The world's intelligence agencies were wrong about Iraq's nuclear program, but this is hardly "fake news" on par with "Restore hair growth with this one simple trick". This whole "fake news" issue is one giant slippery slope. True fake news that damages someone is already actionable under our defamation laws. But what about facts being bandied about in the marketplace of ideas? Do facts counter to the current dogma become fake? Do we allow state or corporate curators to determine for us what the facts are? One only has to go to Wikipedia discussion pages to see how difficult that can be. I can't help but be reminded by Orwell in 1984, "He who controls the present controls that past. He who controls the past controls the future". Is controlling the facts we read what Orwell was warning us about? The only defense against fake news is an informed educated reader.
The world's intelligence agencies were wrong about Iraq's nuclear program, but this is hardly "fake news" [...]
That is absolutely not the way it went. Essentially nobody believed what Iraq was accused of by the USA, not even the CIA trusted the available evidence. It was all fabricated to justify the invasion, a total fake.
I think all of this talk about "fake news" in the abstract is unhelpful, because I suspect we all have something different in mind for "fake news."
I mean, if there's a widespread belief that Secretary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor[0], widespread enough that it's turning up in response to random phone polling in the days before the election, that's a different category of "fake news" than "Restore hair growth with this one simple trick."
If a tweet of some parked busses for a Tableau conference in Austin, Texas, can result in a tweeted claim by the President-Elect and a thread that runs for more than a week on cable news about "paid protestors,"[1] that's not the same as "Aliens take President-Elect for a ride on their flying saucer."
These seem to be in a different category than the NY Times' in-retrospect-horrible reporting prior to the US invasion of Iraq. It's possible to be certain but wrong, and marshal evidence in support of your beliefs. In the case of the NY Times, that mistaken reporting was enormous, and the impact of it was enormous, but it is reasonable to think that others given the same information would have made the same mistakes. Lots of people did, in fact. In the meantime, 99% of the rest of NY Times reporting was accurate, as is usually the case. The two examples of "fake news" I linked seem ludicrous, and they're just the tip of the iceberg.
Anecdotally, I personally saw claims about eight LGBT youth having killed themselves as a result of the election, but those claims seem to be unsubstantiated at best, and most like "fake news" from the other political side. It's not entirely a partisan issue.
So yeah, Judith Miller's reporting turned out to be terrible. I'm not sure how that counters the fact that the so-called "fake news" currently being discussed is reprehensibly awful, and apparently effective.
Coincidentally, I was on FB today and started seeing a red flag on two friends' posts reading, "This website is not a reliable news source. Reason: [REASON]" with reasons like state-sponsored news and unclassified. The flag appeared on an article about Pokemon Go that was clearly sensationalist speculation and a conspiracy website about George Soros. The div tag in the post had a class "bsAlert" and, my favorite part, a poop icon beside it. None of my other friends are seeing the flag, so I suspect I'm one of the lucky A/B testers.
This article notes that consumers want fake news, but I want to see more of these flags. I realize it's a huge risk for FB, as the article notes, but I've unfollowed (not unfriended) so many friends for posting this nonsense that it's really hurting my own end-user experience in the network. When you're dealing with people for whom snopes and wikipedia are "part of the MSM," you are dealing with people who are living in a consensual hallucination. It's simultaneously infuriating and frightening to be exposed to that on a daily basis.
"State-sponsored news" - will I see that tag next to NPR articles? What about wikileaks?
I have very mixed feelings about this. I know that Facebook is a company and can censor or allow whatever they want to. They censor obscene and offensive stuff, sure. But deciding what is "true" and "false" is a whole new ball game. Do we want to get used to having a central authority telling us what's true and false? If I want to say something stupid on Facebook, I should be allowed to say it.
Remember that you can have an authority run by a trusted leader one day, and someone else the next.
I know that, living in 2016, the concept of "objective truth" and "objective falsehood" is a hard one to really wrap our brains around. But lets try:
Some things are true, and some things are false.
You're very welcome to say "something stupid on Facebook" as an individual because you haven't presented yourself as a news source. But Facebook shouldn't play willing participant in giving conspiracy sites a platform to present made up stories as truths.
Better to use the "hide all from [source]" under the dropdown on the article card. I see very few articles now, since the vast majority come from similar sources like Buzzfeed, OMG Facts, etc.
I save "unfollow" for friends who are serial sharers of article, after article.
I can't help but feel that "fake news" is just the latest scapegoat being used by all the left-leaning media organizations (which represent a majority of the media in the US) in an attempt to hide the painful reality that they've been feeding us B.S. for years - and Trump's election effectively calls them out on it.
