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"?
Sorry, is this a real news story about snopes, or a fake news story?
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"
That free speech thing is a bitch to deal with...
If everyone gets to say what they want interpreting what they say becomes harder.
But that's just tough shit. It's the work you have to put in to live in a free country.
People who want rules and laws to "stop fake news" can just go to hell.
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.
It can't be fact checking. Fact checking has become incredibly easy. Everybody has access to academic articles and expert discussions, no need to subscribe to any journal. No, people don't give a fuck about facts. They just like to watch themselves and others say outrageous things. It used to be talk radio, now it's people filming themselves talking. It hardly matters what they talk about, it's all about filming their own faces and enacting big emotions. They've all become narcissistic big babies. Babies don't know what facts are, they have no use for facts. Babies get excited by hearing babies make big sounds with a lot of modulation. Trump truly represents the nation there.
In a nutshelll, what doubles as news today is opinion pieces spiced with sensationalism. Everything is breaking news that will blow my mind. Blah.
When has anyone ever seen a simple, plain facts article in the recent past that wasn't already oversaturated with "information" on how to interpret it and what to think about it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
It's the lack of proper education and the ability of individuals to reason things out logically.
Secondly, desire to believe. In this US election you had Christians and Southerns voting for a New Yorker that lied and was unChristian constantly and is part of the establishment, they wanted to find reasons to believe him or hate Clinton.
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. But if you can be a viable news source that only targets to a fraction of people who are predisposed to be less critical of you, you leave the door wide open to fake stories because the penalty for a fake story is nearly non-existent (you will be likely forgiven by your audience).
Basically you can be viable news source on the internet by having the reporting ethics of a typewritten conspiracy newsletter of the 1960s distributed by post with no return address...
Sure, these fake news stories exist, and are sometimes highly visible, and apparently get enough clicks to make a profit for the bullshitters...
But does anyone actually believe these stories? Could people just be Liking/retweeting them because they're amusing, in a "ha ha, look at this tabloid article about Bigfoot having Prince Harry's baby!" kind of way? Surely a lot of readers WILL realize that what they're reading is bullshit, or do fact-checking on their own.
'Fake' news is ubiquitous and always has been, in any news source. Look at how many peer-reviewed scientific journal articles are later redacted or found faulty, and what portion of published research is later found to be fabricated, or is disproved later on or unreproduceable. Now think about how many news articles are written for laypersons summarizing scientific developments, that are misleading or dead wrong. Now think about how many PR department press releases are copied verbatim into 'news stories' without any critical thinking or fact checking. Ok, maybe your news department was downsized and you don't have an editor anymore, and noone will tell you "you can't put that shit in our publication", but critical thinking doesn't take a dedicated salaried position, any writer can exercise it.
Binkowski gives a free pass to the news industry, going with an 'incompetence/insufficient budget' excuse, completely ignoring intentional malevolence/profit motive reasons.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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"
People seem to be increasingly siloed when it comes to their "news" sources. Stephen Colbert wasn't just making a joke when he talked about "truthiness" - people will hear the same thing from a couple different sources, legitimate or not, and pretty soon you've got a room full of imbeciles claiming as fact that Dearborn Michigan has instituted Sharia Law.
#DeleteChrome
tinfoil hat on, check!
You're really desperate to explain why a real stinker like Hillary couldn't manage to get "selected" in the final round. The sad truth is she was just the new Bob Dole. It was "his turn" to be nominated, too. We will all have to live with Trump now for 4 or 8 years, because the DNC couldn't stand up to the Clinton Crime Family. So be it.
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!
A french sociologue called Gérald Bronner wrote some interesting stuff on the subject - especially in his book "La démocratie des crédules" (democracy of the gullibles, I don't know if it has been completely translated to english).
In his book he tries to answer to the question "why do people come to believe in things that are pure bulshit ?". For him it is a combination of cognitive bias, scamped journalist work due to economical pressure, all this in the context of a highly competitive cognitive market - we are all showered with information to the point it is difficult to filter it correctly.
Anyway, it is an interesting read, backed up by sound sociological experiments - even though I completely disagree with his conclusions, but that's something else entirely.
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.
I found this article confusing.
That much is clear.
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. [...] But her earlier remarks suggest it's not really credibility that's lacking there -- it's the absence of someone convenient to pick on.
Sigh, no. Reading comprehension? You fail it! "It's not social media that's the problem. People are looking for somebody to pick on." That does not mean that the problem is that people are looking for somebody to pick on. It means that the problem is not social media, nothing more. And the problem, as TFS says (you got it right there in the quote!) is that "the public has lost faith in the media broadly". See how that works? The problem is not blame-placing. The problem is media in which it is not reasonable to have faith, which is a problem which has always been with us but which reached a head when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Seriously, you can't even read, and you have an editor job? This is why we can't have nice things. Millions of unemployed in this country, and people are hiring people who can't even fucking read to be editors.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The biggest source of problems with BS stories on line is the greed of publishers. More specifically the greed of the publishers of technical and scientific journals. The real knowledge the verifiable knowledge is locked away behind paywalls often with exorbitant fees. We pay for most of the research through tax financed government grants, seems the tax payers should own the research and have free access to it. Why is it that work I do for my employer belongs to my employer but research payed for by tax payers is owned by journals. Does not seem right never did. Most people would check things out against the most credible sources If they could. But not being made of money they can't. I at least do the next best thing and use some fact check sites like Snopes (Great Site) or a variety of other sites (mostly garbage). The second thing is the terrible total lack of control over advertising on sites. Have they no consideration for their readers at all. I use an add blocker because I am tired of the popup, popunder, float over, video and sound playing assault on my senses served by the advertisers. The greedy publishers instead of forcing some respect onto their advertisers put in adblock detectors and force you to seek the news from other sources often not as reliable. If they would keep the ads to about 1/3 the screen and eliminate all the motion and sound life would be so much better.
