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Elon Musk To Fight Fake News, Rate Journalists' Credibility Via a Site Called 'Pravda'
Elon Musk took to Twitter today to announce his next project: a site called "Pravda" that ranks journalists' credibility and fights fake news. "Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication," tweeted Musk. "Thinking of calling it Pravda..." Musk continued: "Even if some of the public doesn't care about the credibility score, the journalists, editors & publications will. It is how they define themselves." A subsequent Twitter poll (exposed to mostly Musk followers) reveals that most people believe "this would be good."
Accredited journalist Mark Harris replied to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO with a copy of a Statement and Designation by Foreign Corporation form that names the Pravda Corp. "Er, he's not kidding folks," Harris tweeted. "I noticed that one of Musk's agents had incorporated Pravda Corp in California back in October last year. I was wondering what it was all about..."
GeekWire has catalogued a string of replies between Musk and Twitter users who are supportive/unsupportive of his plans.
Accredited journalist Mark Harris replied to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO with a copy of a Statement and Designation by Foreign Corporation form that names the Pravda Corp. "Er, he's not kidding folks," Harris tweeted. "I noticed that one of Musk's agents had incorporated Pravda Corp in California back in October last year. I was wondering what it was all about..."
GeekWire has catalogued a string of replies between Musk and Twitter users who are supportive/unsupportive of his plans.
It's a joke from Soviet Russia, though probably an obscure reference in 2018. They had two main newspapers, Pravda which means "Truth" and Izvestia which means "News". Pravda was the official voice of the communist party and Izvestia was the official voice of the soviet government. In English the joke would be "There is no truth in News, and there is no news in Truth." The current day newspapers are fairly unrelated.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The problem is confirmation bias. Michael Moore didn't convince anyone who didn't already agree with him, but he convinced idiots that their opponents had just been disproved. Today's fake news works the same way, it doesn't really fool anybody of a different ideology but it strengthens the partisan echo chamber so that fewer people ever step outside of it. Kind of like religious dogma in that the more absurd it is the more your faith is enhanced by believing and the less likely you are to question anything in the future.
(For the record, I'm as liberal as non-communists come but could never stand Moore.)
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> the smarter people will deem them as non-trustworthy
Unfortunately, in my experience even "the smarter people" are most often fanbois of one of the political parties, and specifically of whichever mouthpiece the party assigns at the moment.
Slashdot commenters, as a whole, probably have a median IQ somewhat higher than the average, yet most of the comments here about anything *remotely* political are obviously driven by the party line. Commenters routinely contradict themselves when asked a couple of questions, because the bumper sticker or tweet by their "team" didn't explain anything, it just announced the conclusion that their fans should defend.
> The important thing to take note, in a system like this will be that some will rate or judge based on
> "how much they like the message" versus the quality and truthfulness of said message,
> and the fact that it can be independently verified.
Indeed, that's the problem. It seems to me the majority of people routinely fall prey to that to the extent that how much the message fits with their pre-conceived, "first guess" ideas is more important than any evidence. We all do that to some extent, myself included. I *try* not to, and I'm not a fan of any particular political party or politician, so that helps.
* When I say "I'm not a fan of any particular politician", I mean I see faults in all of them, and don't follow any of them as "my team". I also see some good things about some of them, so in that sense you could call me a "fan", but I'm more than happy to discuss where I disagree with any of them, and what I see as their failings.
Its usually higher in the food chain the problems occur. A friend of mine worked for NewsCorp and was consistently mortified at how his stories would be edited to hell and back to put this weird conservative spin on things , often to the point of straight up reversing the meanings of sentences. An example he gave was one where a particular politician had announced a raft of policies that would likely have been quite popular. A number of quotes from politicians of both side generally supportive , except one who completely hated it. By the time the story got past the editor, all the supporting quotes where removed, the bit about the politician who opposed it had been moved to the first sentence and the story retitled "Nationals condemn irresponsible Spending bill", making the story about a minor party conservative disliking a bill by a senior Labor party member, instead of it being about the bill itself. My journalist friend resigned in protest soon after. Alas, in Australia, its either work for Murdoch or join the welfare queue
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
AlanBDee confided:
Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work. While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be. Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly is more important then accuracy.
As a former computer industry trade journalist and columnist, I agree with your assessment of what has come to be called "mainstream media" journalists. Most of them try to get their facts straight.
What complicates their effort is both time pressure considerations (which is to say deadlines and the constant quest for "scoops"), and the standard "three sources" requirement for news stories. The second of those generally means having to include quotes from critics, and there are a lot of those in the auto industry, when it comes to Elon Musk.
(Which only stands to reason, since Tesla is a major disruptive force in that industry, and Detroit has been playing catch-up ever since reality caught up to their pet journalists' confident prediction that Elon's company would fold before he shipped a single car.)
And, speaking again from experience in the trade journal industry (albeit in a totally different sector), those guys - and they're almost all guys in the auto industry version - have the same ethical problems that I found many of my former tech colleagues had. To put it bluntly, a lot of them are basically whores.
There are very different standards in trade journalism than there are in the mainstream version. For one thing, there's bribery, both direct, and via major advertisers (who are the exact same companies about which these people supposedly provide objective coverage) bringing pressure to bear on these rags' publishers to run stories that are favorable to them. For instance, I was fired from my first job at McGraw-Hill's LAN Times when the pubilsher gave the editor who had hired me the boot, and replaced her and her staff with a bunch of ex-PC Week clowns. The first I heard about the new regime was a call from the new Features editor, who opened by telling me, "We want to coordinate content in the back of the book with the News section."
"So, you're telling me you want me to write columns about the latest dot-zero release of Microsoft's crapware, or Intel's me-too networking gear, instead of writing about Internet policy and technology - which is what I was hired to do to begin with?" I replied.
"I wouldn't put it like that," he responded, "but, yes, that's basically what we're looking for."
When I declined to accept the invitation to spread my legs for the magazine's advertisers, I was informed that my services would no longer be required. A year later, McGraw-Hill dispatched the useless, smudgy Xerox of Network World that LAN Times had been transmogrified into to a farm upstate.
So, I went to work for a different mag - which folded after 3 issues - and eventually wound up at Boardwatch, where I spent six glorious years, before the bumbling idiots at Penton Media did the same clueless thing to it that McGraw-Hill had done to LAN TImes. (That happened just months before the first dot-com bubble kerploded, taking most of the computer trade pub industry with it - including the animated corpse of Boardwatch, btw.)
But, a couple of years before that happend, I got so sick of the advertisers dictating content, that, in a column headlined "Crystal Blue Persuasion" (from November, 1999), I closed with a whole section addressed to PR people on how properly to bribe me to write about their clients' products or services.
(What I did not do - what I would never do - is to promise that what I wrote would be flattering. That's something that whatever gadget or service I'm writing about has to convince me it deserves And most of 'em don't.)
You should read it, when and if my ISP gets its Apache fu
Check out my novel.
Search for "EU vs Disinfo" for the EU backed try to do this. They failed woefully. Basically what is was was EU censorship "you do not follow the EU guidelines and propaganda so you are fake news". And then you're branded as being not credible as a journalist...
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