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.

Comments

So the public rates their credibility?

[llamalad]

The same public that can't differentiate -or simply doesn't care about- the difference between fact and fake news?

Re:So the public rates their credibility?

[AlanBDee]

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.

Re:So the public rates their credibility?

[Ichijo]

Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work.

That's why nobody pays much attention to them.

While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be.

That's why most journalists aren't famous.

Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly sensationalism is more important then accuracy.

FTFY.

Re:So the public rates their credibility?

[Rei]

The thing with Musk, you just never know. It could be a joke as in "the joke is a name to make fun of people who make false stories", or it could be "the joke is that the entire concept of the site is a joke".

That said, Elon being upset with people lying about him in the press is no joke. UAW and their allies particularly. One of the big ones recently was a campaign from a pro-union group called "Reveal" arguing, among other things, that Musk demanded that the factory not use yellow safety tape or have forklifts beep because it upset his aesthetic sensibilities. Which is something that can literally be proven false in less than a minute on Google Images or YouTube. And then when the falsehood was pointed out to them, of course they issued no correction, but just continued their attack-series-disguised-as-journalism.

Meanwhile, UAW still can't even get enough Tesla employees to sign that they even want a vote. Musk called for a vote on Twitter the other night. Sounds very confident that UAW would lose any vote by huge margins, as UAW dropped NUMMI like a hot potato during the recession to protect their Detroit base, there was double the injury rate when they were there, and nobody working for UAW anywhere gets stock options as part of their compensation.

I'm sure that the fact that UAW supporters have started harassing his girlfriend online didn't help his view on the manner any.

Re:So the public rates their credibility?

[greenwow]

Since Woodward and Bernstein, too many journalists have tried to create the news rather than just objectively report on it.

Re:So the public rates their credibility?

[sg_oneill]

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

Re:So the public rates their credibility?

[thomst]

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

Re:Russian newspaper?

[Green Mountain Bot]

Pravda is the Russia word for Truth. This implementation promises to be every bit as ironic as the newspaper.

Re:Russian newspaper?

[Kjella]

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.

Branding

[istartedi]

WTF? Any body old enough to remember the USSR will see "Pravda" and immediately associate it with the USSR's mouthpiece. It's Russian for "truth", and was the butt of many jokes in the USA during the Soviet era. What's Elon thinking here?

I blame Michael Moore

[willoughby]

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in a theater (not my idea). I'd heard of this Moore guy but never seen any of his stuff. I guess I'm more of a critical thinker than most folks but I was struck by:

Moore never makes any claims. He never stands flat-footed, looking into the camera and says, "I believe... and here's evidence of that". A clear claim can be refuted or disproven. If you make no clear, direct claims no-one can prove you wrong.

His film was all supposition, innuendo, insinuation, interspersed with quick shots of Moore looking into the camera with a "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more..." expression.

And people left the theater really believing More had made claims and then backed them up with evidence.

So much of the "fake news" is written in s similar manner: " believes that...", "...is linked to..." (what does that one mean, anyway?), etc.

But I blame Michael Moore for conditioning people to read this crap and really believe they have been given hard facts where there are none. And the press so often write like this now. I think the "news" writers today have grown up with this and don't even realize that's not how you're meant to cover the news.

Re:I blame Michael Moore

[john of sparta]

Moore made ONE claim: Trump would win the election. quote: I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP. link: https://michaelmoore.com/trump...

Re:I blame Michael Moore

[Gavagai80]

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.)

Truth by popularity

[MitchRandall]

Now God is real. Noah's Ark is real. The Red Sea parted. Alah is real. Mohamad rose to heaven on a white horse. Santa Clause is real. 13 Twitter trolls threw the election with some Bernie memes against Hillary's $2billion campaign. Assad did a gas attack to kill no one, but to cause the US to attack his country as he was winning. Modern gas pipelines don't leak. Trump is the reason why all of a sudden we're selling arms to Saudi Arabia again like Obama did. Trump has caused everything to go bad because it was perfect before. We don't have money for Bernie's plan for free college. The military needs a $700 billion increase without debate or attention. We can't afford cheaper, single-payer healthcare. Ranked Choice Voting hurts democracy. It would be a mistake to buy meds from Canada at half the price. Repealing Net Neutrality is common sense. Julian Assange is an enemy of the state for publishing their illegal activity. Edward Snowden is a traitor for exposing illegal NSA surveylance. All media agrees on this unanimously, so if any news source is out of line, we can make sure they are called out!

WHOOSH

[SuperKendall]

You, like many other humorless Slashdot scolds, seem to be unable to grasp that Pravda in the name is a direct reference to the Russian newspaper that is literally a mouth of the state - Musk's Pravda is a pointed reference making a dig at modern "news" which has in effect become a mouthpiece of the Deep State, which as he says is layered in lies that wish to be promoted by the elite.

There's a few other people who understand what this refers to, but alarmingly few otherwise intelligent Slashdot people seem to get the joke. The rot has gone deep indeed.

EU tried and failed.

[Askmum]

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...

The way to fight "fake news" is education

[gotan]

Teach people to seek a broader view by comparing different accounts, to keep in mind the source of a news story and its possible motivations and biases, to analyze texts for their true information content, presented facts, rhetorical devices and omissions, and most of all teach them to think for themselves.

Also everyone should be aware, that our view of our world is incomplete and be ready to reevaluate and adapt our world view when new facts are presented.

In the end the people will build their own opinions anyways, the best we can do is give them the tools to use reason in the process.

Re:Russian newspaper?

[Green Mountain Bot]

Why not use something more universal, like 'Veritas'?

Because there's already a "Project Veritas", which is led by one of the few people who has actually been caught commiting voter fraud, and which been caught multiple times deceptively editing footage to make perfectly legal interactions seem nefarious, and in some cases to look like the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Fixed it for you.