I couldn't disagree more
I think the real problem is that people are increasingly looking for news sources that reinforce what they want to hear rather than what is actually going on so that everyone can pretend to be a victim. Listen to the alt-right groups long enough and you'd think white males were being forced to drink out of different water fountains then everyone else while we are still clearly doing very well for ourselves. Likewise the far Left whines about any perceived injustice in society they can find (or think they've found). A close friend of mine's co-workers wife just recently scolded him for saying they should "go straight" at an intersection because it was offensive to gays.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"Honestly, most of the fake news is incredibly easy to debunk because it's such obvious bullshit..." says...Snopes.
Well, that's a rather stupid and ignorant statement coming from a company that exists because it's obviously not so easy to spot obvious bullshit, and therefore the public needs sites like Snopes and Politifact.
Perhaps this was a kind, politically correct way of saying people are dumber and more gullible than ever, which is perhaps the real issue.
Trolling is a paid profession now. That says a lot about mass ignorance.
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.
There's a few things I noticed: First, a (false) rumor, dating back to 2007, in which Fox News opened the door to generating false news, an argument that both bashes Fox News and gave legitimate argument to the idea that false news is protected under the First Amendment. (Source: Snopes.com: http://www.snopes.com/politics... ) Ever since then, the argument between which cable news channels, and which media outlets overall, were accurate, based on political bias, with Fox receiving a bunch of flack on both sides for being able to generate fake news. Meanwhile, it also gave some legitimacy to fake news sites which catered to their crowd.
Second, the Tea Party movement, documented in The Billionaire's Tea Party (Info: http://documentaryheaven.com/the-billionaires-tea-party/), which, while started as a grass-roots project, quickly was usurped by those with money. (NOT going to mention names...) Many of the "Fake News Sites" I've seen so far, when they list their origins, tie back to some smaller party - but many (coincidentally) share the same sources, and nearly the same articles, as their similar-leaning counterparts - many without providing an accurate original source or tying back to each other.
Third, and particularly damning, is the lack of acknowledgement and respect for human error that used to exist. Between the major sites reporting false news from either tabloid or fake news sites, and the typical errors humans can make in either fact-checking, editing or reporting, major media has discredited itself and shot itself in its own foot. The fact that social media has tied into this - both by allowing linked information from all sites and by giving an outlet to all people to complain as well as report - has fueled these notions and made it harder, when errors are made, to fix those errors. (It also discredit's Snopes' argument, when you think about it - it's faster to spread misinformation on Facebook, and harder to prove false afterward, with people clinging onto the false record.)
There's also stuff I see in the comments area, much of which is probably also true: the educated levels of people now compared to points in the past, the lack of proper editorial and fact-checking people working with journalists, the fact that "people only hear what they want to hear" and are stuck in "echo chambers," etc. It's a combination of all of these factors - and probably some we haven't discussed or thought of yet - that's causing the problem.
As I see it, the issue of trustworthy sources really isn't the issue. In my opinion, the real issue is that many simply don't believe even trustworthy sources if the news they report is disagreeable to the person consuming it.
In other words, many now reject any reality that they do not wish to believe. This is tantamount to insanity.
An example is the recent election. If one supported President Elect Trump, then all the reports of his personal and business conduct were "liberal media". If one was a supporter of Secretary Clinton, the issues with multiple congressional investigations were "right wing propaganda, old fat chewed endlessly".
This is not to take a stance of any of them. I'm pointing out the situation. I don't have any opinion on a Fix for it either. If the world is going crazy, let me off at the next stop please. I'm not enjoying the ride.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
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.
Clinton received a plurality of the popular vote, not the majority.
Watch how stories develop now with folks reporting HAPPENING LIVE!! (it just happened 30 minutes ago) then instead of doing things like get facts straight everybody gets caught on reporting on the reporters and reactions.
Its Max Headroom style reporting without wanting to risk doing the legwork or losing the Hype Train
Here's what we know beyond a shadow of a doubt at this point from Wikileaks and multiple other sources:
Most of the major media colluded with the DNC. They had stories vetted. They discussed strategy. They performed requested "edits". And they strategically portrayed the opposition in a negative light.
That, by any definition, is "fake news". It's not reporting. It's news which has been meticulously crafted to produce a desired opinion.
It's propaganda, to use another generation's term.
Take a look at this list of journalists who should be fired but won't be: http://imgur.com/a/D6DMD
Stupid people on social media are.
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.
I don't mean Slashdot per se, but quite simply it's the empowerment of the internet that fuels this. When I was a kid, you had very clearly defined vectors of dissemination - newspaper, books, tv...if I had an outlandish opinion about NASA faking the moon landings I would literally have to get a book published. Or better yet, have a Hollywood producer read my book and think "I can make a movie out of this - say, I wonder if Jim Brolin is available?" Bang - instant commonly known conspiracy theory.
Now, who needs Hollywood? I can have a blog, get interviewed online, find plenty of wackos out there trivially to join my cause and spread the bullshit. It's the "democratization of the internet" that's the problem. So we're screwed, unless of course we can educate all these boobs to learn how to think and recognize something dubious when they read it. Hasn't that always been the problem throughout history?
Clinton got more votes because Trump was almost as bad a candidate as she was.