If there is a problem with the media in general (apart from strong political bias), it's a human problem that we all share. People respond to shock, outrage, and disgust much more than they respond to pragmatic ideas, logic, or even truth in general. As long as media companies are built on revenue models tied to ad impressions and social engagement, we'll likely see more of the same.
Censorship will not help; it can only make the problem worse. Perhaps instead, social networks should return to being social networks rather than scrolling billboards. I recall a time (around 2005-2006) when Facebook consisted mostly of people's own words, thoughts, and conversations rather than embedded media. I think I'd really enjoy a Facebook that didn't even turn URLs into hyperlinks - one where the only media that can be embedded is your own original content. That's partly why I believe Instagram is on the rise, while Facebook seems to be on the decline (depending on who you ask - and yes, I know Instagram is owned by FB).
The current social media landscape is like trying to host a party at your house with TVs on every wall (showing random propaganda) so loud that no one can even hear themselves talk.
But they haven't been feeding BS for years. The vast, vast majority of news reporting done on a day to day basis is factually correct. Journalists call people, check facts, get quotes.
I'm not saying that the media is faultless and never makes mistakes. Or that they don't, from time to time, overhype absolute nonsense stories or clicks or viewing figures. But we're comparing infrequent reporting mistakes with deliberate and calculated lying. They are not anywhere near the same thing.
The fact that you feel like fake news is being used as a scapegoat should make you stop and wonder if there is any evidence to back up that feeling, rather than double down on it.
Calling people, checking facts, and getting quotes are also tactics to push an agenda. Most of the lies in the media are omissions they make, associations they imply, and opinions they insert. For example, the New York Times recently wrote edit:published an article about Jeff Sessions' civil rights issue with schools. They talked about Alabama's history of segregation, mentioned segregation over and over again, and talked about how he continued the problems inherited by the legacy of segregation by refusing to raise taxes to give schools more money.
What they didn't mention is what he did instead, which was to desegregate schools. There's good evidence that desegregating schools is the most effective way to improve them. You have to admit it's a little dishonest to throw the word segregation around over and over again in response to someone following a strategy of desegregation instead of your personal solution of raising taxes. It's a strategy that would make Orwell proud.
I never said anything about it not being an opinion piece, just that it's published by the media. It's just a great example of how you can use words and repetition to create an association without actually accusing someone of something and leave out facts which might be important.
It's an especially good example because it is an opinion piece. It checks facts, cites sources, and presents a lot of evidence instead of just giving a straightforward opinion. All these facts give legitimacy to the implications. Instead of making the article more objective, they enhance the bias.
For example, the New York Times recently wrote an article about Jeff Sessions' civil rights issue with schools.
I never said anything about it not being an opinion piece, just that it's published by the media.
I agree with your original critique, but writing "the New York Times recently wrote an article" is not saying "just that it's published by the media". Whether or not an opinion piece is sufficient to make your point, you said the NYT wrote it, it turns out that they did not, but you are claiming that despite this you were right all along. Don't do that!
I'm sorry. I honestly didn't even realize I worded it that way, and that's totally justifiable to call out. It was meant to flow from inserting opinions to an example of an opinion that used facts to push an agenda, but it was sloppy wording on my part.
And with the advent of "fake news" censorship that distinction will almost entirely vanish for the average consumer, as the two tiers of news will become "trusted by authority" and "fake". I highly doubt any NYT opinion columns will be flagged as "fake" under any classification designed by Google/Facebook/Microsoft et al.
That is an opinion piece. A lot of people seem to be conflating opinion pieces and reporting. You can't use opinion pieces to prove bias in a newspaper's reporting.
I could give you examples of bias in reporting too, but when you look at a website as a whole, opinions are inserted right next to regular articles, and they're often hard to distinguish. This opinion piece is written a lot like a journalistic article, and has the same style of quotes and facts to make it look objective. It's not that different from including native advertising in with regular articles. Sure, there's a "sponsored" tag in there if you notice it, but it works with the rest of the content to create a narrative and bias you toward interpreting facts a certain way.
Anyway, my point was to show how sources and facts can push an agenda.
Sessions is the perfect example of two competing realities being written in parallel. If you dont purposely venture across aisles, the narrative your circles are subject to appears as indisputable fact.
If you really really investigate all the claims by both sides, and at the end dont throw your hands up and say "well I cant exactly be sure either way" then either you have incredible sources or you are reading into stories what you want to hear to confirm your beliefs.
The best counter to fake news I've seen on Facebook is when they suggest similar articles that are written from an opposing side. That gives you an opportunity to get a much better view of things.
