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Fake News 'Crowding Out' Real News (bbc.co.uk)
The volume of disinformation on the internet is growing so big that it is starting to crowd out real news, the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee chairman has said. From a report: Tory MP Damian Collins said people struggle to identify "fake news." MPs in their committee report [PDF] said the issue threatens democracy and called for tougher social network regulation. The government said it plans to introduce a requirement for electoral adverts to have a "digital imprint". This would mean that all political communications carried online would need to clearly identify who they were published by. Labour said the government "needs to wake up to the new challenges we face and finally update electoral laws". The report follows the Cambridge Analytica data scandal earlier this year. The London-based data analytics firms and tech giant Facebook were at the centre of a dispute over the harvesting and use of personal data - and whether it was used to influence the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election or the UK Brexit referendum.
I imagine it depends a lot on your news source. If you only get your news from facebook and are friends with lots of gullible idiots, then you're gonna see a lot of fake news
I don't know why the UK and US are so concerned about democracy all the time seeing as neither one of them are democracies. That aside, the whole point of a democracy is allowing the majority of the populace control over government no matter how uninformed their decisions may be. If you insist that the aristocracy knows better and manipulate the news your "democratic" populace receives and uses in their decision process then you never wanted a democracy to begin with.
...under which full censorship and surveillance will come.
In this postmodern age, most are more interested in their own subjective truth being widely accepted than they are in actual objective truth for its own sake. Thus, the question becomes not so much "will it happen" but "who will control it". And the powers that be are already operating on this premise.
Check your premises.
This started when news became
1) Less filtered. We had journalists and editors. Journalists sought out stories, investigated them and editors reviewed their work. Sure there were biases and still are but now it's about getting first to get it out there quality of source/content be damned. This also precipitates more lazy fuck journalists and so-called editors more anxious to get a story pushed and who gives two fucks about if it's true or not.
2) More entertainment. News was something that happened all the time but you were exposed to it less frequently. Now you have TV shows, Cable Networks and the Internet bombarding you stories that are more infotainment than news. It's hard to distinguish what's important vs. fluffy kittens. This has also led to aggregators who now calls themselves news organizations *cough* Huffington Post *cough* News used to be consumed when you read a newspaper, a magazine or watched the evening news with Cronkite, now it's in your face 24/7 and they have airtime to fill. That's why you have contrived things like "townhall meetings" to discuss whether or not Michelle Obama's opinion actually fucking matters.
3) ADHD of our population. Attention span akin to the life expectancy of gnats.
4) I blame the parents, get off my lawn.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I've never read any news story I was an expert on and seen it fully correct. One has to read widely to not be mislead even accidentally.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I subscribe to both the NY times and the Wall Street Journal (just don't read the comments section or the editorials). There's plenty of real news in these papers. Support them if you like real news.
Non-paywalled news is going to go for clicks as the profit center so Dopamine news is what one gets there. It's not necessarily fake just not composed with integrity as it's quantity over quality.
Real news just doesn't change fast enough. This is also why news tied to a print publisher has sort of a natural limit of quantity and durability.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The beauty of the internet is that it allows readers to check multiple sources for any one subject/story, as opposed to just swallowing whatever the legacy media told them to believe. That scares the shit out of them.
The danger of the internet is literally anybody can put up a website that looks like it's a reliable source so it's easy to fool a lot of people quickly. The next danger is the ability to skew search engine results by "paying" for higher ranking.
The end result is that the "truth" is for sale and there is no way to know if what you are reading is actually the truth or somebody's attempt to influence you to support their cause.
Also, it means the that the mainstream media outlets, who are chasing profits, are prone to publish sensationalism over substance.. Which is the third problem... The internet is about profit, not about facts or truth. What they fear is losing their audience, either by offending them when the facts don't agree with reader's opinions or being shown for the profit whores they have become.
Then, dare I mention him, Trump comes along and upsets everybody's apple carts, by using the same medium to push his messaging and all you know what breaks lose. Now we are in this rough and tumble period where everybody has to figure out what the hub-bub is about and when and how it will end.
The new reality is, the internet is a waste land where grains of truth are strewn about in the sand dunes of a partisan desert being blow around by the breath of the yelling talking heads.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Your "traditional" news sources have given up all journalistic integrity in exchange for agenda pushing activism decades ago.
Before the internet literally anybody could spread whatever rumor they wanted and there was no way to check for yourself. It wasn't that long ago that such word of mouth was the only way to get any news.
And before the internet those rumors were pretty much limited to people you know. Now, with the internet, as Jonathan Swift said "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it". People are more likely to believe the first thing they hear, so by the time the truth reaches them, it's too late.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The difference I see today vs. yesteryear is that the populace at-large is doing less critical thinking about how news should be ingested. That is, asking the following questions: Who is writing it? Why are they writing it? Is it to inform or entertain (or both)? What viewpoint are they trying to convey and why is that viewpoint important from the perspective of the author? How is it important to you as the reader/viewer?
Picking up on the objective of the author was one of the little details that was stressed for a short period when I was in high school (more than half my life ago... wow, I feel old). I think my classes covered that subject for all of about two weeks before moving on to other test-able curricula.
