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Your argument holds true in theory but does not always work in practice. The issue many people have with fake news is that it's a tool that can sway public opi

Your argument holds true in theory but does not always work in practice. The issue many people have with fake news is that it's a tool that can sway public opinion without any basis on facts. I'm not sure, by your response, if you find that to be problematic or not. I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society. That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience. Also, getting a computer to do something will always scale several orders of magnitude more than having billions of people do it.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society. > That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience. From my experience, most people who believe Fake News is a significant problem are people who dislike WHOM some have chosen to trust. Few see fake news coming from their preferred media sources, or supporting their preferred narrative, as highly concerning, and instead usually treat it as benign (human errors happen etc etc). However, when it's coming from their political adversaries, or from sources they dislike, it suddenly is presented as some huge issue. In reality, it is all the same, and people are decently good at filtering it out when it contradicts what they want to believe, and very bad at filtering it out when it agrees with them. For an example of fake news from outlets like the NYT, the most egregious recent one has been the dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop, calling it a Russian hoax, calling it "fake news", listing intelligence agencies (of all people) as proof of this, getting Twitter and Facebook to outright ban the New York Post article on it - when in fact everything in their article was 100% true. How many people (especially Dem voters) have taken this story as "dangerous spread of Fake News by the NYT, Washington Post etc"?
- antonvs 4y ago
  That's quite the false equivalence. A big part of the issue is quantity. You cherry-picked one example for the NYT, but for Fox News you could find examples on a daily if not hourly basis.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    I'm not claiming all news sources are equally trustworthy - obviously the NYT is a better news source than Fox, and both are better than "my primary school friend of Facebook". My point was that we all have blindspots when the news sources we have chosen to trust are feeding us false information. Also, the problem isn't that people don't choose a news source to trust, it is that they choose a bad news source to trust, and this can happen for very different reasons.

tsimionescu 4y ago

> I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society. > That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience. From my experience, most people who believe Fake News is a significant problem are people who dislike WHOM some have chosen to trust. Few see fake news coming from their preferred media sources, or supporting their preferred narrative, as highly concerning, and instead usually treat it as benign (human errors happen etc etc). However, when it's coming from their political adversaries, or from sources they dislike, it suddenly is presented as some huge issue. In reality, it is all the same, and people are decently good at filtering it out when it contradicts what they want to believe, and very bad at filtering it out when it agrees with them. For an example of fake news from outlets like the NYT, the most egregious recent one has been the dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop, calling it a Russian hoax, calling it "fake news", listing intelligence agencies (of all people) as proof of this, getting Twitter and Facebook to outright ban the New York Post article on it - when in fact everything in their article was 100% true. How many people (especially Dem voters) have taken this story as "dangerous spread of Fake News by the NYT, Washington Post etc"?

antonvs 4y ago
That's quite the false equivalence. A big part of the issue is quantity. You cherry-picked one example for the NYT, but for Fox News you could find examples on a daily if not hourly basis.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  I'm not claiming all news sources are equally trustworthy - obviously the NYT is a better news source than Fox, and both are better than "my primary school friend of Facebook". My point was that we all have blindspots when the news sources we have chosen to trust are feeding us false information. Also, the problem isn't that people don't choose a news source to trust, it is that they choose a bad news source to trust, and this can happen for very different reasons.