Are you saying that organizations like ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN etc are reasonably fair and unbiased without any underlying political motivations? If that is the case then go watch some replays from election night. It was the first time in my life where I really felt like it may not be possible to get reasonably unbiased factual information from a single US news organization.
I was watching live when Martha Raddatz almost broke into tears on ABC news. I was thinking "Is she going to start crying? Who is allowing her to be on camera as a serious news person".
I don't like to defend cable news because much of it is terrible, but I'd argue that this kind of election night coverage absolutely delivered factual information, albeit also with heavy helpings of opinion on the side (literally, in the case of the CNN talking heads from both parties).
For instance, no cable network broadcast incorrect election results. They all informed viewers of the accurate, correct vote counts as they came in. By comparison, a fake news site was at the top of Google a few days ago with a story that literally lied about the popular vote count, saying that Trump had won it.
I'm not saying cable news is great - far from it - but these fake news sites are in a league of their own.
Sure they didn't say Clinton won a state that she really didn't win nor did they say she won the election when she didn't. It is possible to be quite dishonest through exaggeration, omission, and sensationalism. It is also possible to be dishonest by producing models that are later shown to be hilariously wrong and passing it off as incompetence rather than misinformation (98% chance of a Clinton victory anyone?)
When I see the kind of blatant bias that the anchors on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN etc showed on election night I can't help feeling like the networks that write their paychecks are intentionally trying to misinform people for their own gain.
Media organizations are corporations, and their primary interest is making money, which means getting viewership for their advertisers. Sure they have some political motivations as it relates to their business, as any business does, but this idea that media organizations are liberal political actors needs some justification.
Unfortunately when it comes to reputation, you're only as good as your worst offenses portray you. It's very hard to make the argument that "most of it is good, so there isn't a problem."
A scientific journal doesn't say "hey - we only occasionally let through a few articles without peer review; the majority of our content is peer reviewed, so we're ok."
Even the most "trustworthy" US-based news organizations have lost a lot of credibility in the past couple of weeks. And yes, there have even been a fair number of cases of deliberate and calculated lying - all without corrections or retractions.
Or, you know, keep trusting these companies (not knowing which stories are "mistakes" vs truth). I'm not going to stop anyone from trusting a source of information just because I don't trust it myself.
Still, the point of my original comment is more about how we deal with it in social media. I have no problem letting the market decide what to do with media organizations.
If genuine mistakes are made, those responsible admit those mistakes and issue corrections. When that happens, one's reputation can remain mostly intact.
We're glad you don't want to start a flamewar—the guidelines agree. But the best way to do that would be to withhold this comment in its entirety instead of making a claim without supporting evidence.
But you can't just say that then say "I do not want to go into specifics". Especially when your citation is "day-to-day reality", which is something that literally none of have exactly in common.
The media you read will not match your day-to-day reality, because it is impossible to match everyone's. That doesn't mean it is factually incorrect.
I cant believe I'm posting a quote from a video game in a thread debating politics, but I guess we live in strange times...
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Problem is, the side that says lugenpresse is also loathe to criticize their standard-bearer, and many believe that people who criticize him should be punished.
False equivalence is far worse than fake news; it's the legitimization of the factually true and the morally wrong.
"One side calls it fake news, another lugenpresse."
Correction: two groups are using that word. One is an extremist faction. The other is an opposing faction gleefully trying to connect the historical use of the word to a candidate and his supporters in general.
Edit: to the authors of the responses below, thank you for taking time to provide a rebuttal (I'm not sure why HN isn't allowing me to reply further). To those individuals who simply downvoted and moved on, I believe the German word you're looking for in this case is säuberung.
I don't think anyone is gleeful about it at all. I think people are freaked out, angry, and frightened and have a right to feel that way.
The candidate drew on that extremist faction for support during his campaign, didn't make any effort to distance himself from that extremist faction, and surrounded himself with people that that extremist faction were delighted by during his campaign.
Then, after winning, not only does he not distance himself from the people he had previously surrounded himself with, but appears to be following through in terms of appointments and proposed legislation that, again, absolutely delights that extremist faction.
I get that the candidate is not a member of that extremist faction, but if that extremist faction adores that candidate and voices strong agreement with every political appointment and policy position, many people have good reason for being a little concerned about it. I don't know why this is so hard for people to grasp. Just because a particular argument is being used by his political opponents for the purpose of discrediting him, doesn't mean that that argument isn't a real issue that people should be very aware of and concerned about.
