7 ms·

There is a stark difference between "fake news" and "difference of opinion that I don't agree with". "fake news" typically amounts to false rumors, amplifying

• throwaway115 2y ago
  >I would be delighted to read about opposing opinions, provided they are presented + supported by provable facts. Opinion a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.
  • epgui 2y ago
    Opinions don't need to be supported by facts or based on facts. They do need to be compatible with factual reality, otherwise they're called delusions.
    • DavidPiper 2y ago
      Unfortunately, phantasms[1] and mass delusions are also very much possible. Increasingly, opinions don't need to be compatible with factual reality to be believed. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/pyfhzb/please_explain_to_me_what_a_phantasm_exactly_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/pyfhzb/please_e... (Sorry for the Reddit link, it's the most succinct explanation I could find)
      • epgui 2y ago
        That’s true… and it’s perfectly compatible with what I wrote.
    • tanseydavid 2y ago
      Delusional people do not speak in terms of opinion they present their perception as facts.
• thsksbd 2y ago
  " "fake news" typically amounts to false rumors, amplifying unprovable/unsubstantiated claims. " Like the Steele dossier or the rumor of a pee-pee tape [1]. Look, Id love to silence Rachel Maddow as much as the next guy, but there is no objective function to reliably do that without also silencing inconvenient truths (Mai Lei massacre, fake WMD, Biden's corruption, etc). [1] That's when I knew power was out to get Trump by any means. Journos seriously reporting that a hotelier is unaware that top hotels are riddled with bugs? Bullshit.
  • toss1 2y ago
    Or, if you want better examples, how about the massively promoted "2000 mules" movie? It was literally all lies, just proven in court, and the producer just apologized to one of the subjects for those lies and pulled it from distribution. When one of the primary architects of right-wing strategy advocates a key tactic of "flooding the zone with bullshit", that side has no complaint. Particularly when that tactic is derived specifically from Russian dezinformatsiya techniques, where the goal is not to get people to believe the lies (the few who do are a bonus), but to exhaust reason and get people to give up and say "we can't tell what is true". At that point, they are most manipulable. [0] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/31/g-s1-2298/publisher-of-2000-mules-election-conspiracy-theory-film-issues-apology https://www.npr.org/2024/05/31/g-s1-2298/publisher-of-2000-m... [1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/31/media/salem-will-stop-distributing-2000-mules/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/31/media/salem-will-stop-distrib...
    • Ray20 2y ago
      >Particularly when that tactic is derived specifically from Russian dezinformatsiya techniques I think it is incorrect to call such tactics "Russian dezinformatsiya techniques". It's rather "leftist techniques". Putin just uses it because he was a member of communist party and KGB and was taught it this way.
      • toss1 2y ago
        Nonsense. First, "Russian dezinformatsiya techniques" is more specific, and specifically related to the current events. Second, no one owns them, they're not copyrighted or anything. Third, "leftist" is far more vague. Fourth, Russia has used these techniques for centuries; so if you must go with some kind of large group, if anything it'd be 'Royalist Techniques', predating the Russian revolution.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• mc32 2y ago
  Unfortunately with Covid we saw what people are willing to do from both pro and anti PsOV. They were both wrong. Even the CDC and the like put out bad information. Internally they had dissent but dismissed it and went so far as to misspell things so FOIAs would not find things[1] No one can be trusted, unfortunately, including trusted sources, or platforms or governments. All of the above will abuse their trust when things prove difficult, trust be damned. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/health/nih-officials-foia-hidden-emails-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/health/nih-officials-foia...
  • sdoering 2y ago
    We need to clearly differentiate between "best known facts currently available" and "already disproven bullshit". The first one has an expiration date in the (unknown) future. The second one has one that’s already in the past. Thirdly there’s the category of "still useful but not true" like Newtonian physics.
    • belorn 2y ago
      "already disproven bullshit" is what meta studies are for. In regards to the covid pandemic there are now plenty of those, and unsurprisingly few people liked what they showed. No one likes it when facts do not conform to cultural views.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    No, again, getting things wrong is not the same as lying, and they do not warrant the same degradation in trust.
    • baryphonic 2y ago
      If people were avoiding FOIA by having candid discussions on private servers and deliberately misspelling words all while telling the public a contradictory story, that is strong evidence of lying. If the private communications matched the public ones and there were no efforts to obfuscate, then the best conclusion would be they just called it wrong.
• nradov 2y ago
  Most "facts" aren't provable in the mathematical sense. We're pretty sure that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer based on extensive research but it's never been 100% proven. So, is it a "fact" that smoking causes cancer? That depends on the level of evidence required and who does the evaluation. Fake news and false rumors are as old as humanity. They are not a problem that needs to be solved, and we certainly don't need governments or media executives acting as arbiters of truth. That said, the Twitter/X Community Notes feature seems to be working well. It has been refreshing to see (mostly) false claims by prominent public figures debunked. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/biden-claims-inflation-has-come-down-in-us-x-adds-a-context-to-the-tweet-with-many-americans-wondering-how-101701400588614.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/biden-clai...
  • throw0101c 2y ago
    > Most "facts" aren't provable in the mathematical sense. How about a child sex ring happening in the basement of a pizza joint that has no basement? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
    • mc32 2y ago
      “He ducked in to a 7-11 and came out three minutes later with a beer.” No, your honor, actually, I ducked in to a Quick Mart and came back out two minutes later with a perry. So that is absolutely false. Are members of Congress clients of prostitute (sorry escorts)? Most likely. Have any engaged in statutory rape? Likely given what we know about the Epsteins. Does that translate into that conspiracy? No. But the worst is now DC points out the ridiculousness of that conspiracy to boohoo the likelihood that some members of Congress and their staff engage in below board activities.
  • JKCalhoun 2y ago
    > So, is it a "fact" that smoking causes cancer? I could be wrong, but I think we're discussing when someone posts something like, "Smoking does not cause cancer." That's very different.
  • 2y ago
• somenameforme 2y ago
  On a meta level this would seem to leave discussion of any sort of revolutionary concept mostly censored. So for instance go back in time to when the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe was near universally believed. If one studies the stars this is precisely what one would tend to believe, and you can even create highly accurate predictions for things like where the stars will be, based on this assumption. Claims that the Earth actually revolved around the Sun, including by people like Galileo, tended to have extensive initial flaws (for instance Galileo also incorrectly assumed circular orbits, which causes lots of problems) and were completely unproveable given the technology of the time. So you have somebody saying something hat many would have considered plainly offensive and/or pseudo-scientific, that had negligible public support, that had proveable flaws, that contradicted centuries of expert knowledge, and was also spread by somebody who was in general somewhat anti-social - he initially had extensive support from the powerful Church of the era, but lost it largely through publishing what, for the time, were quite vile insults directed at them for not immediately jumping on board with him. His former relationship is the reason he was able to spend out the remainder of his years in the relative comfort of house arrest. Obviously any sort of 'new vision' of speech policing that would effectively censor Galileo is a terrible idea. And this isn't just an issue of the past, the person who discovered handwashing/germs faced similar issues among countless other examples that are outside the scope of this post.
  • quacked 2y ago
    This is a crucial point that many in the thread are missing. A "fact" as a unit of information is itself subject to the whims of people and cultural attitudes. Is it a "fact" that a whale is a mammal? No, it's a fact that the majority of modern biologists classify a group of animals collectively referred to as whales as a member of a group of animals they call mammals. Is it a fact that "X murdered Y"? No, but it is a fact that a group of people working together to investigate agreed to formally write down that X is a murderer and retaliate accordingly. (You can't even say for sure that they all believed that X murdered Y because each may have a different understanding of what "murder" is, or that they had doubts but when along with the vote, etc.) When people say "I only believe in statements that are supported by facts" they rarely think about the nuances of the "supporting facts". 600 years ago it was a fact that Christ died for our sins, etc.
• leereeves 2y ago
  > There is a stark difference between "fake news" and "difference of opinion that I don't agree with". There is. But there's plenty of room in the definition of "fake news" to be biased and to exclude falsehoods that you support. Even this paper excludes falsehoods propagated by the left, like the Steele Dossier or the claim that Hunter Biden's laptop was fake. And as expected, some people here are downvoting this, thus proving my fundamental point. Any discussion of "fake news" is inherently political, though perhaps not always consciously. Edit: and despite all the evidence otherwise, some people still believe in the fake news. "Data from a laptop that the lawyer for a Delaware computer repair shop owner says was left by Hunter Biden in 2019 – and which the shop owner later provided to the FBI under subpoena – shows no evidence of tampering or fabrication, according to an independent review commissioned by CBS News." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-data-analysis/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-data-analys...
