whatever other wild things the news can come up with these days. I agree, and I believe it's because most people don't consume news to gain a true picture about the world. They consume news to have stuff to talk about with other people, to have "social objects". Almost none of the news is actionable or even relevant to a regular person anyway, so the primary value of a news piece is whether or not it's interesting, and whether everyone else watches the same news (otherwise it wouldn't work as a topic for casual conversations). Whether or not the story is true is irrelevant. This explains what news you see reported. People killed by a thunderstorm in the mountains is something easy to talk about. You can marvel their stupidity (being in the mountains during storm). Similarly for jet ski casualties. Sewer dumped into Vistula river (another fresh topic from Poland)? Oh the Incompetent Government / the Evil Companies! Venezuela and Hong Kong are complex political topics with no clear right solution, with no clear heroes or villains (at least, not when you dig into the complexities). It's not something suitable for casual conversation.
- johnnycab 7y ago
  >I'm in Poland right now, the latest "big" news was that the son of some rich guy died jet skiing and that a thunderstorm killed some people in the mountains, not the crisis in Venezuela or protests going on in Hong Kong. I recommend Anchorman 2, if you haven't watched it already, great comedy and commentary about the state of the current news. I was with you when you offered a critique of the news-cycle and the banality of infotainment, until you segued into recommending a comedy film, as a way to gain further insight and draw parallels with serious matters.

84 points by Reedx 7y ago

> "A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared the spread of fake news and real news on Twitter in a 2018 study published in the journal Science. Looking at 126,000 tweets of news stories over the previous 11 years, they found that fake news stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. Real news took about six times as long to reach a benchmark audience of 1,500 people as fake news did."

dqpb 7y ago
I think there is an information theoretic explanation for this. The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely. Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Wouldn't we just assume "fake news" is optimized for virality, being a contrivance in the first place.
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    Fiction is more popular than nonfiction generally, roughly 2x according to https://justpublishingadvice.com/is-writing-non-fiction-more-profitable/ https://justpublishingadvice.com/is-writing-non-fiction-more..., which is about the effect size of the Twitter study.
    - yesenadam 7y ago
      >Fiction is more popular than nonfiction generally, roughly 2x That stat refers to money spent buying new books and ebooks, I think. It excludes e.g. newspapers, journals, magazines, and online reading, like blogs and special-interest websites, doesn't it? An extremely large majority of which is non-fiction, I'm guessing.
  - dqpb 7y ago
    Yes. But the follow-up question is how is this news optimized for virality, moreso then factual news. I'm suggesting that it has a general information theoretic advantage.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  The spectacle of seeing a nominal fact-checking site go after an overtly satirical one has been an astounding result for our day. I like to point out the rose colored glasses of the early internet, when the awesome signal-to-noise ratio was going to have a catalytic effect on human knowledge. #Whoops
  - kibibu 7y ago
    Do you remember Bonsai Kitten, and the breathlessly horrified email campaigns against it? People have had difficulty determining real from fake for a long time.
    - esmi 7y ago
      It’s way older than that. This is just one I know off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many other, older, examples. https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-today/fake-news-is-nothing-new/ https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-...
      - kibibu 7y ago
        Yes of course; but it's the earliest one I remember being a purely online phenomenon that suckered people in. Besides, of course, the stupid lists of factoids that used to get emailed around - duck quacks don't echo etc.
  - rosser 7y ago
    See Brandolini's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I'm increasingly convinced that what I call "naive fact-checking" misses the forest for the trees. Facts matter, yes. But a false narrative, even, or especially where constructed at least in part on true facts, is vastly more significant. A characteristic of virtually all Big Lie Narratives is that they contain, often major, nuggets of truth. But the arrangement of narrative amonst these, and eventual insertion of false (or at the very least, unverifiable) facts, eventually proves these out. A classic example I've run across is "It's All a Rich Man's Lie", an epic 3h 40m YouTube conspiracy yarn which, at least in its first hour or so, sticks largely to the domain of underlying truths: yes, there are "secret societies" at Ivy League schools, yes, many major US industrial firms maintained operations or divisions in Nazi Germany, etc. But no, actually, Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech (mentioned about 20 minutes in) was not about the Yale Skull & Bones group, but instead about the Soviet Union, and its practice of leveraging unflattering or inconvenient reporting from the US itself against the US. (The question of whether or not Kennedy was right in asking for self-restraint on this basis is a matter for another discussion.) Often the individual elements and false narrative become apparent by pulling back ever so slightly from the presented story, and looking at the greater context of facts offered. A few paragraphs of surrounding context from the Kennedy speech ("catnip for conspiracy nuts" according to one source) make painfully clear that its topic is not what the conspiracy nuts would make it to be. The fact that such checking is expensive and takes time makes the fabricators' job all that much easier, and the debunkers' harder. Another interesting case is the "J.P. Morgan Bankers' Manifesto" hoax, by one Thomas W. Gilruth, first published in 1892, and still making the rounds on social media over 120 years later. I'd run across it by way of an meme whose message appealed to me, though thinking it might be too good to be true, I dug deeper. To my knowledge, this is the most substantial debunking of the Gilruth hoax ever published: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morgan_and_the_bankers_manifesto_of_1892_hoax/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Fake news isn't bound to the limits of truth. Fake news can be generated with far greater volume than truth. Fake news can be specifically engineered to appeal to various cognitive biases promoting virality. Truth serves reality. Falsehood can, and very often does, serve specific partisan interests who have a hand in promoting its spread. These are four powerful factors favouring falsehoods and their dissemination.
  - popularwarfare 7y ago
    What you have to come to terms with is that there is not a single 'objective' truth but multiple often contradictory truths. Individual Perception and psychology in addition to cultural and social norms play a large role as well.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      I am very much at terms with that. There are also deliberate actions, evicenced in documents and testimony, to obscure objective truths. There is a distinction between reasonable differences of opinion, and abject falsehoods. The principle of anekāntavāda is of many sidedness. It is not of any sidedness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      There are many types of events where there exists an objective truth. 'humans went to the moon', for example, is a statement whose truth is objective. You may choose to believe this truth or not, but you can't say 'the truth is more complicated than that'. Of course 'Americans went to the moon to further the human condition' is an example of statement for which there is likely not an objective truth - the terms themselves are fuzzy, people usually have multiple reasons and contradictory feelings about their reasons etc. So if I post a story claiming Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza place basement, that is unequivocally false. If I run a story saying Hillary Clinton is an evil person seeking to lead the country astray, that may or may not be true depending on many different factors, definitions, personal beliefs etc. It would be wrong to label it as fake news,for this reason.
leggomylibro 7y ago
"A lie can run 'round the world before the truth has got its boots on." There's a novel called The Truth that pokes fun at this idea through a story about the birth of daily newspapers and tabloids in a fictional city-state. The quote that I have in mind is a little long to format here, so I'll pastebin it: https://pastebin.com/T2YjtTN2 https://pastebin.com/T2YjtTN2
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Praise Terry! Hallowed be thy name! And that hard drive got what it deserved!
- phs318u 7y ago
  Great money quote: "what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds."
buboard 7y ago
Likely the fake news were more sensational