Except that the extremist faction is tiny, politically irrelevant, and not nearly that happy with his proposed appointments and legislation. For example, the New York Times Editorial Board is currently attacking Trump for failing to denounce a 200-strong white nationalist meeting that's been happening annually in Washington since 2011 and has achieved nothing in that time, organised by a man whose hope for the Trump presidency - as per the NYT's reporting - is that maybe he'll abandon all his actual policies and adopt ones that actually make white nationalists happy. Their only victory so far seems to be getting the NYT to give them a whole bunch of free publicity by quoting them in great detail yesterday.
Except for the fact that Spencer is one of the leaders of the alt right. He even coined the term "alt right". And Bannon turned Breitbart (which my conservative friends derisively call Trumpbart) into a "platform for the alt right" and used it to both get Trump elected and get himself into the White House.
Having a multitude of sources and letting people choose as a solution presupposes that people have the time and the inclination to fact-check and are capable of evaluating news and sources critically.
If I see how much time it takes to carefully fact-check some of the nonsense articles that have been doing the rounds recently, it would be a full-time job just to stay reasonably up-to-date. This is why people have been sourcing out the job of fact-checking and editing to e.g. newspapers in the past.
I also very much doubt that the majority of people are capable of critically evaluating news items. Some of the discussions I've had recently, where people wouldn't change their opinion even when confronted with clear-cut evidence, haven't helped convince me otherwise.
I gotta say, watching the political ideology that doubled down on postmodernism massively backpedal on the "truth is relative" meme is endlessly entertaining.
If you want to understand how this works, you can find some example in some other thread that was started a bit ago but I think it got moderated, here's the link to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016561
It's an article about the "scapegoat" person behind the website dolartoday.com
You can find my explanation about how much damage this website does by publishing fake news to a large audience... I dont even go in details about the economically damage (the one with more impact on my country) just a simple example, link to my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13017182
A nothing-burger of an article, im my opinion. There is a problem, can't really be fixed, also 'liberty.'
I am actually concerned by the implications of our destroyed arbiters of truth, but I'm not smart enough to envision a path back to sanity. People accustomed to the relative political stability of the US have no idea how bad it can get.
In my view, we need to go farther than just fixing Facebook in this regard, although that would be a great start. We have “truth in labeling laws” and I think we should also have “labeling of truth laws”. What I mean by this is that we restrict the free speech rights of those selling food and drugs and require that claims of ingredients and claims must be truthful. This is of course because it goes to the health of the public.
I assert that we need something similar when it comes to "NEWS", anything labeled news should have certain standards of accuracy such that the public consuming something labeled news can be confident that what they are consuming is reasonably factual much in the same way that someone consuming food and drugs feel reasonably confident they are consuming what is on the label. This goes to the health of our democracy and hence indirectly to the wellness of the public.
I know this sounds pretty controversial and has 1st amendment implications but it is not without precedence. Prior to the 1996 telecom deregulation act, there were restrictions placed on the public TV networks under something called the “Fairness Doctrine”. That was done under the 1934 telecom act which (http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/piac/novmtg/pubint.htm), in return for free use of the airwaves in exchange for "public services" such as news programming.
With deregulation came the selling of spectrum through auction, which in my view, I don't think it was a good bargain for the public. But I also think that falsely calling something news could also fall under the regulations by the FTC.
I think it is important for the functioning of a democracy that the public have access to a source of information that they can feel confident is fact based.
All of this is obviously academic as it seems pretty unlikely the Trump administration would consider anything like that.
> anything labeled news should have certain standards of accuracy such that the public consuming something labeled news can be confident that what they are consuming is reasonably factual
Who determines what is factual? How do you police the global Internet?
Consider the Snowden disclosures. The government held its line on their non-factuality for surprisingly long, including by lying to Congress [1]. Also, The Guardian, who led the charge on vetting and publishing Snowden's claims, is a British newspaper.
Good point. But I know a lot of people who feel very exasperated and frustrated in not knowing who to trust. I think for democracy to work, we have to figure out a way to provide people with some level of confidence in some sort of information source they can trust. If not, I sincerely worry about the future of democracy.
We used to have nonsense toolbars "scanning" Google links, et cetera for viruses. Perhaps a similar, but federated, trust system?
I could choose to have sources flagged as trustworthy or untrustworthy by the ACLU and the EFF thusly indicated in my browser. (Similar to AdBlocker Plus lists.)
It would be simply for a campaign to publish its own trust ratings, however.
Something like that would be great, something like a virus checker but a fact checker button, so it is quick and easy for people to know if what they are reading is true or not. A
lso, it would be great if TV network News shows had to display their "accuracy" rating at the beginning and end of their shows.