At least in the sense, Facebook is sucking all the oxygen, i.e. online ad revenue, out of the room, making billions on news without hiring a single reporter or opening a single news bureau. Even the largest legitimate news organizations, NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, are struggling to make a business model in the online world, because people don't need to subscribe to them or look at their ads in order to get news. Instead they get it from Facebook, which selectively feeds readers only the news they want to hear.
The real problem is that nearly 50% of the public has below-average intelligence.
(Anyone who sees the above statement as elitist, rather than an obvious statement about mathematics, is part of the problem.)
Therefore, whoever makes the most noise gets the most attention from people, regardless of the truth of the message.
We all know, and most of us are probably annoyed by, the collection of click-bait links at the end of every single story on CNN's site. That's too obvious to miss. It sounds like you probably haven't noticed even their front page stories are pretty pathetic. Here are as few stories that CNN os running as front page news right now. Tell me if you think this looks like a self-respecting news organization objectively reporting the news:
"Biggest Event in Human History" Imminent
Students fall over themselves to flee Trump
How do you deal with Donald Trump?
Trump must address conflicts of interest
Sessions will undo decades of progress
Rates hit 2.75% APR (15 yr). Are you eligible?
We are witnessing the end of the liberal era
4 jaw-dropping cards charging 0% interest until 2018
Fox is a conservative news organization. CNN is well on it's way to becoming a tabloid.
Has the editor not been paying attention for the past year? Why do we question "legitimate publications"? BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN LYING TO US!!!!
> What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
This article describes any press against their chosen candidate (Hillary) as misinformation, that's obvious. Now all their bribes are wasted and their well-paying opportunities are gone (for the next 4 years at least).
This whole fake news is a made up controversy by the mainstream news sources to give the people something else to blame and try to overshadow the real debate. The real problem as I see it is the proliferation of fake experts. What really caused the news media to go over the deep end this election cycle is fake fact checkers. Snopes is far from perfect and is biased, but Polifact just makes shit up (1)(2). They literally have different people saying the same things, and they award one a rating of "Mostly False" (its way off, 1/3 of the quoted number) and the other "Mostly True".
With access to these fake experts the news can say anything it wants, and provide sources and experts to back up their news. The media creates these "experts" by giving them credibility, while in turn these "fact checkers" lend credibility to the media. It's a cycle of both self delusion and self promotion.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Once firms were able to fuse their business and editorial divisions journalistic integrity made way for infotainment. There's no obligation anymore to report fair and balanced news, just an obligation to increasing revenues in bolstering the share price for stockholders.
Then, couple that with anyone with a cellphone calling themselves and "alternative media" journalist, with absolutely no background in journalism or even the capacity to craft a coherent narrative of an event. It's exceedingly rare that I read a news story online that has no spelling or grammatical errors, for example, and while that doesn't necessarily take away from the veracity of a story, the ability to communicate that story is woefully lacking. When anyone can slap together something and post it to their blog, with or without any research behind it, who is anyone going to believe?
I'm old enough to remember something called journalistic integrity and it was a big thing that people used to pay their news sources for. It is a sad aspect of today's world that we no longer consider an investment in a truth that is back checked worthwhile. Instead we have turned our backs on all "traditional" media which had journalistic integrity as a fundamental tenet and we just read anything that falls in front of our face.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Most media outlets have become naked propaganda producers for one particular ideology or the other.
E Proelio Veritas.
> The problem with this article is that Snopes itself has a pretty strong left-wing bias.
If you say something like that you should back it up. What's the criteria? Where are the numbers?
Because what I've seen from reading snopes is plenty of debunking of 'left-wing' scare-mongering and bullshit.
It's a little bit of all theories, it's not new, and it has been amplified by current events.
First of all, there's no epidemic of misinformation. What happens is that there has always been an epidemic of lack of critical reasoning.
Tabloid journalism is as old as journalism itself, and too many people have favored it since ancient times.
In fact, none of the stuff mentioned is new. Confirmation bias? Sensationalism? Lack of credibility coming from tabloid journalism? These are all stuff that have always been out there.
It could be argued that this blaming of specific social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) is also part of tabloid journalism.
There are definitely some people trying to blame them for stuff that they don't particularly like themselves, like the results of a democratic election of an US president. Because it's easy to take a company as scapegoat while ignoring that none of the fake news and none of the people who believe it are part of the company itself.
The fact is that US citizens elected Trump whether you like it or not. And Facebook or Twitter didn't vote for him. In fact, if anything these companies' CEOs and employees were probably against him becoming president.
Blogs like Gizmodo who keeps posting these idiotic whinning posts trying to blame Facebook for Trump being elected are just like kids in denial... they simply don't want to admit living in a country that is not aligned with their own personal political views.
We're currently at a transitional period from traditional journalism to Internet portals and blogs, so there will be some confusion regarding the new media. It certainly allows fake news to spread in an easier way, but it also allows a broader range of news in general, different perspectives, and coverage overall.
Personally, I don't see it as a bad thing. Journalism just has a new dimension... it became a tool for information that has more potential and that is more powerful, for the good and bad. It is not controlled or limited by a handful of huge news corporations anymore. If we as a society is letting it take a turn for the bad, we only have ourselves to blame. The way journalism and information spreads in society is just a reflection of it.
It's up to us to learn how to use it. We can't expect to be babysitted everytime something defies our ability to use critical reasoning. If people are being fooled by something as trivial as fake news, and cannot be bothered with something as basic as fact checking, we get the results we deserve. That's not a problem with how news work, that's a problem with education and culture.
Traditional journalism has always been swayed by popularity. You really don't have to go too far into history to see it. It's a huge mistake to think we always had impartial coverage in the past, or that the results of elections would be different if it wasn't for social networks and whatnot.
