Slashdot Mirror
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.
Rather ironic that this kind of article would be published in Guardian, considering that it is pretty much a progressive echo chamber that has no trouble to distort the truth whenever it is needed to push a narrative.
Whenever anyone throws out these terms, recall the line in that Indiana Jones move: (paraphrased) This class is about the search for facts, if you want to search for the truth then the philosophy class is down the hall.
Are journalists supposed to be searching for facts or for the truth? When they say they are "fact-checking" how often is it more like "truth-checking"?
You can't fact-check something a politician says they're going to do. You just have to wait and see whether they actually do it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That 350 million a week was analysed and proved to be wrong _during_ the campaign but unfortunately there's more people around who believe what they are told than there are who do their own research and as such then realise the figure is bollocks.
The problem with democracy is that both types of people get the same number of votes per person so appealing to prejudices was enough to swing it for Leave.
Signed,
A pissed off Brit who did his own research and voted Remain as a result.
People have always gravitated toward "news" that confirmed their biases. And although news outlets may have smaller budgets for fact-checking, the cost of fact-checking - not to mention the ability of individual consumers to fact-check - has become incredibly low. You no longer have to plod down to the library or news office and spend days (or weeks, or months) tirelessly pouring over articles on microfiche. You can do a LexisNexis search. Want to vet a claim made about economic growth? Pop on to the Federal Reserve economic research site and have instant graphs of hundreds of thousands of metrics.
The problem is people don't want truth; they want validation. If they do stumble across truth, they'll cherry-pick the pieces that agree with them and find some way to dismiss the rest.
In relying on a fact checker, one simply substitutes another's confirmation bias for their own, and in the process moves further from the raw facts than they were before. What people need is the intellectual curiosity to seek out a broad array of opinions and the humility to actually consider them in good faith. Good luck with that.
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.
Everyone is getting so delusional these days. Nigel Farage can't remember his own campaign promises and I can't remember why I once thought slashdot was a source of amusing comments and even a bit of insight. (My searches in the comments so far came up completely dry.)
I've never been able to earn many funny points, and the more insightful and thought-provoking my comments, the more they attract the game-playing trolls and their sad little mod points (trying to compensate for their small penises and inability to respond with stronger ideas).
Anyway, in this case the article is typically misleading. The problem isn't technology, but the will to believe as amplified by technology. The truths are out there, and you can use search technologies to find them, or you can go on believing exactly what you want to believe, and the search technologies will help you do that, too. Since most people already know EXACTLY what they prefer to believe, they can search for "proof" of exactly that, and thanks to today's google ("All your attention are belong to us.") they can find as much evidence as needed. However much "research" time you have, the google can stuff it with the evidence you like while allowing you to ignore any evidence you don't like. (If the google didn't do that, you might run away, which would be terrible for the google's advertising revenues.)
"Believing what you want to believe" might not be a fatal flaw of democracy. It would depend if most people are nice and want to believe nice things--but there's no profit in encouraging that sort of thing. Not sure of the best example for England, but in America we have the Second Amendment and it's hard to believe nice things when that's probably a gun in his pocket, even if he is pretending to be happy to see you.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
How can you tell a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.
That is why we should elect Jeff Dunham President of the United States.
Walter can run for Vice President. Plenty of precedent for having a dummy for VP.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Disagree - my support for Hillary Clinton doesn't make me "objectively a socialist" - in fact, I trend fairly conservative in matters of finance and policy. Hillary, however, is the least-bad alternative available to me, so I choose to support her. I agree with some of her positions, and disagree with others. Overall, I think she'll be a perfectly decent president if she gets elected - however, she's not my "ideal" candidate, nor is she running my "ideal" platform.
The destructive nitwit here is you - the person who insists that everything can be boiled down to only two sides, and that one's position on healthcare, for instance, necessarily comes with a host of other unrelated beliefs about foreign policy, women, religion, and fiscal policy. People vote their conscience, and not a single person voting believes they are doing something evil by doing so. Until you can understand what might motivate people to disagree with you (hint: it's not "stupidity," "ignorance," or "hate"), you are bound to be just another meme-spewing dolt who thinks he's clever because all the people in his little echo chamber agree with him.
Or, to summarize: twat.
See, this is what you don't get. The FACT of 350m was wrong, but that fact you're disputing is not what was encouraging people to vote - the actual sum was completely irrelevant. Your own article says, "This equates to £136m a week, less than 40% of the amount splashed on the battlebus." So, regardless of the specific amount of cash you're "sending to the EU each week," you're still sending a fuckload of money to them.
The point of the slogan on the bus was not "AMG 350 millionz!" It was: "Shouldn't we spend that money on your dear old grampy and disabled uncle Joe instead?" The point being that the money would be *better spent in Britain, on Britons,* than being spent in Brussels, on hookers and caviar dinners for bureaucrats.
You missed the forest for the trees - instead of focusing on "IT'S NOT 350 MILLION," you should have focused on "WE BRITONS GET GREAT VALUE FOR THE MONEY WE SEND THERE." Your attitude is a perfect explanation of why the Remainers lost. You didn't even understand the terms of the argument you were having, and you focused on the little facts that didn't matter, instead of on the emotional realities that did.
Wow media. First of all, he mentioned a potential option of what to do with the money instead, didn't make any sort of campaign promise. When asked about the leave campaign's advertisement, he responded that it wasn't promised outcome of the brexit and they shouldn't have done that.
That isn't him "misleading" anyone. It's other people.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
Thing is, that figure was still not correct, the £350M was shown to be wrong, the actual number is £180M, which is just over half the figure used by the Exit campaign. And people still went for it because it was "truthy", so it played well to their own preconceptions. Similar to the rhetoric about Eurocrats, when the reality is that the EU has less bureaucrats employed in total than the UK has bureaucrats working in Birmingham, their second largest city.
I think one item that made it very clear that people were voting with their feelings rather than weighing positives and negatives, was Cornwall realizing, after the vote, that they get a lot of EU support, and trying to put pressure on London to match this. Whether or not it will happen, who knows, but after the vote probably wasn't the time to bring it up.
I've said before that I believe that much of the negative feeling towards the EU is from governments all over Europe using the EU as a handy scapegoat, and claiming that any unpopular decision was a result of the EU. This has been going on for 40 years in the case of the UK, which was bound to have an impact. It also doesn't help that people find it difficult to distinguish the EU from the ECHR (a separate organization) and EU related immigration from external immigration (in the UK, the largest number of immigrants are from India, for instance). This is a great example of what the article is saying because it shows that the narrative has been prioritized over the reality, and it's really difficult to dispute a narrative now because it's dispersed, rather than having a small number of sources.
Rational thought is the only true freedom