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?
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 single story sums up CNN: Math is racist.
With that single story a national of deplorables can trivially take CNN off the credible list. But that isn't the only story. Its been a barrage of bullshit for years and years now.
You can easily find complete bullshit stories like this coming out of every single major news outlet, be it FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, RT, and even PBS and NPR.
Thats it. They have taken credibility off the table so all thats left is pushing paid-for narratives and personal biases. Its really as simple as that w.r.t. the media.
"His name was James Damore."
I wish it was just slipping.
Over the course of the past five years or so I've seen every major newspaper in my country (Denmark) turn into tabloids, with extremely clickbaity article names, misinformation, mistranslations, butchered grammar, lack of understanding of the subject matter or even the metaphors they try to use ...
It's pretty much as the article summary says - they are forced to crank out so much content with so little oversight, assistance or perhaps even education that it ends up a complete and untrustworthy mess.
Here are some quick translations of the top stories on the websites for each of the three biggest newspapers:
Ekstra-Bladet:
Trump raging after boos: Ole Henriksen refuses to apologize! (Because an entire theater was booing at Mike Pence, but this one guy gets singled out because he's originally from Denmark)
Fitnessbabe shares completely honest picture: This is what my body really looks like (Front page material right there)
BT:
Friday is when it happens: Black Friday will beat all records (Why is Black Friday even a thing outside the US, let alone front page material a week in advance?)
Famous Danes losing money: They have million dollar villas for sale - but no one wants to pay the price (Oh hey, we're still feeling a recession)
Berlingske Tidende:
Check it yourself: Your part of the country reveals your taste in music
And a special one just for subscribers: Men: "We want to do everything. So do our wives."
How are people supposed to take these newspapers seriously? How are we supposed to believe anything we read there?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
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.
Fake news, you say? Would this amazing coincidence of dozens of media outlets running the exact same theme qualify? This isn't news, it's coordinated propaganda. Fox News? You're missing the forest for the trees.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.'"