...assuming anything that suggests you were wrong is a conspiracy.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
They have stopped questioning anything that they are told and accept everything that they are told as true. And this isn't a new problem in the past year or so. Back in the early 2000s many people accepted the "fact" that Iraq had WMDs without question and it lead to the death of 100,000s It just seems worse now because it's become easier to spread the misinformation with the click of a button or a tap of a screen. Before they were urban legends.
We are now going to have to protect our right for free speech because some in the establishment will want to "think of the children" and start cracking down on fake news.
A major issue is that everyone is talking about "the" problem. There is no "the" problem...there's an entire ecosystem that includes entities that are wont to do bad things, economic and social drivers that incentivize them to do these bad things, and technological functionality that empowers them to do these bad things. Social media sites and apps...in their current incarnation (including the entire ecosystem of supporting back-end processes, business arrangements, etc.)...fall into the latter. Social media is a valid place to go after the problem, even though it's not the only one; like most significant problems, what works best is a multi-pronged effort to address as much of the end-to-end chain as possible.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
We all expect the news to be misleading so all these fact checking websites popped up. But then even these show wrong information so we have no where left to trust. Sometimes they even contradict their own headlines with the news story they use as sources and just put a meter of how truthful the fact is. Can you really consider something 50% truthful and then claim it is a true fact in the headline then go say something else is 45% truth and claim it's a lie. Sorry but those made up percentages have no basis in reality.
This is a perfect example of why we have so many problems - people willing to straight-up lie, even when what they're saying can be easily disqualified.
Stern: "Are you for invading Iraq?"
Trump: "Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly."
You can say he was reluctant, but "Yeah, I guess so" is a supportive statement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - scroll to 1:39
"You want to go out for dinner?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
The sane response would *not* be "Okay, I hear you, you're opposed to going out for dinner."
Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... 0:36 in.
He didn't say 'find them in your already hacked files', he just said 'find them'. How does anyone 'find' emails they don't have? I think it's called 'hacking'. Even if he was referring to hacked emails somehow previously obtained by Russia (and how does Trump 'know this'?), isn't it concerning that a presidential candidate wants that information released publicly? He wants to LOCK HER UP because she was using an 'insecure' mail server, but it's okay for him to ENCOURAGE Russia to release that information? Will he then chant 'LOCK RUSSIA UP'? Oh, never mind.
What we need is more honesty and less people spewing lies like this, and less time spent in echo chambers. And the people and organizations who do this should not be tolerated.
Among the many other reasons noted, not mentioned is the seeming inability of the public to read more than one or two paragraphs. Perhaps three if you slip a photo of a kitten in between.
Serious/legit journalism generally requires at least a few hundred words to report on anything beyond the most trivial. And those reports often may use "big" words or terms specific to some topic. The need to concentrate for a few minutes on one thing and actually comprehend it is lost to the previous millenium.
Television news departments were never supposed to be profitable. They were supposed to be a compliance to the original guidelines of the FCC licensing to provide for the 'common good'. You did news so that you could put on all the other entertainment pieces. But at some point this all changed and news became yet another profit center for networks and ratings were tied into them to come up with advertising pricing. Between that motivation and the new 24 hour news cycles, network tele-journalism lost it's way. Once it bled over into a new medium like the internet where there were literally no controls in place and narrowcasting was the way to build views and ad revenue, we ended up with the echo chamber that now mainly serves to generate clicks and reinforce personal bias. We still have some great journalism in place in some of the remaining newspapers, but as readership dies (thanks partly to millennials defining it as a dead medium) we're going to lose those credible, researched sources by reporters who actually go out and get stories as opposed to algorithmic re-posting and re-editing of someone else's shit posts.
Snopes included.
After faithfully repeating President Obama's promise, any "undocumented citizens" who vote will not be prosecuted for such fraud, the site declared the claim, that he made such a promise "False" anyway.
That's when even my industrial strength bullshit-meter blew up...
You rail on snoops about this article but did you even look at any of the evidence they presented? Did you watch the video or even READ the short transcript where the quote comes from? They were debunking a short "out-of-context" video posted somewhere on Facebook by showing the entire interview. I don't see anywhere in the transcript or video where he encourages illegal aliens to vote. At most, he tells any of their family that are citizens to vote in their place.
I am not saying the interview was some great piece of journalism, its more of a polticial ad than anything. I am just saying its not what was presented on Fox News.
If I am wrong, cite please.
It is not coordianted propaganda unfortunately, that would mean ti would be at least a semi coordinated cleverness or whatnot. The very sad reality it is general cheapness and general lazyness together which lead to the situation. Many medium and small publication just simply copy verbatim press releases or even primary sources and don't bother to do any research. Heck sometime even major media do it too. Don't believe me ? Look for snippet of media which have a special wording not often used, or pieces of news. For example recently there was the news of that guy which had Daa3sh as his wifi SSID. Well guess what ? The news was reported verbatim without verification, word for word, as it was in the original article. NO thinking. No research. Not even paraphrasing. It was verbatim copy all over.
Coordianted propaganda my ass. It is just plain uncoordinated cheapness and uncoordianted lazyness.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Regarding "the absence of someone convenient to pick on": Hillary Clinton has only herself to blame for her losing campaigns. The 2016 campaign was hers to lose and her incompetence apparently found a way to lose the electoral vote (the only vote that counts) to another candidate her campaign would not stop making fun of. Instead of spending 3 "debates" worth of time joining Trump in pointing fingers of disgust at each other, she could have chosen to raise practical arguments against that resonated with workers (such as the workers hurt by NAFTA, which she endorsed). Instead of taking money from the big banks and continuing the wars Obama kept going from Bush (as well as the drone war Obama escalated so much it's mostly Obama's legacy now), she could have done as Bernie Sanders did and raised money from the public in small donations and done as Sanders didn't by taking a new stance against empire-building. But she apparently didn't see that having the US go through another term like Obama's was never in the US' interests, only the elites whom she both was and whose interests she defended.
