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Dictionary.com Picks 'Misinformation' As Word of the Year (cbsnews.com)
Misinformation was chosen Monday as Dictionary.com's word of the year. "Jane Solomon, a linguist-in-residence at Dictionary, said in a recent interview that her site's choice of 'mis' over 'dis' was deliberate, intended to serve as a 'call to action' to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits," reports CBS News. From the report: It's the idea of intent, whether to inadvertently mislead or to do it on purpose, that the Oakland, California-based company wanted to highlight. The company decided it would go high when others have spent much of 2018 going low. "The rampant spread of misinformation is really providing new challenges for navigating life in 2018," Solomon told The Associated Press ahead of the word of the year announcement. "Misinformation has been around for a long time, but over the last decade or so the rise of social media has really, really changed how information is shared. We believe that understanding the concept of misinformation is vital to identifying misinformation as we encounter it in the wild, and that could ultimately help curb its impact."
"Disinformation would have also been a really, really interesting word of the year this year, but our choice of misinformation was very intentional," she said. "Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behavior of others. It's sort of like pointing at behavior and saying, 'THIS is disinformation.' With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behavior, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation. It's a word of self-reflection, and in that it can be a call to action. You can still be a good person with no nefarious agenda and still spread misinformation." Some of the runners-up include "representation," "self-made," and "backlash."
"Disinformation would have also been a really, really interesting word of the year this year, but our choice of misinformation was very intentional," she said. "Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behavior of others. It's sort of like pointing at behavior and saying, 'THIS is disinformation.' With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behavior, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation. It's a word of self-reflection, and in that it can be a call to action. You can still be a good person with no nefarious agenda and still spread misinformation." Some of the runners-up include "representation," "self-made," and "backlash."
Good word. Also could have chosen the synonym: illegal profiteering
Says the person who wants people no-platformed and fired for asserting the existence of only two genders.
There is a basic principle that the left doesn't understand and is doubling down on to its own destruction: "if I cannot trust you to not lie to me in the small things, how can I ever trust you in the things that matter?"
The more "fact checkers" and "scientists" become political, the less credibility they have and rightly so. Politics is where hard facts typically go to die.
"The mainstream media" is too broad here. It tends to be just a small number of outlets who are already known to support the government of the day, e.g. the Telegraph or the Mirror in the UK.
By saying "the mainstream media" it sounds like you think a broad spectrum of them are doing it on command or something. Is that what you are suggesting?
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I was hoping for "dictionary"
I thought only the Oxford English Dictionary could pick the "Word of the Year"...
Literally anyone can pick a word of the year. Oblong. There you go.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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In America, the bastion of freedom, you criticize speech? Even China is freer than that. Chinese think nothing of what they say, who they say it to, or where they say it. Far more free than America in so many ways.
The same China that is rating citizens on their individual behaviour including what they say and who they say it to? That free China?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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It's called a press release and they don't just come from the government.
Cheap storage VM.
"Anti-vaxxers" (presumably meaning people who are concerned that some vaccinations may cause harm) are rather different, as there may well be evidence supporting their position. Moreover, there is a lot of complexity in the issue: which vaccination exactly (or what combination), given to whom under what circumstances?
There isn't and there isn't.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
In America, the bastion of freedom, you criticize speech? Even China is freer than that. Chinese think nothing of what they say, who they say it to, or where they say it. Far more free than America in so many ways.
The same China that is rating citizens on their individual behaviour including what they say and who they say it to? That free China?
Not only is there no freedom of speech- there is no freedom of listening. You get negative social points just for being friends with someone who said something or did something considered bad (which impacts where you can shop, jobs you can get, where you can stay, etc,)
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"The rampant spread of misinformation is really providing new challenges for navigating life in 2018," Solomon told The Associated Press ahead of the word of the year announcement.
Bollocks.
Translation: some people continue to do unapproved things and think unapproved thoughts. We can't have that.
Since just calling them stupid doesn't seem to be working anymore, we need to blame something for fooling them.
They really need to add it anyway.
Just happened to read this: https://www.redstate.com/strei..., which describes a concerted media effort to cast a Democrat election stunt as coming from "racist" Republicans.
