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Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation? You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the evidence was your Tweet, and it was really y
by chrisseaton 5y ago
Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation?
You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the evidence was your Tweet, and it was really your Tweet that had zero evidence behind it.
- bastawhiz 5y agoAbsolutely not. Should The Onion be considered fake news? It was a parody account, which was labeled as such. Journalists who can't even be bothered to tap through to the profile don't get my sympathy.
- chrisseaton 5y agoI kind of think that in the mess we’re in ‘it was just a prank bro’ doesn’t cut it any more as an excuse for something that causes harm. But maybe that’s extremist of me.
- bastawhiz 5y agoSo satire cannot exist? Because anyone who might accidentally mistake it for truth can be "harmed" Journalists have a big megaphone. Their job is to amplify truth. If I'm making jokes and being clear about my intentions, but a lazy journalist sees my content as easy clickbait, that's my fault? What I was tweeting was never "news" let alone "fake news". It was never wrapped deceptively as truth. It wasn't a prank. Someone else took my words, which were obviously and provably not truth, and held them up under their reputation as an authority of truth. Why should I be responsible for the alleged harm that they caused?
- chrisseaton 5y agoWhy add entropy to the situation? We know people mid-understand satire and sarcasm. I do kind of feel much satire is deliberately harmful - people use it to say things and then hide behind ‘but I was just joking’ having already pushed the message out.
- bitcharmer 5y agoSomething tells me you also regard stand-up comedy as harmful.
- chrisseaton 5y agoNobody confuses a stand-up club as news - people do confuse Twitter as news.
- kortilla 5y ago“My use case for satire is obvious but yours is not”
- earleybird 5y agoAnd I knew folks who thought Spinal Tap was a real band. Satire is therapeutic when the crap around us gets too deep.
- bastawhiz 5y agoIt's not my job to cater to people who choose to get their "news" from a website where anyone can post anything under any identity at all. There has never been any credibility to Twitter as an authoritative news source, especially from accounts that are clearly labeled as a joke. Silencing or shaming folks for being creative in public is far worse than empowering the layman (or lazy journalist) to get their news from the gutter. People will post lies online regardless of whether the good intentioned folks self censor or not. The problem is not the satire, it's the blind trust. Speaking of which, I've got a rich client who recent passed away and left a significant sum to one Chris Seaton. If that's you, just shoot me your bank details and I'll get the money wired to you directly.
- hanselot 5y ago
- derekp7 5y agoYes, it is extremely extremist to call for canceling all works of fiction.
- dzikimarian 5y agoMost works of fiction is labeled as such. I don't see anything against them in this comment.
- earleybird 5y agoCan't wait for the return of Tipper Gore and labelling anything that offends. /s
- dzikimarian 5y agoI don't call for labeling. I'm just saying that most of fiction can be easily identified and nobody in the comments has issues with that. Previous comment implied that someone wants to cancel all works of fiction. So much ad absurdum in this thread...
- smcl 5y agoI kinda love how that effort backfired, and the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" became a fairly cool symbol
- fleshdaddy 5y agoI mean are you suggesting no more jokes, parodies, or satire lest a journalist take it seriously? That would practically require a complete self censor on all fiction. I could just easily tweet a blurb from a Sci-fi novel and risk someone, somewhere, misinterpreting it. Also a prank has the intent to mislead which the poster didn’t. Don’t mean to sound inflammatory but the humorless world that would be sounds a lot more miserable than living in the mess it seeks to remedy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smcl 5y ago"It's just a prank bro" would be inexcusable for someone mocking up a screenshot to make it look like someone was sending racist DMs to get them fired, or something on that level. But this is not anything like that, it was a funny comment in a forum where funny comments are made that was taken at face value by a credulous reporter who should've done their job better. It wasn't hateful, offensive or dangerous. In addition, you've completely altered what the author of the blog post was saying. They're not using the dismissive "It's just a prank bro", they've actually written quite a thoughtful post explaining the context behind the incident. They didn't apologise but they didn't need to.