I can see why anyone would find the Snopes interview article confusing (how legitimate can a news source be if they're publishing "erroneous stories"?), but I'd say this is merely the latest symptom of calling erroneous story publishers "legitimate publications". First, you have to understand whose interests are being served by corporate media. It's not the general US public's interest. The US are among the most propagandized people on the planet and the US is the chief source of world terror. Maintaining the latter requires the former.
Second, go back to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and recall that the New York Times saw fit to publish factually inaccurate headline stories from Judith Miller. Miller would later retire and the Times would later apologize but in nowhere near as public a manner as they did with the far less important lies of Jayson Blair (which included a large spread and a well-attended public event that was also carried on C-SPAN). You can count on the Times to champion the pro-war position, despite that war costs lives, trillions of dollars, and most Americans don't want war. Following suit with a pro-war US presidential candidate such as Hillary Clinton (a Syrian "no-fly" zone that she secretly tells her bankster friends will "kill a lot of Syrians") is de rigueur.
Digital Citizen
Social media isn't the problem as long as it doesn't get into the business of publishing news articles itself. "Facebook News Network" isn't really a thing yet, for example. When people complain that social media helps promote fake news, that's really just a complaint that people are reading these fake news sites, accepting what they read as truthful, and passing them on as recommended reading for their friends.
As an Independent, politically, I'm getting incredibly tired of seeing everything framed as a 2 dimensional "left vs. right" debate. That's why you see all this division (claims that "The Right" are full of stupid, gullible people believing all the fake news, or claims that the left-wing idiots won't accept the truth when it's held in front of their faces).
Reality is, there's no confidence in the mass media anymore, because it doesn't make the effort to provide well researched, unbiased news. Decades ago, the TV news went from a "loss leader" to a big profit center. The focus became entertaining as many people as possible to boost ratings. So jovial anchor-people with silly banter back and forth, or the "weather bunny" became more important than spending money on deep research of a story. And we all know how the newspapers have been hurting since people don't want to pay for one thrown on their doorstep each morning, and advertising in them has been rendered ineffective vs. online alternatives. Combine all of that with many news outlets getting bought out by the same few moguls, and you have a homogenizing of the news. No matter what you read or watch, it tends to learn towards the agenda of the owner of the networks -- and everything else is based on the same "news wire" stories they all obtain and rehash.
If you're a blogger with really limited resources but a motivation to start your own "alternative news site", chances are, you approach it with a strong bias too. That's what motivates you to keep going with it. You have viewpoints that you feel everyone else is ignoring, so you try to emphasize them. This is how we got to such sites as InfoWars or NaturalNews. Offering a strong bias that appeals to an "under-recognized" minority of readers/listeners is a combination for success -- even if it muddies the waters for people just trying to get the facts.
As for the "fact checking" sites like Snopes? The consensus I've seen is that they USED to be pretty unbiased, but ALSO took on more of the internet "chain letters" and other nonsense that was easy to disprove as fraudulent, without attaching any political slant. (If a supposed letter promising a free can of tuna or soda is proven to be fake, nobody considers it a left-wing or right-wing issue.) Lately, they seem to come up much more often when debating something said by the Democrats or Republicans -- and I think a bias toward the left is starting to show. (I don't have links handy at the moment, but I've noticed a few times where Snopes tried to deny a claim against a liberal politician as false. But upon reading their explanation, it was clear they gave an incomplete answer and ignored some of the reasons people on the Right had concerns it was true.) I think they're still a site worth reading -- but certainly not the "end all, be all" answer. (I don't believe the owners of Snopes had any particular credentials making them better than the rest of us at fact checking either?)
When you alter you contradict your own fact checking to include partisan interpretations and equivocation to bolster an agenda, you lose credibility.
Snopes is no longer a credible source for fact checking when they don't stick to facts as stated BY SNOPES. Now I have to suspect every analysis on editorializing. Snopes provides their own custom narrative on judgement re: http://www.snopes.com/hillary-... - she did laugh, she did plea bargain him out, etc. Don't say false when it's true, but you are trying to meet your own overall conclusion. It really soured me. Yes, the story is basically false, but the fact checking there is factually incorrect. Her behavior isn't all that strange among defense attorneys.
That being said, the idea of "fake news" is tricky subject when real news can be spun so hard. Facts get blurred when put together in unexpected ways to form a new headline which is almost always to meet some agenda. On the other hand, a news story always starts with a perceived context, so which is more correct? The more factually correct or the more coherent narrative?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I saw Stephen Colbert and John Oliver doing an "interview" last night, at a benefit for the Montclair Film Festival. (It was originally planned as an election recap, but that would have been too sore a subject ...) In response to an audience question about "fake news", Colbert said (not claiming a precise quote here) that the term is being misused: "it's not fake news, it's just lying". "The Daily Show", Jon Stewart, SNL, and many other comedians beforehand have categorized "fake news" - topical humor on current events, and more recently on the news media itself - for years. The current discussion is about so-called news items that are simply false, or contain simple falsehoods because the real person being quoted said something simply false. At best people are woefully misinformed; at worst, they know better and are deliberately lying.