I personally view Facebook as an advertisement platform equally for both corporations and individuals. Corporations selling their stuff as usual, and individuals selling themselves.
So what I do is unfollow all my friends by default, and I use FB only to discover interesting events, and for basic messaging with friends.
In this article, Ben Thompson proposes no clear alternative to the status quo of Facebook distributing fake news/propaganda, suggesting, vaguely, that "whatever fixes this problem must spring from the power of the Internet."
Furthermore, he seems to argue for an economic fatalism about both the news media and Facebook, that they must provide what users want, and that users want fake news/propaganda to support their own opinion, so the media and Facebook must provide it.
On the media: "The media couldn’t have done a damn thing about Trump if they had wanted to. The reason the media covered Trump so extensively is quite simple: that is what users wanted."
On Facebook: "the company is heavily incentivized to be perceived as neutral by all sides; anything else would drive away users, a particularly problematic outcome for a social network."
If this economic fatalism argument is correct, then I see no reason to believe that some other solution will "spring from the power of the Internet," and democracy is doomed.
Certainly Thompson himself provides no reason to think a solution will exist, even one that "springs from the power of the Internet." He is correct that "if we choose, [we have] access to more information and sources of truth than ever before, and more ways to reach out and understand and persuade those with whom we disagree." But if we can't actually tell which news sources are providing truth, and we all want lies, and so thereby the lies are easier to find/access/distribute, then the problem cannot be solved.
But if his economic fatalism argument isn't correct, then it really has nothing to do with his second argument that FB shouldn't decide the news.
As for Facebook, most their proposed solutions https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103269806149061 look like solutions Thompson would like. Thompson argues that Facebook shouldn't "decide the news," not for economic reasons, but because FB could make the wrong decisions under a totalitarian government. Facebook strongly agrees, "We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves," so they won't.
FB proposes easy reporting and third-party verification, which sound to me like they "spring from the power of the Internet," whatever that means. If FB decides to "raise the quality bar" on the "Related Articles" section by measuring positive citations, in a way vaguely reminiscent of Google PageRank, that would spring from the power of the Internet, I guess.
None of that matters if people are always going to click on propaganda and share it no matter what. So Thompson is either wrong about the economic fatalism argument, or FB is already planning to give him what he wants, or both.
The difference between fake news, à la The Onion, and fake news that's propaganda is the propaganda has an agenda that isn't advertised.
Pieces in The Onion do have an overt political leaning, but the publication's primary function is comedy, not news.
A lot of these so-called fake news agencies may quietly label themselves as satire simply for legal reasons but make an effort to conceal this whenever convenient.
I'm not sure if you can categorically differentiate between the characteristics of an Onion piece full of hyperbole and some typical nonsense fake news piece, but the impression left in the readers is probably the differentiator: Fake news sites are trying to convince people that they're true, where actual parody and satire sites do not.
In the truest sense of the word ("that which is to propagated"), yes.
But for common usage, it's seen as less than honest. For example, consider "spreading awareness" and "spreading propaganda". Which seems benign and which sinister?
Mr Propaganda himself, Edward Bernays, had consumer-facing Propaganda renamed as Public Relations because people had a sour association with the word from the Great War, but openly stated that it was the same thing.
"Social Media" in general is another scapegoat, but don't you remember when everyone was changing their profile pics to be that "Hope" meme that Obama did? Why was social media good then but evil now? No-one seems to be able to explain it.
How on earth are those things connected? Changing your profile picture is nothing like disseminating factually untrue news stories to an audience of millions.
They are connected by being scapegoated, in a display of cognitive dissonance to avoid a real root cause analysis.
No piece of "fake" news changed anyone's mind, simply reinforced beliefs they already had. Same reason people subscribe to newspapers that reflect their existing worldview or value system.
If enough people were concerned that Clinton had won because of fake stories that circulated throughout the campaign, and there was incontrovertible evidence that Clinton benefitted from it, then yes. Of course. Duh.
While Clinton cronies definitely were on the fake news bandwagon (BlueNationReview et al), fake news shared virally is far more popular with the right (85% of the top 20 fake news stories were pro-Trump/anti-Hillary).
Blue Nation Review was a progressive news website. At the end of 2015, it was bought by Clinton surrogate David Brock (of writing The Real Anita Hill, the character assassination book to discredit Anita Hill so Clarence could become a justice of the Supreme Court). Staff of BNR were fired and it was turned into a Clinton propaganda machine with mostly pro-Hillary, anti-Bernie, and anti-Trump stores. BNR's 1 million subscribers on social media had no idea that this happened.