- kibwen 5y agoTen years ago I would have agreed with you. These days I know that humans are too gullible to be able to understand obvious satire, and the consequences are deleterious for society. As someone who has long appreciated The Onion, I am now of the opinion that they should not legally be allowed to call themselves a news source, in the same way that someone cannot legally claim to be an expert in an accredited field. We don't need to censor The Onion, but we do need to establish norms regarding false advertising in journalism. I understand this won't be a popular opinion, because lots of people don't want to realize that the internet has killed the very concept of satire.
- rapind 5y agoI’m going to assume you’re not being sarcastic. At some threshold we shouldn’t need to dumb it down any further. I think journalists being able to tell the difference between parody, that’s clearly labelled as parody, and real news is already lower than I’d set that bar. Ask yourself what’s the value in journalism if they’re just going to build a story off of a tweet with no verification/ fact checking?
- bastawhiz 5y agoSo my Twitter, which does not claim to be a news source or post anything other than silly jokes, should also be disallowed because some journalists are too lazy to do their job?
- kibwen 5y agoNo, if you're not calling yourself news then there's no false advertising going on.
- kortilla 5y agoThat’s ridiculous because we don’t have the ability to censor the entire internet to police what websites call themselves “news”. If your solution to this is to police the word “news”, it’s dead on arrival. People claim they are engineers/doctors/lawyers on the internet all of the time and there is no repercussion. We are only able to actually police those terms when it comes to actual business transactions.
- nicholsonpk 5y ago"It was a parody account, which was labeled as such." I'm looking at the page now and you use the Mountain View California city crest as the image, "MV Police Blotter" as the title, and it is described as "Keeping tabs on crime in Mountain View, Ca. Not affiliated with MVPD, see @MountainViewPD. Report all emergencies to 911." That does not read as "this is parody" to me. You may not have intended to deceive but I would bet most people visiting would expect this to be actual police blotter information.
- jjulius 5y agoAnd yet wouldn't we expect a journalist who reads a tweet from an account that says, as you pointed out, "Not affiliated with MVPD," to do their due diligence and reach out to an official channel? I can grant that it doesn't actually say "parody" in it's description, but we should still be expecting more effort from reporters.
- krsrhe 5y ago
- renewiltord 5y agoHmm, it is true. There are many such people spreading misinformation about chickens crossing roads. They have very little evidence for their assertions about said chickens but they state these things with great confidence! Twitter should crack down on this misinformation.
- rascul 5y ago> There are many such people spreading misinformation about chickens crossing roads. Do these people explain why the chickens were crossing the roads?
- krallja 5y ago“Bok-bok-bok-b’CAUSE,” one chicken said, when asked why it crossed the road.
- renewiltord 5y agoThe Register: Cause for chicken road-crossing identified HN: Clearly the original user who purported to have recorded what a chicken said is lying. He hasn’t learnt anything from the whole thing. What a misinformer. Practically Pravda.
- krallja 5y agoI would agree with you, depending on the day of the week.
- pessimizer 5y agoA tweet isn't any more evidence than a person you don't know and have never met spraypainting the same thing on a wall. The problem is how news outlets that care so little about the quality of the information they present continue to exist.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bitcharmer 5y ago> Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation? This is a bizarre stance to take. Social media was always filled with false information. It's entirely on news outlets to verify what they decide to publish.
- chrisseaton 5y agoWhy fuel the problem by seeding more false information?
- bastawhiz 5y agoShould we also remove the fiction section from libraries?
- chrisseaton 5y agoDoes anyone in practice confuse books from the fiction section with news? People do in practice confuse Tweets every second of every day.
- bastawhiz 5y agoFor the past few years, the best selling books on Amazon have been misinformation about the pandemic, virology, and "critical race theory" (if that even means anything anymore). Your reasoning is tortured at best.
- chrisseaton 5y agoAre they sold in the fiction section?
- bastawhiz 5y agoI feel like the actual answer really undermines your point more than you think
- krallja 5y agoOne very important concept of journalism is getting a fact “verified.” Often you need either an incredibly trusted source or multiple sources. The journalist should not have reported it. But their fact checker committed a grave error by allowing a story to run with “some rando on Twitter said…” as the only source.
- bastawhiz 5y ago*some rando claiming to be a parody on Twitter