We don't yet have an analysis of the fake news situation or even the kinds of fake news out there. There's erroneous news (offered in good faith but wrong), unresearched news (not bothered to check even the basics), but most ominously there's manufactured fake news, created to (among many possible reasons) raise the noise level around an issue but steer people in an erroneous direction. Like cryptography, it will be an escalating war to identify and put down various kinds of fake news even as people purposefully creating it get better at walking the line between fantasy and reality.
I'm sorry, but you should more properly have said:
The extremist controlled media (and yes, I mean extremist in the most derogatory sense) has for years cherry picked content to frame arguments and poison the well. This has been done to promote the extremist agenda, which is completely anti-American. They do so with culture as much as politics. Those two tactics of Sophistry that have been around for at least 2500 years but are very effective w...
It would have been just as true. And it wouldn't have falsely implied that only one side was doing it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Snopes history is quite "illustrative" on how "fake news" propagates. Snopes is an aggregator of memes, and gets 99% of their content from "Factcheck.org) .. Who owns Factcheck.org?.. The Annenberg Foundation! Who are the Annenberg's .. only one of America's favorite Mafia families. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just take this one example of how Snopes spreads disinformation: http://www.indiana.edu/~p10134... Snopes has had over 17 tries to get the "facts" right on this one single issue. Snopes started with .. "The Test is a hoax.. never existed" .. WRONG, The Test was never given to students .. WRONG, The test was only given to Teachers.... and over 15 other tries to get the "facts" right! Still 17 tries later, they still don't have the "facts" .. Snopes is a joke, and "exhibit A" of how lies are propagated to their followers.
SNOPES .. is nothing but a pack of Lies.
It's not that everyone that racist is bad at math, but that they don't apply it properly in certain contexts. I would go so far as to say that unconscious emotional biases widely keep people from noticing evidence contradicting their emotional biases.
When I say unconscious, what I mean is emotional biases that you really aren't aware of. I had this brutally forced to my attention in the early twenties when I was considering marrying a black woman. Irrational fear welled up, which justified itself in patently irrational reasons. I had not previously been aware that I was at all racist, but since then I've never been able to doubt it. I can often look at particular fears I have (usually in retrospect) and say "that was irrational, and due to emotional bias", but knowing that the fear is foolish and irrational doesn't usually help that much. Of course, if I had a strong reason to do something, that might overcome the fear, but it doesn't make it go away.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm sorry to say, but this community is five years in the past, and I'm face palming. By the time this community realizes why Trump got elected, he'll be gone. I assure you, it's not because of "those dirty ignorant conservatives." People have been saying it all along. The very news sources liberals relied on for the election lied to them. No one listened before, and no one listens now. Does anyone question the foundation of their opinions? No. They reinforce their bias by reverberating the same mantras from the same sources that made them wrong in the first place. What if I told you that that phrase "Reality has a liberal bias" is as truthful as Google's "Do no evil"?
Extremely biased news sources, like CNN and MSNBC, are getting their asses kicked by internet sources like Infowars, and Breitbart.
In response, some left wing extremist associate professor created a list of "fake news" sites. By "fake news" she means anything that is not left wing biased.
"Remember all those "journalists" who kept claiming that Hillary Clinton is going to win by "landslide"?"
It's not that they were smart or stupid: in the weeks before the election there was a lot of "Hillary is going to win" reporting going on everywhere. There was even a fair amount of it here on Slashdot, just mindless posts stating "Hillary is going to win". I am confident that was all part of the Hillary PR campaign.
Enten and Nate Silver himself are clearly left wing. The lower echelon probably are, but it's hard to tell since they mostly carry water for the leadership.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Many of the "right wing hate crime" hoaxes have been debunked.
Meanwhile, in many incidents people have been arrested for attacking Trump supporters or committing property crimes during anti-Trump riots.
You are part of the fake news problem.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Oh come on...anyone believing in ONE website is nuts to begin with. Inside the USA, hell, you can't trust any of the news on the left or the right. It's all political in nature, to serve their propaganda. Anytime I see a story that claims one politician, killed, raped, stole something, I'll search it out. That includes sites OUTSIDE of the USA. You know what they say...what they DON'T print, speaks volumes.
Why is Black Friday even a thing outside the US
Friday and Christmas are the same across all countries using the Gregorian calendar. Black Friday is the Friday closest to 30 days before Christmas, or 31 before Boxing Day.
The last time that sort of federated paywall was tried, it was called the Adult Check platform, presumably because when people are adults, they can pay for nice things. Each subscriber paid $10 a month or so, and each participating publisher got a share of Adult Check's revenue based on its page view count. It was successful for several years until the publisher of a magazine called Perfect 10 successfully sued Adult Check for processing payments for several publishers that were using photos from Perfect 10 without permission.
The data is part of a feedback cycle. Of course math itself isn't racist, but the way its used most certainly can be. If black people were correlated with defaults in the 1970's (which they were, in no small part due to racist policies), and that's part of the training set for AI, and that AI can find data that indicates race, that AI will discriminate against black people.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
On Netflix or Amazon Prime, one is more likely to binge several complete series. News articles, on the other hand, are found through general-purpose web search engines or through citations shared on social media and viewed one at a time. Having to pay upwards $4 for a month of access to each of ten different sites in a day just to read only one article from each site adds up over the course of a month to a total that non-professional readers cannot afford. Settling for subscribing to only one news source locks the reader into that news source's biases and keeps the reader from fact-checking on other sources, which are (conveniently) also paywalled.
Scripted series also have a fairly long shelf life (notwithstanding fear of water cooler spoilers), so one can switch among Netflix during one month, a different service in another month, etc. Amazon has tried to counter this by making Prime an annual commitment. News, on the other hand, goes stale fairly quickly.
Democracy requires educated and informed citizen. This gives news companies a specific duty that is screwed when we allow tycoons to buy them.