  • astrange 2y ago
    The laptop found in the computer store of a blind guy containing a copy of Hunter Biden's iCloud was fake, yes. The prosecutor in the case against him did recently claim it was real without providing new evidence of that. In the same document, he claimed a picture of sawdust on a table saw was a picture of Hunter Biden doing cocaine. (Other stories about "Ashley Biden's diary" were also faked, though by different people, and faked in different ways.)
    • tanseydavid 2y ago
      >> claimed a picture of sawdust on a table saw was a picture of Hunter Biden doing cocaine. They also keep trying to say that Hunter's glass flute (or maybe its a piccolo?) is a crack-pipe! Why would he photograph himself with a crack-pipe in his mouth? He wouldn't -- he's obviously practicing his music lessons.
• belorn 2y ago
  Opinions supported by provable facts is what distinguish a scientific dissertation compared to a political statement. Politicians do not generally support their opinions with provable facts, and while they can consult with scientists to form opinions or support a political statement, this seems more of the exception than the rule. In social science, defining provable facts is also a major problem since very few publications can be replicated. In fact, most provable facts in social science is estimated to be provable false, a fact found by meta studies a while back. A common finding is that the further one goes from pure math, the worse the provable facts become with social science sitting furthers away in the spectrum. Thus I often see a different and more strict definition of "fake news". Fake news is only when an opinion has been been made with the intention of misleading for political gain, with strong emphasis on the intention aspect. It thus becomes very close to the definition of propaganda, but with additional restrictions. Intentions are also very hard to prove, especially with provable facts.
  • prophesi 2y ago
    Do you happen to know where the meta study on this is from? I know of one paper that puts the blame on biomedical research[0], but it makes intuitive sense for the same to apply to social science. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi...
    • belorn 2y ago
      The initial key word I would start with if someone is interested in studying this concept would be "replication crisis". Wikipedia has a good starting off point with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis I would not point to a specific study. Primarily because I would have to dig through a rather long list to find the one that I found "best", but also because in terms of fact finding, its better if people did this independently. "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is a good one however.
      • prophesi 2y ago
• lenkite 2y ago
  We have already seen in the last few years that "fake news" and "misinformation" of today has a reasonably high probability of becoming "verified news" and "factual information" of tomorrow. Of-course the "fact-checkers" and "misinformation experts" rarely correct themselves or apologize for their censorship.
  • flyingcircus3 2y ago
    This take is akin to finding a broken clock that just happens to show the correct time at the moment you found it, and then refusing to accept that the clock is broken, even hours later. Then as the days go on, you accumulate more evidence that the clock is actually working, because you keep checking on the two minutes per day that the broken clock is "accurate", while discounting the other 1438 minutes per day when the clock is wrong.
    • lenkite 2y ago
      Well, if the "fact-checkers" are the broken clock, then I would agree with you.
• gustavus 2y ago
  Yes false rumours and unsubstantiated claims such as - COVID came from the Wuhan virology lab -The NIH was funding gain of function research in Wuhan. - There are rich pedophile businessmen that are pimping out underage girls to be able to blackmail them. I could go on and on, because those are all horrible unsubstantiated rumours and I am glad we hunted down people who shared them persecuted and hounded them and limited their freedom to share things like that.
• logifail 2y ago
  > I would be delighted to read about opposing opinions, provided they are presented + supported by provable facts Looking back at the output of certain major media outlets during the pandemic, I'd suggest it might an idea to hold everyone to the same standards, regardless of whether the opinion is seen as "opposing" or "mainstream"... "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
• spydr 2y ago
  A lot of the “fake news” in circulation about Covid turned out to be true. Oh how some of this info was shut down, from twitter and Facebook removing them , to news outlets reporting on them. How do you decide what is fake news and what is something that we just got wrong and a small group of people are pointing out?