Slashdot Mirror
Snopes.com Editor on Fake News: Social Media Is Not the Problem (backchannel.com)
"Honestly, most of the fake news is incredibly easy to debunk because it's such obvious bullshit..." says Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of the fact-checking at Snopes.com. "It's not social media that's the problem. People are looking for somebody to pick on." mirandakatz shared this article from Backchannel:
The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly -- therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. "When you're on your fifth story of the day and there's no editor because the editor's been fired and there's no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don't have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up," she says.
I found this article confusing. Snopes seemed to be trying to steer the conversation back to erroneous stories from "legitimate publications," which erode the public trust in all mainstream outlets. (Which I guess then over time hypothetically makes people more susceptible to fake news stories on Facebook.) But her earlier remarks suggest it's not really credibility that's lacking there -- it's the absence of someone convenient to pick on. So what is the problem? Is it the news media's lack of credibility? Algorithms that disproportionately reward alarming stories? A human tendency to seek information that confirms our pre-existing biases? What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
I found this article confusing. Snopes seemed to be trying to steer the conversation back to erroneous stories from "legitimate publications," which erode the public trust in all mainstream outlets. (Which I guess then over time hypothetically makes people more susceptible to fake news stories on Facebook.) But her earlier remarks suggest it's not really credibility that's lacking there -- it's the absence of someone convenient to pick on. So what is the problem? Is it the news media's lack of credibility? Algorithms that disproportionately reward alarming stories? A human tendency to seek information that confirms our pre-existing biases? What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
Notice how many news sites (like CNN) now interleave fake story links with their real stories? And we wonder why the general populous is confused. If the news organizations want to regain lost trust they need to do away with such tactics. As it stands, the news sites are basically endorsing these sites.
What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
Gullible Idiots and confirmation bias.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Nothing is causing it. Fake news has been around forever, just look around your supermarket checkout line.
We're having a "national dialog" about this "issue" because the political establishment is pissed that their candidates didn't get elected and they are trying to figure out how to regain control of the electorate.
This is fascinating to watch. The 'fake news' meme itself is the disinformation (which has a specific definition, see the book "Disinformation" by Lt Gen Ion Mihao Pacepa - http://www.amazon.com/Disinfor...).
The US mainstream/legacy media disgraced itself with the recent coverage of the Presidential race. Their polls were way off because they oversampled members of one party (they oversampled Democrats by +8% and Hillary is up by +4% as a result, it told you who was actually ahead - and with high betting odds it was possible to win big), their suppression of the information about corruption and subversion of the DNC primary process, and their spinning of every situation to match their own particular worldview (instead of doing 'journalism' and presenting both sides objectively and trusting the reader to make their own conclusions).
Because the mainstream media did so poorly (with the exception of the LA Times whose polling was much more accurate than CNN, MSNC, Fox etc etc) and an overwhelming majority of people distrust them, they need a way to combat the alternative media sources that have sprung up 'Uber-like' to provide more accurate coverage. Hence, the mainstream media folks who propagate the actual 'fake news' coverage have only one card to play, and that is to accuse the less biased 'alternative media' as being the fake news sources. This 'fake news' meme is pure disinformation - and they think that Slashdotters are not smart enough to see straight through it ! But we can.
The mainstream media are doubling down on their smear tactics. They will do *anything* except do actual journalism and objectively tell all sides of a story. They will do anything except tell the truth - all the while smearing the alternative media who actually report much closer to the truth. No wonder smart people have stopped watching the mainstream media in droves and their revenue is plummeting as a result. To stop the slide they need to stop pushing their Narrative and start reporting objectively, but they will not. Hence, like all dinosaurs they will die under the evolutionary pressure of the democratization of information (amateurs who are more dedicated to the unvarnished truth than the legacy media are).
Back in 1995 the Bill Clinton White House was already scared shitless of the net... http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...
> Three years before Matt Drudge changed the world and how news would be
> consumed, President Bill Clintonâ(TM)s White House feared that the Internet was
> allowing average citizens, especially conservatives, to bypass legacy gatekeepers
> and access information that had previously been denied to them by the mainstream press.
Before the internet, the lib-left elite controlled news. Embarressing stories were hushed up. E.g. President Kennedy was screwing more women than Bill Clinton could dream of, but the MSM kept quiet. Similarly, Newsweek refused to publish the Monica Lewinsky scandal story. But an impertinent upstart with a modem and a web site, Matt Drudge, broke the story.
Hillary Clinton was unhappy, and mused about "editing function" and "gatekeeping function"
http://www.freerepublic.com/fo...
Democrats/Lib-Left don't like free speech. Think Russia, China, Germany, etc. During the recent campaign, the Democrats were openly talking about shutting down Breitbart after the election... http://dailycaller.com/2016/08...
> "We've had a conservative media in this country for a while," says the email, sent
> Thursday and signed by deputy communications director Christina Reynolds.