As a consequence, there is a need for a special rule here. For instance, we could require news companies to be owned only by staff and readers. Of course some will die because of the lack of investment, but that is better than living just to produce poor news and defend the owner's business.
They've been happy to carry oceans for the right causes, but not if it is an inconvenient truth.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So given a line-up of 2 randomly chosen people, one white and one black, there is essentially equal chance that either one is an ex-con. And if you have a line up of more than 2 people, one that is racial proportional to the general population, say 7 white guys, 1 hispanic guy, 1 black guy and one ethnically ambiguous-maybe-asian, then the chance that at least one of the white people is a felon is about 7x higher than the chance that the black guy is a felon.
I agree with everything you're saying, in principle, but your math is bad. ... .2% both felons
It's not true that there's an essentially equal chance that either one of a randomly picked white-black pair is an ex-con.
From your provided numbers
A randomly chosen white person is one out of 156 million of which there is a 2.1% chance you picked a felon.
A randomly chosen black person is one out of 27 million with a 12% chance you picked a felon.
The combinatorics of picking two people, one white and one black give us 4,212 million combinations of two chosen.
(for each white cycle through 27M black =156M*27M)
Of these 4,212M combinations, there are four possible arrangements.
innocent white and innocent black (152.8M Innoc-W * 24.2M Innoc-B = 3697.76M pairs gives 87.8% of pairs both innocent
felon white and innocent black (3.2M felon-W * 24.2 Innoc-B = 77.44M pairs gives 1.8% of pairs felon white and innocent black
innocent white and felon black (152.8M Innoc-W * 2.8M Felon-B = 428.06M pairs gives 10.2% innocent white and felon black
felon white and felon black (3.2M Felon-W * 2.8M Felon-B = 8.96M pairs gives
So, of two randomly chosen white-black pairs out of the general population, there's a 2% chance you have a white felon and a 10.4% chance there's a black felon.
I am not advocating changing the rules to overturn the most recent election, but it is worth thinking about for future elections.
Yes, they were both using different strategies and trump was all over my state like a fly on shit (and he still lost my state), but it is making people think about whether we should continue with this system.
How many people in California didn't vote because they knew it really wouldn't make a difference? What about Texas or New York?
It's very easy to support the Electoral College when most of the time it votes the same way as the popular vote and the exceptions to that match your choice anyway.
I think calling the system rigged was a good strategy on Trump's part. Many of his voters may believe the system is rigged, but they were going to have their voices heard and he got the vote out.
Say what you will about the interests of the individual states, but I don't think any state with perhaps the exception of WV and their interest in coal was voting for Clinton or Trump based on their own state interests.
Like many people I have lived in several states. I have never voted for President based on the interests of that state. That's what I do when I vote for my Senators and Congressmen.
Many Clinton supporters were just smugly laughing at Trump and truly believed he had no chance of actually winning that many of them just stayed home.
I can see why it seems more ethereal when there's less of a concrete entity to point the finger at, and this accusation about how information disseminates has more attention on it now, but why media competitors would be without sufficient editing and fact checking is something that's been followed for a quite a while and is actually pretty comprehensively accounted for, probably best by Noam Chomsky when describing the phenomenon as a propaganda model. Because it's more complicated and because it's more a product of the environment of news corporations, private interests, and government, rather than specific entities you can point the finger at, it becomes more like attempting to point the finger at any one thing causing an economic crisis. To narrow it down to one answer that has to remain vague due to its large scope, the reason that media can't have the things it used to are that new trends, generally pioneered by 6 members of an oligopoly(or forced onto them by other conditions), forcing the rest of the non-privy companies to have to dramatically lower overhead, generally leaning them in a direction similar to those 6 entities, or, if desirable, causing a loss of money great enough for those businesses to be consumed through acquisitions and mergers which allow the new parent company to enforce this newer less fact oriented conduct(in the 90's I believe the oligopoly was 22 groups). The more complicated answer, as to what the trends are, can't really be explained in detail in something like an internet comment, but to just name one of the biggest ones, the 6 members of the current media oligopoly, shifted away from investigative journalism to obtain information and towards journalists developing special relationships that are sometimes unofficial, exclusive, or sought after as a commodity with PR employees. Because the number of PR employees working for the government and private interest put together whose job it is to give journalists info exceeds the number of journalists whose job it is to obtain info, this reduces overhead that forces competitors to have to similarly let go of investigative journalism to reduce overhead in order to keep from being forced out of business.
It's absolutely no surprise to see the US based people getting stroppy when they get a taste of their own medicine - see the complaints when Brazil did a quid pro quo to treating only US citizens visiting Brazil to rigorous security theatre and allowing everyone else to enter normally, when the US started treating incoming visitors to the States differently.
I think it's a fantastic state of affairs that the US is finally seeing the reaping of the policies they've sown over the past decades, just unfortunate that so many normal and innocent people are going to be so badly affected in the future as a direct result. Then again, many normal and innocent people were affected when the US stuck its unwanted nose into other countries sovereign affairs...
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
lol as someone once said, elections have consequences.... get over it
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
What i find rather funny, almost laughably so, it the incessant need to use fake and/or made up news articles to argue the merits of an article about fake/made up news. I don't know if the irony or sarcasm is killing me, but surely you can't believe the crap that's being posted?
I am truly saddened. I now understand the scripture: "Jesus wept."
The question asked of Obama was: "If 'undocumented citizens' vote, will they get into any trouble?" His answer was: "No, they will not."
However you spin it, the actual discussion went as follows:
RODRIGUEZ: Many of the millennials, Dreamers, undocumented citizens -- and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country -- are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?