paulsutter 7y ago

This is similar to publication bias for news outlets and even scientific journals, just with progressively lower standards. Each party wants to publish the most interesting things they can, therefore take it as close to the line as their reputation/judgement allows.

rb808 7y ago

I think I have the opposite problem now where I don't believe anything I'm told. Especially from friends and relatives.

oyebenny 7y ago
I don't believe you.
- FillardMillmore 7y ago
  I don't believe you don't believe him.
  - vemv 7y ago
    This is not Reddit.
    - chacha2 7y ago
      I don't believe you.
esmi 7y ago
I read through the article and wondered, how did they determine which questions were fake news and which weren’t? That wasn’t really addressed. Oh well, I guess I’ll just believe what I was told by the WSJ...
eitland 7y ago
> Especially from friends and relatives. You make me feel extremely lucky.
DangitBobby 7y ago
I get the impression that that's the desired effect of foreign-funded fake news compaigns.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago

redmaverick 7y ago

Ted Bundy's mom Louise refused to believe her son was a murderer despite all evidence to the contrary. Her son admitted that he was the culprit and only that made her come out of her denial. In a lot of third world countries it is pretty common and even expected that the average Joe will vote for whomever appeals to their emotions. Every sin of the politician is forgotten and forgiven even if the said politician has a history of inciting murder or being corrupted etc. There is a good chance that people who voted for their candidate made up their minds long before any kind of "fake news" hit their newsfeed.

sieabahlpark 7y ago
I think what's important to this statement is that regardless of political opinion everyone is susceptible to it.
jadell 7y ago
In a lot of first-world countries, too.
klingonopera 7y ago
...not just in third world countries, the G7 suffers from this too, regardless if you support Trump or Merkel.

