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The US Government Funds A War On Online Fake News (bangordailynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:
Congressional negotiators on Wednesday approved an initiative to track and combat foreign propaganda amid growing concerns that Russian efforts to spread "fake news" and disinformation threaten U.S. national security. The measure, part of the National Defense Authorization Act approved by a conference committee, calls on the State Department to lead government-wide efforts to identify propaganda and counter its effects. The authorization is for $160 million over two years...
The Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, has approved language in the fiscal year 2017 intelligence authorization bill calling for new executive branch efforts to combat what it characterized as "active measures" by Russia to manipulate people and governments through front groups, covert broadcasting or "media manipulation." "There is definitely bipartisan concern about the Russian government engaging in covert influence activities of this nature," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "If you read section 501 of this year's intelligence authorization bill, it directs the President to set up an interagency committee to 'counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence over peoples and governments.'"
Several senators on the intelligence committee also asked President Obama to declassify any information relating to the Russian government and the U.S. election.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, has approved language in the fiscal year 2017 intelligence authorization bill calling for new executive branch efforts to combat what it characterized as "active measures" by Russia to manipulate people and governments through front groups, covert broadcasting or "media manipulation." "There is definitely bipartisan concern about the Russian government engaging in covert influence activities of this nature," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "If you read section 501 of this year's intelligence authorization bill, it directs the President to set up an interagency committee to 'counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence over peoples and governments.'"
Several senators on the intelligence committee also asked President Obama to declassify any information relating to the Russian government and the U.S. election.
Let the US government fake news win!
We called it propaganda for hundreds of years? Why change now? Is this some form of doublenextplusgoodspeak?
I use a high quality source for my news. TheOnion.com is America's finest news source (it says so in Google) and provides me with everything I need to know about news. If everyone would use high quality news sources, we would all know the truth like I do.
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Look. If you think your populace is too stupid to discern between a clickbait tabloid and real news (whatever the fuck that is these days), going after the messengers will only aggravate the issue. Either through malice or stupidity, a government truthiness division will just make people more likely to validate their biases towards those that are government approved. This is just a ploy for votes/money anyways. The CIA has long participated with the media in terms of combating propaganda and injecting the party line into the zeitgeist.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
The time is coming where any news expressing something the government doesn't want us to hear will
just have a FAKE label slapped on it, followed by a "Fake News Removal Order" (Evolution of the DMCA) sent to the hosting website.
If it were really about eliminating the fake news threat; a major goal would instead be to improve education of the people to more readily spot suspicious content, evaluate it logically and rationally, and not be fooled by snake oil.
A lot of /.ers will say if you're dumb enough to fall for fake news that's your problem. You're ignoring what happens to millions of people's brains as they age. Not everyone has their full mental facilities in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Unless you're going to start administering tests to decide who gets to vote (and please God, let /.ers be smart enough to know why that's a bad idea) then the problem of fake news needs to be faced head on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What part about freedom of the press and "congress shall make no law" don't they understand
Shit, they might as well name the new effort the Ministry of Truth so that it can be crystal clear what they are trying to accomplish.
What, the US mainstream media didn't work hard enough disparaging Donald Trump for the last year? Let's dredge up the Russia boogeyman again and say Russian propaganda is a threat to US propaganda. We need to install a new government branch called the Department of Propaganda to counter such danger to national security. Citizens and countrymen, it's time to double, nay triple our propaganda efforts this time, so that it doesn't fail again!
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 (part of the National Defense Authorization Act) has repealed the domestic prohibition, allowing the government's propaganda to be directed at/created for Americans for the first time in over 40 years.
Russian propaganda is an excuse and diversion to prevent people from realizing that this is a new effort of the US government to create and disseminate propaganda to the American public, fully backed by the law. The line "2017 intelligence authorization bill calling for new executive branch efforts" sounds a lot to me like "President Trump will have this new propaganda tool at his disposal to hoodwink US residents even further than they already have been by every source already."
It also smacks of a return to the Cold War anti-USSR propaganda spouted by every source. I can't help but feel a "wag the dog" situation is unfolding, with a growing Russian bogeyman to distract us from our growing domestic problems.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The current state of affairs is too complicated for an AC analysis in a single post but I will say a few things. The two main political parties are closer to each other than we realize. If you look at Europe and elsewhere, you find greater differences and more parties. Because they are so similar, they have spent decades attempting to distinguish themselves and their supports from the each other. They have played the people against each other through sensationalist rhetoric, attack campaigns (good ol' muckraking as it used to be called), lies and incessant fear that the other party is trying to destroy your life and family. We've dug a 3 mile deep trench in a 10 foot wide field and convinced everyone that the people on the other side are monsters. Incidentally, this sort of dehumanizing psychology is what allowed so many soldiers to view the enemy as animals and treat them accordingly. When we no longer see people, we are no longer bound by any empathy.
So how is this relevant to fake news? The connection is simple imo. If you believe that the other side is a manipulative, pathological liar, then everything they say and everything that agrees with their viewpoint must be wrong. It can't be considered or even analyzed. So what do you do? You seek out views that reflect your own side and you end up in an echo chamber.