OBAMA: Not true. And the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself. And there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, et cetera. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential in terms of who you voted for. If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.
RODRIGUEZ: This has been a huge fear presented especially during this election.
OBAMA: And the reason that fear is promoted is because they don't want people voting. People are discouraged from voting and part of what is important for Latino citizens is to make your voice heard, because you're not just speaking for yourself. You're speaking for family members, friends, classmates of yours in school...
RODRIGUEZ: Your entire community.
OBAMA: ... who may not have a voice. Who can't legally vote. But they're counting on you to make sure that you have the courage to make your voice heard.
To the contrary of your portrayal, Obama is emphasizing that only citizens can vote, notes that many have friends and relatives cannot legally vote, and that it is still important for those who can vote, to vote and show their interest, and that some massive dragnet won't be formed to find them out just to punish them for having the temerity to voice their entirely lawful political opinion.
But do go ahead, continue to show the rest of us why deceit is such a major part of your plan. If you were honest and true, why would you need to lie?
And if you had any sense, why would you lie so transparently?
And faith means that all facts that fit your faith are true, all facts that don't, are false. And you shouldn't try to research these facts to see if they really are true, that will just confuse you.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
and you know this by having researched stuff...?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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When the internet allows you to fairly easily and quickly fact check the fact checkers themselves and determine that every last site has some bias and often blurs or distorts facts and interpretations to their particular point of view it is obvious that "fake" is an unrealistically broad term to have a meaningful discussion or debate on this topic. I have gotten some very useful and possibly highly accurate information from some so-called "fake" news sites while I have received information of very low or questionable accuracy quite frequently from "mainstream" news sites. To me it proves nothing other than every source of information has an opinion, an axe to grind and I need to be knowledgeable and question the veracity and quality of all information I access.
There are always Apparatniks like you will, who will sell out their country for power
Like selling control of a huge portion of US Uranium to a Russian interest?
Good point you make there.
CpnTripps
You are, no doubt, familiar with the idea that a minimum sample size is necessary to generalize results to the population?
Well, what no-one seems to know is that the math works both ways, the results can not reliably be applied to any group -smaller- than the required sample size.
When you are faced with a single person, statistics cannot tell you -anything at all- about them!
This mistake is the cause of most racism and prejudice.
Seems to me that social media and political issues are less of an problem than trash advertising for misinformation on health products. And the major media are sticking those trash advertisers on their pages seeking revenue without any consideration of the ethics of the products being presented.
they would have been long forbidden if they actually had.
bickerdyke
I think that media at large (including biased, seemingly non biased, and established mainstream) have a problem with credibility because of bad editing habits. The headlines are designed to sell. This makes for a bad reading experience. Even SlashDot has been guilty of that, and of course harshly reprimanded when ti does. If news organizations want to be considered credible, they need to strive for their chosen profession's excellence standards, not use it to just lash out. (use the news force, Luke!). Some editors do a good job, most don't unfortunately (imho)
For the biased media outlets, I see a large part of the problem as it seems there an additional need just to get even exposure by using a 'fight fire with fire' mentality. i.e., "if the other side (alt-right) puts out fake news, then we have to just to be heard" sort of thing. It's wrong, of course, and suspicions rise from everywhere wondering if those are plants as well, or used to sway the unknowing or think it's funny because of the reactions they get. Didn't we call them 'trolling' articles before?
Snopes has been used a lot by both sides to denounce the other side's articles, which can explain their increased traffic more than complaining people are not fact-checking. "Who's facts are the real facts?" becomes an e-discovery in itself beyond the story you're trying to fact check. Complaining there are not enough news people (fact checkers, editing, etc) seems to be a cop-out for me. Then get better. Every industry deserves more support personnel and sometimes you have to wear two hats (like devops). Learn. Expand that knowledge of your profession. No one else will. The empty spots are a warning sign to a changing industry (from paper to ethernet). Adapt to survive....or change careers.
That's for sure. He really has gone off the deep end now.
A shame.
Just prior to the election, latest consensus "too close to call"
That's bullshit. It's only been a couple of weeks, too early to try to rewrite history dufus.
Nope, the parent was right. Before Comey's investigation announcement, Clinton had widened her lead in the wake of Trump's 1980s video comments. But at that point her momentum full-stopped and she started losing support again. The "undecided voter" group grew, and the margin of victory on election day was within the margin of error.
Snopes provides their own custom narrative on judgement re: http://www.snopes.com/hillary-... [snopes.com] - she did laugh, she did plea bargain him out, etc
She did laugh, but not about what the original circulated story had her laughing about, nor the context that the story implied. The original story was "she gave an interview where she admitted she knew he was guilty. And she laughed about it."
Specifically from the article: "The audio on these tapes is difficult to understand, but Clinton can be heard describing the case as "terrible." She did audibly laugh or chuckle at points, not about "knowing that the defendant was guilty" or "getting a guilty guy off" (which makes little sense, given that the defendant pled guilty) but rather while musing about how elements of the case that might ordinarily have supported the prosecution worked in the defendant's favor (i.e., observing that the defendant's passing a polygraph test had "forever destroyed her faith" in that technology)." Note that he pled guilty. This is not disputed by either side. It's also not questioned that ALL people under trial are entitled to a vigorous defense. Hillary Clinton had him take a polygraph which he pass, and she was chuckling that he passed it, somehow.
Also note that it was the prosecution who pushed for the plea deal to avoid the daughter having to testify. That's in the legal record and it directly contradict's the story's assertion. Do you have a problem with Snopes's explanation of events? I'm still looking for the false or misleading conclusion or argument here from the Snopes article.