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The lesson is mainly that few news sources these days do anything like fact checking, with bothering to care at all if what they are reporting may be true or no
by jrochkind1 5y ago
The lesson is mainly that few news sources these days do anything like fact checking, with bothering to care at all if what they are reporting may be true or not.
If you can accidentally plant a false, story imagine doing so intentionally.
Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get important things wrong just through the game of telephone and becaues media outlets don't bother trying to ensure they mostly report true things.
We really do live in a post-fact society.
- blowski 5y agoI don’t know how true that is. I look at old news from the Victorian era and there was a lot of bullshit then too. The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.
- Nasrudith 5y agoYep. People confuse detection related correlations with causation all of the time.
- sacrosancty 5y agoIt doesn't even matter. The facts of a news story aren't very relevant to the opinions people form. Instead, news largely leads people to get emotional hostile feelings about outgroups. It doesn't matter if mother Theresa saved a dying beggar or a terrorist bombed a hospital. Whatever the story, and whatever the facts, people will go away hating whoever the news hijacked their minds into hating. If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
- jrochkind1 5y agoYou're suggesting the right way to deal with the "real problem" of hate-inducing news is... to be unconcerned with whether facts are true? Really? Like, being concerned about whether facts are true in an article about a software bug harms your ability to deal with this real problem? What's the way you recommend to handle this problem, that is based on being unconcerned with whether facts are true? I'm not totally sure it's relevant to this particular story, but now I'm curious, are you suggesting this story about a joke bug report is an example of that real problem of hate-inducing news? (I mean, it might be).
- sacrosancty 5y agoYea, for the most part, it doesn't matter if news is false, I don't think. We don't do anything with that information, just experience feelings. You might say, what if it has real consequences like who gets elected, having a war, or making personal lifestyle choices? Yes, but true news already influences people to make bad decisions like that using its emotional tricks, so what's the difference? At least if it's all false, people won't take it so seriously. I think the truth in news is mostly there to enhance entertainment value, like a movie that's "based on a true story" is more satisfying than one that isn't. I wasn't thinking of this particular story. Doesn't seem vary hate-inducing to me, but the meta-story about how journalists aren't doing their job does!
- barry-cotter 5y agoWhy would you believe it was ever better?
- imgabe 5y agoTrust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday is a book about exactly this. People 100% do plant fake news stories all the time to suit their purposes.