Where can I get the swimsuit calendar?
Have gnu, will travel.
So you're saying that we can choose to ignore misinformation based upon our own free will?
Have gnu, will travel.
Archtech posited:
An interesting selection of examples, especially if they are meant to correspond to categories of "misinformation".
They obviously are so intended. You're just being coy here.
"Flat earthers" probably get little support these days, as belief that the Earth is an oblate spheroid has a great deal of evidence behind it.
You are far out of touch with the conspiracy theorist community, which is the source of almost all the actually-fake news. New World Order conspiracists - and, particularly, those who espouse the view that billionaire Zionists make up the heart of the Illuminati conspiracy to enslave the world - and flat-earthers, along with fanatic AGP deniers, fundamentalist Christian apocalytics, and garden-variety white nationalists are treated with equal seriousness in those precincts.
Just as a "for-instance," there's a user whose handle is "roflcopter2110 on The Pirate Bay who posts torrents of "documentaries" that cover the spectrum of conspiracist idiocy. In recent months, flat-earth nonsense makes up close to half of it. Then there's professional conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who, likewise, gives credence to flat-earthism, along with claiming that mass shootings are elaborately-staged frauds, featuring paid "crisis actors" pretending to be survivors and grieving relatives of the victims, pushing Christian millenialism, insisting the Apollo Program's moon landings were faked on a CIA soundstage, and, of course, continuing to pound his desk and shout about the also-supposedly-CIA-masterminded "false flag" 9/11 attacks being a plot by "the government" to frighten the masses into accepting whatever load of horseapples the White House cares to shovel out.
I'd like to say, "You can't make this stuff up," but I can't, because it's crystal clear that those people actually do exactly that.
"Anti-vaxxers" (presumably meaning people who are concerned that some vaccinations may cause harm) are rather different, as there may well be evidence supporting their position. Moreover, there is a lot of complexity in the issue: which vaccination exactly (or what combination), given to whom under what circumstances?
There is zero evidence in support of anti-vaxxers. There's a tiny percentage of patients who have allergic reactions to vaccinations, but that's it.
Andrew Wakefield, the scumbag gastroenterologist who authored the Lancet article which was the genesis of the "MMR vaccinations cause autism" meme, was convicted of intentional fraud by a Britsh court for altering data to support his hypothesis, abuse of autistic children - by failing to obtain informed consent from their parents for highly-invasive (and medically-unnecessary) colonoscopies and lumbar punctures - and conspiring to profit from his fraud. He was subsequently stripped of his license to practice medicine.
He's not in prison, for some reason, but his study was comprehensively debunked, and The Lancet voluntarily withdrew it, and apologized to its subscribers for having published it in the first place.
The anti-vaxxing movement in the USA has been led by Jenny McCarthy, an ex-Playmate of the Year, and B-movie actress with no medical or scientific credentials of any kind, who also pimps chelation therapy as a cure for autism. Interestingly enough, she pushes that because of Mark and David Geier's claim that chelation could reverse autism caused by timerosol (a compound based on mercury that was used to extend the shelf-life of MMR vaccine prior to 2001). In fact, however, there is zero evidence that timerosol causes autism, and the fact that autism rates in vaccinated children have not declined in the years since it was removed from MMR is compelling evidence that it it does not.
Check out my novel.
Yes, and we also criticize our leaders in America too. How's that work in China? When's the ban on Winnie the Pooh being lifted again?
That would be like Trump trying to ban Cheetos.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
What about thesaurus?
I was chased by a large thesaurus that had big teeth and a ferocious roar!
(species of dinosaur)
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Few weeks back a chief of security agency called Protection of Constitution Agency (Verfassungssschutz) said that the German Chancellor and German main stream Media topped even the Russian campaigns by inventing attacks on foreigners where there were none. Government and media stopped claiming there were any people chasing foreigners through the streets of Chmenitz after that but the man was fired anyway. In fact there are plenty of misinformation and which hunts all over the Western world. It seems to be a new sport. I think Russians do it too. The problem is - only Russians get fingers pointed at them.