RyanAF7 7y ago

Not to mention the political advantage of framing your opponents base as having poor judgment or lacking discernment by producing fake stories you know they are more likely to read, share and believe than your own base. Politics today is far more deceptive because the speed of delivery and feedback for communications allows it to be. Only going to get worse unless a new platform/network/protocol is created for the future of "trustless" news and publications.

popularwarfare 7y ago
It's always been this way, politics is a zero sum game.
- RyanAF7 7y ago
  All things are zero-sum if you try hard enough.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

Wait, so you mean Dorian won’t hit Alabama!?

pjc50 7y ago

Something very important with reading news: you have to understand reported speech. If you see "a spokesman for the president says the moon is made of green cheese", and that spokesman did actually say that, that passes a fact check. The fact that the moon is not made of green cheese is not considered to be in the remit of journalism.

mieseratte 7y ago
Reminds me a bit of “peer reviewed” vs. “reproduced.” One would hope those journalists would employ some type of standards on what they choose to report, and how deep they investigate it to avoid confusion.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Peer review can be pretty shit too, and should be viewed as a spam-filter more than anything. There isn't really a fast way to know if some work is good and reliable if its about something new.
SiempreViernes 7y ago
No, that's overreacting: there is like an entire industry about reporting false statements made by Trump so its not that bad. Of course, there is also a industry dedicated to reporting how the false statements can be interpreted as almost true...
AstralStorm 7y ago
Of course he could have said it in any number of context that are not a statement of fact, which will be omitted so you can be manipulated.

dredmorbius 7y ago

The conclusion of this WSJ piece -- organ of the Murdoch disinformation empire, though generally the WSJ's news reportage continues to enjoy a reputation no longer afforded its opinion pages -- is that we need better media literacy. That is: it's a plea for a dodge of responsibility by media organisations themselves. My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions. The idea that a media channel, editorially controlled, AI heuristics driven, or "wisdom-of-the-crowd" determined, can act in complete disregard (or open opposition) to the truth and reality, and fail to be held to account, is a key problem. To those who respond with "but who then would determine the truth": these institutions are already determining at least the perception of truth, through what they promote. Repetition, as the WSJ article and its cited research show, create impression of truth. And whilst not all ground truths can be known, some can be well established, as can be deliberate campaigns to obviate and obscure truth. Dante's deepest circle of hell was reserved for the betrayers of others. But immediately above this was the circle reserved for the bearers of false witness. An arrangement in an age where virtually all information was conveyed through witness, either oral or spoken testimony. Much of the social, religious, and communications institution of the time was devoted to establishing the importance of truth, and the consequences for falsehood, where independent verification was difficult or impossible. Advances in information technology have offered increased opportunities for verification, but also broken down many of the foundations of trust in individuals and institutions. Some recent tools -- Bitcoin comes to mind -- are expressly founded on removing the role of trust within sectors of activity. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, two of the principle ones being that trust itself has an extreme function in improving efficiency, and that its removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally. We need to reestablish trust, adherence to trust, accountability to trust, and institutional trust. Information technology to date has worked in the opposite direction. This ends poorly.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rntz 7y ago
> The conclusion of this WSJ piece [...] is that we need better media literacy. > My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions. I've noticed that on issues that provoke strong feeling, folks often put things in opposition that really aren't opposed. This is a great example. These aren't opposites. They're simply two different approaches to the same problem. They're not mutually exclusive in the least. Nothing about teaching people to think critically harms or opposes holding media institutions to account for what they say or vice versa. Anyway, I don't think more accountability for media institutions is a bad idea, but I can't help thinking it alone won't fix the problem. The internet isn't going away, and it's fundamentally a many-to-many medium. Unless some authority systematically censors and reviews public fora --- I'm talking about everyday conversations and posts on Facebook, reddit, chatrooms, HN, Slack --- we're not going to be able to go back to the days when fact-checked journalism could keep misinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theorizing at bay. (Hell, I guess those days never existed, but I think these problems have gotten worse.) Perhaps the best point of comparison for the effect of the internet as a new medium is the invention of the printing press. Generally regarded as a good thing in the long run, but it led almost directly to centuries of religious warfare in Europe. Not a heartening thought.

empath75 7y ago

It’s a rare parent that wants their children questioning what they’re told. It’s one of the reasons the Greeks killed Socrates. That’s the fundamental aspect of human nature that needs to somehow be changed. It’s not that hard to develop critical thinking skills — but parents don’t want it, corporations don’t want it, politicians don’t want it. Where is the constituency that is going to push for and pay for critical thinking skills in childhood education?

klingonopera 7y ago
Add religious leaders to that list, too.
Vinnl 7y ago
> corporations don’t want it, politicians don’t want it Hmm, the question that then arises in my mind is: are parents that do encourage their children to question them properly preparing those children for a society that will disregard them with that attitude? (Working from your assumptions here - I'm not necessarily sure how widespread the disregard for a questioning attitude is.)