We see a lot of stress on the "what" and not much on the "why" and "who." While we ought to trust the news outlets to do that job, certain "news" outlets absolutely have an agenda and either selectively choose to report certain facts to reinforce their message or omit certain facts that may undermine that message. Another tactic is presenting opinion as "fact" or outright lying. Knowing what kind of message the outlet is trying to convey is as important as the content they publish. Much of the "fake news" can easily be filtered out by the reader if they just apply those basic steps while seeking out reporting from multiple diverse sources and knowing how to properly independently fact-check sources.
I guess I'm saying that people, in general, may need a refresher on those critical thinking skills.
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Learn how to think critically and you won't be so gullible.
Which is super telling when one party tries to defund education while the other tries to pump money into it.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
People who would censor "fake news" are far more dangerous than those who put it out. At least the latter allows people a choice.
The beauty of the internet is that it allows readers to check multiple sources for any one subject/story, as opposed to just swallowing whatever the legacy media told them to believe. That scares the shit out of them.
Except most "journalists" these days just copy and paste identical stories from the same wire service or press release without doing any real writing or thinking.
Is it though? A few big outfits have their own journalism departments but wire services still do the bulk. Outfits like Breitbart and even Fox News largely wrap wire stories in layers of editorial. They're basically aggregators.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Now, you can even point to real, factual news like the fact that collusion isn't a crime and therefore Trump is indeed suffering from a witch-hunt and people won't believe it.
Webster definition of collusion: "secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose; acting in collusion with the enemy
Webster definition of conspiracy: "1 : the act of conspiring together 2 a : an agreement among conspirators b : a group of conspirators"
Webster synonym of conspiracy: "2 a secret agreement or cooperation between two parties for an illegal or dishonest purpose a conspiracy among the leading manufacturers to fix prices
Synonyms of conspiracy
collusion,"
Last time I checked, conspiracy was an indictable crime. Since conspiracy is an actual legal term, there could be a risk of possible lawsuit by publicly accusing someone of conspiracy. Collusion is a little more nebulous and has no legal meaning, at least in this sense.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Too bad paywall... But some form of criminal conspiracy? Like conspiring with a presidential candidate to win a debate? So far, what we have are people being indicted for actions taken prior to the Trump campaign (and, in fact, often whilst working with strong Democrat lobbyist groups), or for "lying" about something that wasn't criminal, prohibited, or illegal in any way, shape or form (basically a process crime).
Now, there ARE several indictments of Russians, but given that the previous Administration told the cyber security chief to stand down about investigating any issues, well - it seems that the previous Administration should be held complicit to any Russian wrongdoing.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The problem here is that people cannot distinguish fact from opinion and cannot distinguished biased news from "fake news."
"Collusion is not a crime" is a factual statement. "Trump is indeed suffering from a witch-hunt" is an opinion. An opinion can't be "fake news" because an opinion does not have a truth value.
"Fake News" is a news story without any factual basis. Traditionally, it was used to apply to stories from media outlets that either don't actually exist or don't do any fact finding at all. They were stories that were calculated to generate clicks because they conformed to the bias of a particular political group.
Biased news is a separate phenomenon from fake news. A biased outlet (and all outlets have some bias) at least makes a good faith attempt to report statements with an affirmative truth value, but may omit relevant facts or over-emphasize others. Reporting that "Collusion is not a crime" is a true but biased statement. Yes, there is no crime called "collusion." However, the word "collusion" is simply the one that was seized upon to describe a variety of actions that may be crimes. So saying "collusion is not a crime" is like saying "killing someone is not a crime." Yes, it's possible to legally kill someone (in self-defense, for example), but there are a wide variety of crimes you could be charged with if you kill someone.
People have now weaponized the term "fake news" to apply to any news reported with a bias that they dislike. The danger is that this delegitimizes any opinion you don't like and serves to demonize your political opponents. There was a time when it was assumed that both political parties wanted the best for the country but just had different ideas of how to achieve it. Now, people think the other side is affirmatively evil. It's hard to actually solve problems with someone who thinks you are evil.
You're right about the term "fake news" but I'd like to add that talking about "US mainstream media" is way too vague to be of any use in any discussion. In the US you absolutely have to distinguish between newspapers, radio, and TV:
- Radio plays no substantial role. Some US radio hosts may be informative whole others would land in prison or pay hefty fines for libel, slander, and hate speech in almost every other civilized country.
- TV "news" is mostly hysterical crap and also very biased in the US. It has always been like that, the quality is really low almost everywhere. If you primarily get your "news" from Fox or CNN, you will remain uninformed, though certainly less than if you get your news from other internet sources like news aggregation sites.
- Most US newspapers are outstanding, no matter which political bias they have. The people who criticize newspapers do not read them. The printed versions are extremely informative, and a good way to get good background information in the US (besides other sources like foreign online news,directly tapping into press agencies, documentaries).
Every other alleged news source in the US is not only crap, it doesn't even generate any news. Left and right wing "info sites", bloggers, social media, etc. do nothing else but copying news from shady sources who copied the news in the place. Most of them employ no journalists or way too few, and even worse, most of them don't even have subscriptions for news agencies.
So in a nutshell, US TV channels and the social media are and have always been horrible 'news' sources, but printed newspapers are fairly good and will inform you.
In my experience the people who criticize mainstream media are almost universally uneducated and misinformed because they get their "news" from way less reliable sources and do not understand that somewhere there needs to be real journalist recording, taking pictures, and jotting down notes in order for there to be any news at all.