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How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com)
A day after the Brexit, former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage admitted he had misled the public on a key issue. He admitted that UK's alleged 350M Euro weekly contribution to the EU would not be directed to the National Health Service, and that this commitment was never made official. Journalists worldwide tweeted photos of the campaign ads -- posted in conspicuous places like the sides of buses -- debunking the lie. This incident illustrates the need for more political fact-checking as a public service, to enable the voters to make more informed and rational decisions about matters affecting their daily lives. Fact-checking is supposed to be a part of the normal journalistic process. When gathering information, a journalist should verify its accuracy. The work is then vetted by an editor, a person with more professional experience who may correct or further amend some of the information. A long-form article on The Guardian today underscores the challenges publications worldwide are facing today -- most of them don't have the luxury to afford a fact-checker (let alone a team of fact-checkers), and the advent of social media and forums and our reliance (plenty of people get their news on social media now) have made it increasingly difficult to vet the accuracy of anything that is being published. From The Guardian article:When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and "facts" that are not.Global Voices' adds:But the need for fact-checking hasn't gone away. As new technologies have spawned new forms of media which lend themselves to the spread of various kinds of disinformation, this need has in fact grown. Much of the information that's spread online, even by news outlets, is not checked, as outlets simply copy-past -- or in some instances, plagiarize -- "click-worthy" content generated by others. Politicians, especially populists prone to manipulative tactics, have embraced this new media environment by making alliances with tabloid tycoons or by becoming media owners themselves. The other issue is that many people do not care about the source of the information, and it has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not. This, coupled with how social networking websites game the news feed to show you what you are likely to find interesting as opposed to giving you news from trustworthy sources, has made things even worse. As you may remember, Facebook recently noted that it is making changes to algorithms to show you updates from friends instead of news articles from publications you like. The Guardian adds:Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook's news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want -- which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. [...] In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same -- whether they come from a credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous stories.
Sure you can.
If a politician claims he's going to pave the streets with unicorn poop you can be pretty sure it's a lie since unicorn poop does not exist. Likewise, if a politician claimed they'd give the 350 million GBP per week given to the EU to the NHS you can be sure it's a lie since that existed about as much as unicorn poop exists.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Is it too much to ask that a post about fact checking get its facts right?
The "350m to the NHS" billboards were created by the Vote Leave campaign.
Nigel Farage was not part of that organization, he joined the separate Leave.EU organization.
When Farage himself spoke about the money to be saved by leaving the EU, he gave a 34 million a day figure, which is 238m a week, 32% less than what Vote Leave claimed.
In the video, Farage also says the money saved should be spent on both schools and hospitals, as opposed to all of it going to the NHS.
Blaming Farage for lying for things said by Vote Leave is like blaming Bernie Sanders for things Hillary Clinton said. They are roughly on the same side, but they are not the same people, and do not support the exact same policies.
The Hillary email issue often shows how sloppy the reporting process is. Here are common facts or issues that the media and pundits consistency foul up or fail to consider:
1. Receiving classified info doesn't necessarily mean one also sent classified info.
2. One may not know that received classified info is actually classified. Whether it's realistic one should have known is often not addressed and/or not considered in the press.
3. Sometimes there are "external" sources of facts that have been classified. A given worker may get info from the foreign press or another source independent of the same fact being classified by another person. That worker may not know about, or even be allowed to know about the classification of that fact. Inclusion of a fact by itself is not evidence of copying of a classified source. Ideally there should be a reviewer with enough access to check, but that can be tricky, kind of like Slashdot (not) catching duplicate story submissions: blunt word-matching alone is often not sufficient; it takes a human with eidetic-like memory to get it right all the time.
4. Existence of "classified" markers doesn't necessarily mean that email content actually contains classified info and vice versa. The existence of markers and existence of classified materials (facts) can be independent issues.
5. The "regular" State Department email server was NOT designed for classified materials, and is thus not necessarily "safer" than a private server. (A separate system, not usually called "email", was typically used for classified content.)
6. Hillary claims "remove the headers" is short-cut shop-talk to scrub the ENTIRE document of classified material and markers. Whether that was actually done or not is rarely confirmed or verified by the press. It's fair to give someone the benefit of the doubt, in my opinion, until it's shown that ONLY the headers were actually removed for a specific document subject to the "remove the headers" request.
I'm not defending Hillary here, only saying coverage of important details is very poor, and we are getting only a sliver of reality and/or fuller analysis.
I don't recall her having been tried, much less convicted. As in the United States of America, you are innocent until proven guilty, she did not "factually break the law". Insistence that she did break the law is completely right-wing one-sided propaganda.
FYI, The Espionage Act (18 U.S. Code 793(f)), which is the law most cited as the one she supposedly broke does not specify what the 'proper place' for a confidential document actually entails. Yes, she was dumb for designating, in the course of her duties, that the proper place for documents should be the digital equivalent of a cardboard box. But unless there is actual evidence that documents were improperly taken from that cardboard box, she is not actually in violation of anything.
Fact remains FBI director came on to the television as stated that if this was _anybody else_ they would have been prosecuted. Facts are facts. Rules for us and rules for wing nut Democrat imbeciles. Come the revolution.
TRUMP 2016
FBI director Comey said he could find no previous precedent for prosecuting Clinton under these statutes. Former SOS's Powell and Rice although they didn't have their own email servers did use G-mail or other external email sites for similar messages and yet they weren't prosecuted. I guess if your ideology is strong enough you see what you want to see instead of reality.
No, she broke the law, but not badly, and not deliberately. The law was vague, and she broke none of the rules, as she was "allowed" to do what she did at the time she did it, like everyone before her. The rules changed after, and she was grandfathered. She didn't leak anything, and the FBI guidelines from previous similar cases is to not prosecute if there was no verifiable breach. There was a theoretical possibility that there was a breach, but no evidence to support that possibility. So with no actual breach, and basic attempts to meet the guidelines at the time it was done, there's no criminal intent, nor actual loss to bother prosecuting.
Learn to love Alaska
That "excess money" didn't include anything else in the discussion, namely the massive amount of EU nationals working in the NHS. Should they disappear, you'd need far more than £350m a week to shore up the NHS.
The EU pumped millions into training programmes across the UK, helping areas ignored by Westminster. The EU is good for everyone in Britain, regardless of your wealth. The problems people attributed to the EU were nearly entirely the fault of Westminster. For example, the immigration issue. Guess what? Britain was always in full control of its immigration. EU migrants wishing to live in the UK had to have job offers, or be self-sufficient. Non-EU immigration was always under full control of Westminster. Now, outside the EU, Britain will have to abide by the EU's freedom of movement laws, but will now have absolutely no say over what they are. So what did Britain gain? Nothing - it just gave away its ability to decide who gets to come to the UK. It is precisely the opposite of what the leave campaign promised.
Sorry. This whole debate (or lack thereof) really gets to me.