turk73 7y ago

I read all the comments on here. I think you're all barking up the wrong trees. You're missing the bigger point: There is no truth. There are no facts. Not in the way you think there are. Never have been, never will be. The world you perceive is a lie told to you by your brain. Humans have studied these flaws for decades now and they are extremely good at exploiting the flaws in our physiology. Once you internalize what I just said everything is much easier. Media will never be reformed and history will repeat itself it many twisted ways. Man is imperfect, fallen, and his institutions will never be anything but the same way. This is why humans invented gods--to have something perfect to aspire to. But it can never be that way. Never. Perhaps we can create spiritual machines that can achieve such perfection, but I doubt it because ultimately they came from us and our own imperfections.

popularwarfare 7y ago

The real lie is the implied premise that if people only knew the 'the truth' it would somehow cause them to act in a certain way. Which is categorically and empirically false. But I don't want to be too hard on them, they are journalists after all.

rkagerer 7y ago

I tend to be very skeptical and have a good sense of whether somebody's feeding me bullsh*t. I'm genuinely surprised by some of the things I see those around me just blindly accept. I hope when I'm a parent, I can instill a healthy sense skepticism in my child.

abraae 7y ago
My proudest moment of parenting so far was when my son told me how much he appreciated being brought up to question and not to blindly accept groupthink.

vbsteven 7y ago

The first part of Neal Stephensons latest novel “Fall, or Dodge in hell” explores exactly this topic in the context of social media. The possible consequences of a post-truth world where people cannot agree on facts are stunning. An interesting read.

mch82 7y ago

The correct term is “propaganda”. We shouldn’t use the term “fake news”, which is a term designed to undermine trust in news institutions. When we use the term, we contribute to the undermining.

tsimionescu 7y ago
That is confusing terms. Propaganda can and usually is built out of true news as well as fake stories - true news presented selectively, given a specific interpretation etc. can be a very powerful tool. Fake stories and their spread are a different matter - they can be a form of propaganda as well, but they can also serve other properties (selling ads, such as in spam, is a major reason for fake stories).
- cjslep 7y ago
  I've been using the word "paltering" or "to palter" to help make this distinction. Once "lying by being truthful" has a concrete name like paltering, it is easier to get others to start to see the different kinds of propaganda and label them. Paltering is what Chomsky rails against in traditional media in his books such as Manufacturing Consent. Ex: tortured Polish Solidarity Catholic priests in the USSR get national headlines, but Catholic Priests murdered by US-funded death squads in Guatemala do not.
keiferski 7y ago
Considering the behavior of top news organizations over the past ±20 years, I have no problem calling them both propaganda and fake news.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Animats 7y ago
"All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods." "It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying." - Hitler Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, is generally credited with scaling up the "big lie" technique. He had access to radio broadcasting, which was new then, and pushed mass production of radio receivers. With those powerful tools, propaganda became far more effective.

JacKTrocinskI 7y ago

I think a lot of people don't really care or want to know what is going on in the world, they prefer watching "entertaining" high speed car chases, tornado reports, animal rescues, special guest "experts" that shout ideas over one another, and whatever other wild things the news can come up with these days. I'm in Poland right now, the latest "big" news was that the son of some rich guy died jet skiing and that a thunderstorm killed some people in the mountains, not the crisis in Venezuela or protests going on in Hong Kong. I recommend Anchorman 2, if you haven't watched it already, great comedy and commentary about the state of the current news.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> I think a lot of people don't really care or want to know what is going on in the world, they prefer watching "entertaining" high speed car chases, tornado reports, animal rescues, special guest "experts" that shout ideas over one another, and whatever other wild things the news can come up with these days. I agree, and I believe it's because most people don't consume news to gain a true picture about the world. They consume news to have stuff to talk about with other people, to have "social objects". Almost none of the news is actionable or even relevant to a regular person anyway, so the primary value of a news piece is whether or not it's interesting, and whether everyone else watches the same news (otherwise it wouldn't work as a topic for casual conversations). Whether or not the story is true is irrelevant. This explains what news you see reported. People killed by a thunderstorm in the mountains is something easy to talk about. You can marvel their stupidity (being in the mountains during storm). Similarly for jet ski casualties. Sewer dumped into Vistula river (another fresh topic from Poland)? Oh the Incompetent Government / the Evil Companies! Venezuela and Hong Kong are complex political topics with no clear right solution, with no clear heroes or villains (at least, not when you dig into the complexities). It's not something suitable for casual conversation.
johnnycab 7y ago
>I'm in Poland right now, the latest "big" news was that the son of some rich guy died jet skiing and that a thunderstorm killed some people in the mountains, not the crisis in Venezuela or protests going on in Hong Kong. I recommend Anchorman 2, if you haven't watched it already, great comedy and commentary about the state of the current news. I was with you when you offered a critique of the news-cycle and the banality of infotainment, until you segued into recommending a comedy film, as a way to gain further insight and draw parallels with serious matters.