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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.
First, fake news is not crowding out real news. But this article is perhaps an example of fake news. Is it crowding out something?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At least on social media, people have lost their collective minds. We've stopped posting anything that allows for any sort of discussion on social media, because people seem to be really insane on social media. They say and act very stupidly. If this is where most people are getting their news these days (and I don't doubt that it is), God help us all. The human race is going to eat itself because it's too fucking stupid to live.
I don't respond to AC's.
...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"
Starting? I think that boat sailed (and probably sank) years ago.
Indeed. The National Enquirer was founded in 1926. But then, it's not run by Russian agents (afaik), so maybe it doesn't count.
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 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
By "legacy media" you mean traditional news sources that fact-check, edit, and issue corrections when mistakes are discovered?
That would be nice. Instead, we had Dan Rather.
Yep, the same ones who breathlessly reported on the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Saddam's WMD's.
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 term "fake news" arose in US dialog to describe bizarrely distorted and completely made up hit pieces put out against Hilary Clinto and the Democrat campaign by various Trump-supporting people and also certain foreign actors, some of whom were supporting Trump and some were just out to make a living off ad-click revenue.
Trump started calling the mainstream media "fake news" as a defensive tactic, to deflect from the accusations of fake news helping him get elected.
Just so we're clear on where this all came from.
Yes, the US mainstream media is distorted and prone to sicophantic support for US policy, like the Iraq war cheerleading for example, but their level of distortion is nothing compared to the spew of right-wing completely and obviously fake rubbish that started spewing out during the 2016 election campaign.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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
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.