While I believe that the internet has the greatest potential we have ever seen to bring us together and unite us as a species on a path to a better future, that potential is not being realized. We may be here together on this site right now, collectively considering the consequences of fake news, the recent election, the growing surveillance across the globe, and we may share the same shock and dismay and even fear, but this is yet another echo chamber. All forms of social media seem to reinforce this and the potential of the itnernet is lost in groupthink.
We have reached a point where the American government is going to start policing media for fake news in the interest of national security. This is the motivation of China with their great firewall. That was the motivation of the old Soviet governments. Censorship and control are not the answer. Meaningful dialogue and a critical eye are. We need to stop with the vehement rhetoric and the everpresent need to prove the other side wrong or scream about how the sky is falling. We need to calmly start asking for citations and weigh the evidence presented. We need to remember that most issues are finely nuanced and that sometimes both sides are partially right and partially wrong. We need to stop seeking out spurious information that confirms our own worldview and re-inforces our comfy bubble, but rather seek out contrary information and evaluate it.
If we can do that then all the BS in the world from foreign state agents won't make a difference. We are only susceptible to it now because of all the ridiculous infighting. Decades of that have left us uncritical, petulantly defensive, blind to facts, and obstinate to an impossible degree.
If your response to this is to just blow it off as "yeah, people are stupid, you can't do anything about it" or make more sarcastic comments then you are part of the problem. This can be changed. Shitty government can be changed. Shitty news agencencies can be run out of business. It just won't happen if we're all sitting around mouthing off about how bad everything is on the internet instead of discussing ways to fix it.
Of course, the pessimistic cynic in me says that this won't even show up on the page. Prove that voice wrong.
Seriously. They meddle in elections all over the globe.
Elect anyone who is slightly socialist?
USA to the rescue!!
Elect someone the USA doesn't like? Must be election fraud!!
Nationalize oil companies? Here, have an embargo.
Violate the human rights of women and immigrants, don't have democratic elections, no freedom of religion, no free press?
Please be our ally UAE!!
Honestly, fuck the US and their hypocrisy.
They can complain about russians influencing their election when they stop fucking around with countries all over the world.
Historical article: "Establishment of Minitrue"
Yes, we know. All mainstream media are fake news. All hail the trustworthy Fox News and Breitbart. Wikipedia has a left-wing bias, as has physics, universities, Einstein (dirty Jew) and science in general. All hair our great Fuerer Trump and his new Mobocracy.
Is to fix the credibility of the so called real news, in this election they basically burned all their goodwill as fast as a gamegear plow thru batteries.
This much censorship makes it MORE likely there's something to the allegations, not less. Nobody cares when the National Enquirer makes up nonsense about Brangelina or the Weekly World News claims to have found aliens.
You remember.......the one the Obama administration blamed for the Benghazi attack? Does that count as fake news?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I used to turn to BBC for reliable news but once they became embedded during the Iraq war they never extricated themselves and are no longer a reliable news source. I turned to Al Jazeera who always reported both sides and went out of their way to help me understand the other side of the story but the US military actually targeted them and arrested them so they stopped printing the truth. There is only fake news left. I now read a variety of sources like Russia Today as well as western news and judge the truth to be somewhere in the middle of the two lies.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Unlike you, he was able to pass the entrance exam.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'd like to see that report, 97% is way too high to be believable. I don't think you could get 97% of people to self-identify as human.
All hair our great Fuerer Trump and his new Mobocracy.
You're a recent college graduate and on drugs, aren't you?
For what it is worth, I am a PhD and definitely not a recent college graduate. Most of those are legitimate news sources, but then that has less meaning than it used to. I do watch a fair amount of CNN, or rather listen when I'm doing something else. CNN tends to be mostly correct, but they also gave Trump lots of free air time, not because they like Trump, but because they like money. CNN is also fact light. They need to fix that, but first they need to fire all the shills. If your primary purpose is to represent a party or a candidate, you should be gone.
Still, to be fair, CNN was certainly way better than the crap that was floating around Facebook. It was beyond criminal that this crap wasn't denounced by _everyone_, but then Trump never complains when he is helped, regardless of how bad it is for the country.
How do we fix it? My suggestion is this.
1) Enough tax money to pay for many independent news agencies at various levels, local, state, etc.
2) The boards leading the agencies can be elected, but cannot have any association with any political candidate in the past so many years.
3) Each agency checks the reporting on other agencies. Have promotions linked to either outstanding reporting or uncovering lies of other reporters. Whether a reporter gets promoted is reviewed by a random set of his peers that changes. Rotate who checks whom. Yes, I don't like all the potential back stabbing that is possible, but the truth is a precious thing, and it can be objectively proven. We need to do that.
4) Agencies remain independent. If the associated board fails to act to stop bad reporting, then the recourse is for the town to hold a special election to replace the board.
5) To prevent the emergence of a fox news town, provide a way for a set of independent agencies to basically declare an entire agency a failure. De-fund it and redeploy the resources elsewhere. This should be a high bar and not done easily. One possible indication of failure is if repeated surveys on common provable factual information reveal that the people that watch said news consistently believe lies, well that would mean they have been nicely indoctrinated by lies. Garbage in. Garbage out.