>"I don't always like what they have to say, but I respect their role and their right
> to exist Reynolds' acknowledgment that the regular conservative media
> has a "right to exist," though, is used to contrast it with Breitbart, which
> apparently has no such right. "Breitbart is something different," she says.
> "They make Fox News look like a Democratic Party pamphlet. "
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Ahh, yes, get all upset when someone else uses the USA's playbook against it.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
So, this is it. Journalism is too tough because the business of news is too tough. Seriously? Soul-searching and THIS is the best they could come up with? I thought after the shock election result, the Left was supposed to wander in the desert and seek answers? They STILL don't get it?
An explanation that does not include the fact that the media dropped its last pretense at truth-telling and wholeheartedly backed the worst political candidate since Edwin Edwards is NOT truth-telling! Jesus Christ! The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that there is a problem! Even the New York Times came out and said that after the election they had to rededicate themselves to journalism. Why would they need to do that unless they lost their dedication in the first place?
The Emperor has no clothes. The whole world saw it. Yeah, if you don't read international news from non-European sources, it was obvious to everyone worldwide that the US media were totally supporting Hillary. They're used to detecting this kind of bullshit after all, but they're just not allowed to report it when it concerns their own corrupt elites. The US media are bankrupt, deplorable, and irredeemably biased. Cancel your paying subscription today and help them into the grave. Cancel your ad buys. Tell the reporters you don't trust them when they want to cover your daughter's softball championship win. It's the only way we can progress as a society.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It is similar to the way fundamentalist sects work.
1. (Confirmation bias) people prefer to be told what they like to hear, to have their beliefs and wishes confirmed.
2. (Intellectual laziness) people don't tend to waste effort scrutinising what they already agree with.
3. (Complexity of debunking) to give a convincing reason why fake news is wrong, you have to go into details, and this turns off many readers, especially the intelligent readers with cerebral jobs whose brains are tired from their day jobs.
4. (Effort of debunking) it is often easier to knock out a fake story sufficiently plausible to those who already agree with it, than to put out a carefully thought through article debunking fake news.
The problem is one of quality vs quantity: once you have the right psychological conditions (charismatic leader or group saying what some want to hear, frustrated audience that want change), fake news in support of something can be churned out, and circulated via media, social or traditional, on an industrial scale, cheaply and largely decentralised. Proper journalism and proper rebuttals simply can't be produced on a comparable scale. So to the naive, it can can appear clear that the balance favours the fake news.
(The comparison with fundamentalism can be seen if you peruse some of the religious apologetics literature, or books pushing creationism or similar.)
Reason and scrutiny are intellectually expensive, and cheap and cheerful bullshit is not.
John_Chalisque
The problems is free news. Or more correctly, people not wanting to pay for news.
For some strange reason, people expect to get their news for free on the internet. Which is kind of strange, when most people would gladly pay for a video or music subscription, or even buy digital content like games, they throw a hissy fit when they hear of a news paywall.
The problem is that news, reliable news, is not free. Research, fact checking and editing is a time and money consuming task. So when people demand their news for free, either two things can happen. 1) shut down operations (which has been the case for a few newspapers so far) or 2) pursue an ad-revenue model.
Now I don't have to tell you what the problem with 2) is. Boring stories, however important they may be, generate no traffic. Misleading headlines, half-truths and sensationalism on the other hand generates a lot of clicks and therefore is more profitable to post fake news, hearsay and rumors than do some actual journalistic work.
Social platforms exacerbate the problem. Media outlets, in an effort to reach as many people as possible (more revenue) use social networks to push their unchecked, half-baked articles. Echo chambers quickly form, and like in a very twisted version of the Telephone Game, the story mutates, getting worse as it goes along.
Want the problem to stop? It's easy: Stop getting your news from facebook (I'd personally recommend stop using facebook altogether) Stop complaining about the damn paywall and pay a subscription to a couple of trusted news outlets.
The real problem is us.
It's an accident of history.
Newspapers have always had a tabloid tendency and were in many ways worse in the 1920s and 1930s, the era of the Hearst newspaper empire and Hearst's many political agendas which he used his newspaper empire to push. The mass media had characters like Father Coughlin and his Breitbart levels of populism and antisemitism.
It's only after WW II that the newspapers become something of a serious and more neutral force, but even then they were glossing over some facts, such as ignoring Presidential affairs. By the early 1970s, we have the dawn of the crusading liberal in the form of Woodward and Bernstein, taking Nixon down with their Watergate reporting and the NY Times with the Pentagon Papers.
In spite of this, I think in this era the media was taking its role as the Fourth Estate seriously and with an academic level of introspection and attempted neutrality.
I think it began taking a further turn for the worse when CNN and the 24 hour cable news network came around. Not only did it help hollow out newspaper publishing as a business, but it inaugurated the relentless news cycle where fresh content had to be sourced every few hours, leading the press to spend its time not developing good stories, but searching for the next quote, the next nugget or the next angle.
The Internet made the 24 hour news cycle worse. Where CNN made new TV news every few hours, now newspapers were expected to have something new every time the page was reloaded. Social media and clickbait made it worse, making it harder for the consumer to sift news from hype.
With all of this, I don't think the major news outlets have made it better. I've subscribed to the NY Times for 20-odd years and I think it's journalistic neutrality has been seriously in question for years now. In this election cycle, the bias for Hillary has been palpable. Their article choices and language always made it harder for Sanders to appear serious, and Hillary was given every pass and very positive coverage. Once Trump became the leading Republican candidate, they were writing "analysis" headlines questioning their obligation to neutrality. To me it seemed fairly clear that journalism itself was operating in a demographic bubble of like-thinking liberals bought into the Hillary agenda.
She might have won the majority of votes, but that's not the game they were playing. Just like a given team might have scored more runs overall than another in the world series, what counts is the number of games they actually won. If the rules had been different, the behavior would have been different. Trump would have spent more time in California and New York, and Hillary would have spent more time in Texas. You don't know how it would have turned out.
Also, stop blaming all your problems on Russia. You sound like a crazy person.
I think fragmentation is the biggest cause of fake news. When there were only a few viable news sources, they had to cater to everyone so stores were less biases and fact checking more rigorous.
Unfortunately, you have that completely ass-backwards. Conglomeration is the biggest cause of fake news. When Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 he opened the door for media consolidation which removes the alternative outlets which once kept the major media corporations in check. They simply buy out the competition that would point out the flaws in their reporting. With nothing to keep them honest, the major media conglomerates can report essentially anything they like. As their credibility falls, the fake news seems more credible by comparison.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem isn't fake news on social media. The problem is that major news sites gave up being subtle with their bias and went on an all out attack against Trump.
Everyone expects that kind of reporting from places like Huff Post, USAToday, MSNBC, and Drudge Report. But this time sites like the Washington Post, NYT, and CNN stopped pretending to report facts and published nothing but attacks; the worse their "reporting" got the more frustrated they became as readers increasingly ignored what was obvious BS. They're trying to blame the BS that was circulating on Facebook for influencing people, but their real problem is that their own voices faded away.
The problem with this article is that Snopes itself has a pretty strong left-wing bias. They might be useful in debunking urban legends, but it's not a useful outlet for fact checking anything that politics may enter into.
All these fact checking websites have biases, but people for some reason do not believe they do.
True, but the problem is the increasing political bias of major news sources that used to pride themselves on being neutral. CNN is a particularly flagrant example.
Online news sources are just as biased, but the bias is open and the choice is diverse. On any given issue, I can find a spectrum of opinion and make up my own mind.
I'm led to understand reality has a pretty strong left wing bias, also.
People who keep saying this played a major role in getting you-know-who elected.
I used Snopes to defend Bush Jr through part of his first and his entire second administration. People were sending me emails that were obviously inaccurate re him and his admin. I did this regardless of my political views. I just want the truth so we can make intelligent, informed decisions re our government.
I haven't met anyone on the right who has demonstrated that same level objectivity.
If Snopes were left-leaning, it would have been impossible for me to defend Bush all those years.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
CNN was working with Clinton though.
Darn facts right?
I blame Rupert Murdoch for that. CNN's bias was a direct response to Fox News bias. Prior to that, they were neutral. At some point, somebody wrongly concluded that the only way to fight bias was with opposite bias, rather than with accuracy.
But there's more to it than that. The problems actually started earlier, as media consolidation led to cuts in the number of journalists and reductions in pay resulting from the glut of available staff to fill the positions. The inevitable result of such poor pay is that the industry fails to attract the best and brightest, and over time, quality suffers more and more.
I basically predicted this collapse of TV (both journalism and programming quality) way back in 1999 in a speech before the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences board of directors in which I said why I'd be using the computer science part of my degree rather than the communications part, largely because TV pays new people so very badly. I predicted that broadcast TV and cable networks would become largely irrelevant, replaced by Internet-based content. I predicted that content quality would decline more and more rapidly as the quality of people declined over time because of poor starting pay.
And now, just 17 years later, we see the results. We have reality TV star Donald Trump as our President-elect because the TV industry stopped paying their people enough money twenty or thirty years ago.
And inadequate pay for K-12 teachers compounded the problem by ensuring that the people looking for jobs in the journalism industry are not as well prepared for understanding the world and are less capable of recognizing bulls**t when they see it. This has been an ongoing problem for even longer than poor pay in journalism.
This is the point where I would ordinarily say, "I told you so," but as is frequently the case as of late, the smugness I should feel from being right is overwhelmed by despondence over the horrifying consequences of everyone ignoring my warnings. Such is life, I suppose.
And just as the problem was obvious almost two decades ago, the solution is just as obvious now: pay journalists better. If you do this, then in two or three decades, quality will start to improve. Nothing else will help in the long run, and nothing can solve the problem in the short term, because problems that take a long time to develop take an even longer time to fix.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.