6) Move people around somewhat. Make sure that you rotate different providers so that people see a range of viewpoints, or at least have them available during the most common news hour. When fact checking provide multiple links when possible. For instance, if say 3845 out of 3902 accredited news agencies say Trump is a liar, well people have no excuse if they believe the opposite.
7) Make sure people know relevant details. What some con man tweets is not necessarily news worthy. His myriad conflict of interests and the sheer vastness of his lies are. The fact the vast majority of accredited news sources didn't endorse him is a relevant piece of news as well as why they didn't endorse him, and no it wasn't because they were all in the tank for Hillary.
Now you can't entirely stop people from following non credible sources, but we can do our best to make sure credible reporting is supported. It is sort of like broccoli. If you put it in front of a kid, tell him it is good for him, and he still throws it on the floor and refuses to eat anything but french fries, well, if that is how our country ends, then so be it.
The problem is that people equate being able and allowed to tell the truth with some sort of obligation to do so, and that's dangerous. You have the same effect as you do with people being dissatisfied with the medical system or with science. I do not want to believe in established science/pharmacy/news, and there is someone else who sells "non-establishment" science/pharmacy/news, so he must be right because "the establishment" is something I don't trust.
And that's dangerous.
Just because A is false doesn't automatically mean that B is true just because B contradicts A.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Going after fake news? does this mean the US government will be attacking its own propaganda sites too? or is this just more hypocrisy where it is only everyone else that isn't allowed to create fake news?
OPM (Other People's Money) You've just "self-identified" yourself as a lib-leftie.
As opposed to a rightie who loves to take OPM as you put it but refuses to talk about it in a sensible way or even admit to it? Red states receive on average considerably more federal money than blue ones. That makes republican voters net beneficiaries of "other people's money" more than democrat voters.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That's genuinely how people think in a post-truth world. They think that all politicians are liars, all media is biased and published fake news, all experts are either idiots or biased... So they just decide to believe people who tell them what they want to hear, without bothering to figure out if it is true or not because, if you didn't get it the first time, everything is a lie anyway.
There is no truth, only that warm fuzzy feeling of having your existing views confirmed.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Republican Climate Change deniers are passing a law regarding monitoring truth in news? These are the same guys that has recently earned headlines like House Science Committee Tweets Climate-Change Denying Breitbart Article.
The are giving the power to "enforce" what is fake to an incoming president with about 70% of his statements rated from "mostly false" to "pants on fire" ( Donald Trump's file)?
I started to write a novel around this concept a decade ago. My friends urged me to abandon the idea was it was too far fetched. "Not believable," they said. "Would never happen," they argued.
I agreed that it was a silly idea.
Damn.
Well, okay, let's do as you suggest. The ultimate ad-hominem, reject all media because it's been found to be inaccurate. Mainstream, non-mainstream alike, because it's not like Breitbart or Reddit are any better.
Now what? How do we know anything about anything happening beyond our immediate vicinity?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You claim certainty that Trump is "...ridiculously unprepared and still doesn't really understand what the job entails." but there is a bit of reality you and others like you still have not yet faced:
Barack Obama had never done a productive thing in his life when elected President.
He had a good academic career, many years of experience as a State Legislator, almost 4 years as a US Senator, and was clearly competent and obviously had a strong grasp of policy.
Still he didn't have sufficient Federal experience and paid for it in his first couple years in office.
Everybody has their opinions about whether Trump is good/evil, right/left (Lots of Republicans fear he is too liberal and Democrat-aligned), etc but the simple fact is that the man is far more qualified to be CEO of the US (The President is the top executive job in the US government, the head of the executive branch)
CEO is a very different position than President.
than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Bush COMBINED. Trump has been successfully running a multi-billion dollar international corporation through about 40 years of economic ups and downs and shifting legal sands and even across shifting international lines. He has employed tens of thousands of people around the world and has hired and fired, promoted and overseen and monitored hundreds of managers of his many sub units of his vast holdings and has probably more experience in managing a team that manages a complex, hierarchical, distributed entity than ANY US President since Eisenhower.
He's mostly a franchise at this point, licensing his name to other groups to throw on hotels. When he manages things himself bankruptcies and unpaid bills are a typical outcome.
I suspect he's pretty good at real estate, and he may do a decent job of managing his organization, but his chaotic disorganized campaign was a common story line during the election, the most obvious evidence being the two campaign managers he fired and turfing the entire transition team several days after winning.
His managerial abilities are clearly not universally awesome.
He was also caught out many times simply not understanding fairly basic things about different policy areas, what the POTUS did, or even what the constitution said.
I stole this Sig
Okay, but if every source of information about the world beyond your immediate ken is unreliable and must be rejected, how can you possible be informed about the world?
That was my point really. No media outlet is perfect, but some are clearly better than others. Obviously you should still be sceptical, but just because CNN isn't perfect doesn't mean you need to run to Breitbart instead. The latter is 90% bullshit, people just like it because it happens to align with their prejudices.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC