How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study
nytimes.comFirst off this is terrifying. Additionally I was realizing the other day I thought of another reason fake news might resonate so quickly with people that doesn't get brought up as much (not that I think I've had a novel idea of course, it probably isn't true or has been brought up and I haven't seen it): fake news has little nuance.
Its part of what I think makes conspiracy theories so attractive, they give the impression that no matter what else is going on, someone is in control and things happen for a reason. I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people).
I don't think it is entirely that fake news fits into your own viewpoint already, I have some "friends" on facebook that sometimes share fake-right news that aren't even really right wing, they are just kind of gullible (I hate to say that but they also fell for the fake wireless-charger video going around. Luckily that one was a little easier to debunk). The fake news would be so simple and digestible, without any nuance or subtlety that it might subconsciously be immediately favored over a more nuanced story. I don't dispute any of the other analyses going around but I think the simplicity of fake news can't be ignored and we need to remind our friends and family that the world is complex and very few stories are so straightforward.
> I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people).
But that's not true either, those two are not the only possibilities. The fact is that what happens in the world is usually due to the collective action of many different people and groups, with converging and diverging opinions. It's something like vector math, the resultant vector determines direction of decision making. The mass narrative which has been sold is that no one is in control, and things just happen. Which is also not true. Implicit conspiracy is common, when those interests converge.
The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer working. HALP! Or maybe mass propaganda techniques have been democratized. HALP!
>The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer working. HALP!
i read the opposite: the propaganda technology known as "clickbait" has become so widely disseminated that truth or factual information can't compete because it doesn't translate as smoothly.
the truth and the facts are always a bit less streamlined, and are always presented in a slightly more complex way-- slightly more cognitively expensive. the human mind takes the easy path whenever it can.
Human brain is easily hijacked by memes, propagandists have been doing it for a century, now the masses are doing it too -- and they are mad (are the masses mad? or the propagandists? why not both? what's the truth? i don't know!).
Richard Dawkins on memes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRggkkAIC5A
For instance this meme sunk Howard Dean's campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwkNnMrsx7Q
Dan Quayle and the potato incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdqbi66oNuI
> The fact is that what happens in the world is usually due to the collective action of many different people and groups
Thats exactly what I mean, it seems like most conspiracies stem from the idea that some person or a group of persons is able to manipulate world events. In the fake news world, it is insinuations that circumstances have a very simple cause->effect relationship. Rather than having to comprehend the huge number influences on events, it is boiled down to a simple "they did it." narrative, which is appealing because its not challenging.
Also I think calling it vector math is misleading because the number of datapoints and the complexity of the system makes any discrete analysis impossible, short of inventing psychohistory[1] for real.
The amount of attention that fake news are receiving from traditional media _AFTER_ the elections is astonishing... almost as if they wanted to blame fake news for the results of the election and the failure of their own forecast
Why were they not so active about this phenomenon during elections? I doubt they were unaware of it since even I saw many tweets that were obviously fake
Hindsight is 20/20, and that applies to everyone. Sorry to say, but not all journalist are incompetents like you suggest. Yeah of course after Trump "won" the election you can say "yeah of course he did it was so obvious, how come none of those stupid journalists could see it" yadda yadda. Same thing for this fake news phenomenon. Did you realize it was happening before Trump won the election and gave us all a rude wake up slap?
I both realized:
1) Trump had a significant chance of winning because of a disgruntled American public voting against establishment candidates (the same reason Obama himself was elected in 2008).
2) There was "fake news" before the election.
Indeed, I know a number of additional things.
3) Right now there is a crisis in faith and credibility in the US domestic news. The reason for this is that the official narrative across the media industry - much of it literally state propaganda - has been consistently proving hallow and unreliable. People are continually confused, and their attentions are jerked around as the media needs the public to be outraged/motivated/mobilized at each subsequent juncture.
4) There is huge amounts of fake news and misinformation INSIDE the industry. If you want to focus on Trump rather than national security and propaganda, take the ubiquity of the "search terms spike for how to move to Canada after Trump won primaries" with absolutely no coverage giving the context that Canada had on that day finally passed a long-in-revision piece of legislature revising US-to-Canada patriation and such search terms would have spiked regardless of the candidate in the US primaries. (Trump is not and never was a candidate for president that I would endorse.)
5) The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as sole sources.
> the official narrative across the media industry - much of it literally state propaganda - has been consistently proving hallow and unreliable.
> The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as sole sources.
This is exactly it. The following google trends graph makes this obvious: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=fake%20news
To have done so DURING the election would have created accusations of bias. This was always going to be a big story post-election. Stories about troll factories and the Macedonian clickbait troll town were out before the election. The comment trolling phenomenon hasn't even picked up much coverage yet.
That said, a lot of blame does need to be apportioned to western intelligence agencies. The idea that hostile foreign actors could (if they wanted) manipulate large segments of electorates seems to have escaped them entirely. This is especially damning since they saw how those tools were effectively deployed in the Arab Spring and elsewhere to foment revolutions (if they weren't behind those movements themselves). It is an epic fail, and joins a long list of intelligence failures.
I agree with something Ben Thompson said on his podcast Exponent — fake news is a problem intimated tied to Facebook as a platform and the filter bubbles that most people create for themselves. This material functions less as news, per se, and more as performative identity affirmation.
Somewhat true. There was a bit of this in the blogger bubbles of the 2000s too, but facebook does bring it to a larger audience.
It's funny how the next big idea for the news media to get on board with starts at the New York Times and then filters it's way down the food chain through the less influential newspapers, CNN, and other mainstream news outlets, etc. It's sad that nobody is coming up with their own material much any more among the big networks. The agenda is set and it's all just a bunch or mstaphorical retweets.
It's like there's some board somewhere that comes up with the next big thing we are going to try and sell to the American people on and they publish it in the NYT and then the whole mainstream dutifully jumps on board and it gets pushed and pushed by all the networks until they give up or they move onto something else.
Searching news archives, one could build a nice directed timeline of the genesis and bloom through the media of these regular campaigns.
The NYT seemingly has written a well supported and fact checked story explaining how a verifiably false tweet from a person with few followers spread far and wide.
What exactly is being pushed on the American people?
It's not that they aren't factual, it's that they direct the nation's attention. There are millions of newsworthy stories, but only some are published and the NYT seems to be the source of that focus that then leads the whole mainstream media around by the nose.
>What exactly is being pushed on the American people?'
what about that time the NYT pushed the iraq war
or that time they pushed hillary clinton
or that time they pushed (insert whatever their paid PR "article" of the second is pushing for)
If I remember correctly, the NYT published a written apology for their role in popularizing the invasion of Iraq. Newspapers make mistakes, recognize them, and apologize publicly. That's journalistic ethics.
They were also forwards about their editorial support for HRC, having declared her their candidate well before she became the presumptive DNC nominee. You might not like the fact that pro-HRC opinion pieces made their way to the top, but there's no ethical dilemma there either.
There's not an ethical dilemma in pushing a candidate but an issue of trust. Lots of people don't trust Hillary. So when a publication goes out it's way to pump her up and writes biased hit pieces on the opposition are people who mistrust Hillary going to trust the publication?
The point is, you can't argue why people should trust you rather than the opposition. You have to provide reasons for them to do so.
It would be like building an app that wasn't getting positive reception and then trying to argue or shame people into liking it rather than giving people what they want. It plain doesn't work.
People want to know what is going on. Tell them to the best of your ability. Don't couch it in spin, don't support sides, don't appear biased. That is how you establish a reputation of trust. It's not a matter of what is legal or ethical in this case at all.
The irony of attempting to "argue" with my point is incredibly hilarious. I would suggest suspending ideological preference for a moment and re-reading my post.
It's about trust and human nature. Not nitpicking details to try to "prove" you are right. You will never win what you are trying to win like this. Ever.
But since you asked here is a sample:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/politics/donald-trump-w...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-w...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donal... (the implication being of course that Trump is tied to racism).
Now lets oppose the outrage above with the treatment of Hillary's behavior.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/27/us/politics/wh...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/us/politics/hillary-clinto...
Look guys... it's not an ideological thing here. But you can't behave like this and have people who support a different ideology take you seriously. That's a simple fact.
When this happens people will get their information from elsewhere.
Last I have to say about this. Think about it or not. But I don't intend to argue.
Debate isn't ironic, and it's not productive to laugh at people who want to reason with you.
I'm not sure what you mean by "trust and human nature". These seem to be self-evident (read: mostly rhetorical), and not directly in conflict with what I've said.
I'm also not sure what details I've nitpicked. I pointed out a case that I thought you might consider a hit piece, and explained why dulling it down to just that has a chilling effect on journalism as a whole and operates against the public interest.
The articles you linked portray Trump in a negative light. Is the conclusion supposed to be that HRC must be portrayed in an equally negative light? It's odd to have to say this, seeing how I'm not a particular fan of hers, but the media cannot treat circumstances as equals when they are definitively not equal. There is no modern analog to what either candidate has in their closets, but to equivocate between them via this fact alone is, bluntly, bewildering.
I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, and I hope you revisit this conversation (or perhaps the thoughts behind it) at a later point without immediately defaulting to a defense against "ideology".
I'm sorry, but what hit pieces? The NYT's coverage of Trump hasn't been favorable, but it would be difficult to characterize their exclusives on him as hits. Even their most negative coverage (the $916 million story comes to mind) was, at its core, factual.
You could argue that it's indicative of bias for the NYT to break such a story at all, but it's in the public interest to know the financial solvency of their leaders. At the risk of conflating news and opinion, there was no shortage of opinion pieces calling on HRC to release her speeches - also in the public interest.
It's difficult to ask the NYT to "establish a reputation of trust" when it already has one, deserved or not. Such a request, to the editors and ethicists of any media outlet, is just a nice way to ask for more favorable (or perhaps less damning) coverage of your candidate of choice.
False dichotomy. Just because an article has some facts buried in it does not mean it's not a hit piece. A hit piece is simply something crafted to create a strong negative impression of a person.
With that in mind, let's go to the NYT front page:
Do we now live in some kind of alternate reality where stuff like this is considered normal, unbiased journalism?Donald Trump’s Swamp Gets Murkier A disturbing number of lobbyists and special interest players are joining the transition team. The interaction does not appear to violate federal laws or ethics rules, three lawyers said, but it did create the appearance that Mr. Trump and his partners are using his status as a way to profit. Cabinet Selection Turns Into Spectacle That’s Made for TVI just visited the NYT front page.
"Donald Trump’s Swamp Gets Murkier" is an opinion piece.
"Cabinet Selection Turns Into Spectacle That’s Made for TV" is a silly title and a cheap shot, but cabinet pageantry is nothing new. The article itself has a message in the form of facts focused on (e.g., the fact that all of Trump's picks seem to be old white men), but doesn't seem to express an opinion in the way that the editorial board's piece does.
Does it have a bias? Yes. Is it abnormal, or even unusually biased? No.
Well, "he started it" by not releasing tax returns, not relinquishing his control of his businesses nor disclosing his international business deals. Its fair game, then, to interpret subsequent actions as part of a pattern.
Links to the biased hit pieces please?
There aren't any. The Times bent over backwards to stab Clinton in the back at every opportunity, to avoid accusations of bias.
>the NYT published a written apology for their role in popularizing the invasion of Iraq
i also remember how it was widely thought to be a bad idea at the time by millions of people, yet, somehow they managed to pick the wrong position.
> somehow they managed to pick the wrong position.
... along with millions of other people.
It's called a "scoop". There's nothing particular novel or unusual about the way a story proliferates through media outlets. The nature of online news and media has simply made the process more visible.
Good point. It would be good to see a tree (or graph, it's probably cyclic at some point) of exactly how it spreads.
The left and the right have those as well (although calling Hillary and Trump supporters "left" and "right" is inaccurate, but that's for another discussion).
The "right" had "the protests are started by Soros" and so they saw buses everywhere for a whole week or so. There was another such thing for a "get paid $3.5k to attend an anti-Trump protest" that ended up as a fake CL screen capture.
The left first started with "let's hack the electoral college". There was a lot of discussion about that - "what if we convince/force them to vote the other way. Maybe invoke some hidden article from the Constitution..." or some thing like that. That went on for a while. It died down.
Then "fake news" started, almost overnight. And it's been fake news since then.
Just yesterday here there was some discussion about an oil field in Texas, and it seems they overestimated the cost or used a different metric or some such thing. But people here were calling it "Fake News". I thought it was initially supposed to lizard people controlling the government?
Then this story as another example. A major fuck up, everyone got worked about stuff without verifying. The source doesn't seem to have done it on purpose and has since deleted it (but it was too late) of course. Everyone in the chain begin idiots and overreacting. But NYT, CNN, CBS, FOX, NBC have been doing this stuff for years! Especially regurgitating anything coming out of the State Department or other government institutions. They are billion dollar corporation, if anyone can verify stuff it should be them. Would they consider themselves "Fake News"...
The problem is they are realizing they are losing the ability to manufacture consent like they could before. That must be terrifying, so they have to respond or do something about it. "Fake News" is their response.
To be fair, is a useful PR technique - a label that can be quickly thrown on anything. This makes sense also in the context of how popular Identity Politics became, where flinging labels like "fascist", "racist", "sexist" is done all too easily. Also with Twitter becoming an acceptable political discourse medium, try to argue a complex point in 140 characters. You can't! Instead throw a short label in there and you're done. Wipe hands on pants and refresh to see the results.
Americans apparently don't learn how to think in their many years of compulsory schooling. They can apparently be shown pictures of unmarked buses and be told to believe anything you want. I really don't know how you combat that. How can you try to show these people the truth when they don't have the capacity to discern fact from fiction?
It isn't just that people aren't critical in their thinking, they just tend to be more critical in their thinking about things that violate their experience (read: things they disagree with) than things that they expect.
For example, are you critical of the floor being solid when you get out of bed? You probably wouldn't spend extra milliseconds contemplating they hardness of the floor. Now let's say you get up and the floor is wet. You might take a moment thinking about what happened, looking up at the ceiling, whether the dog peed, did someone spill water, etc.
That is an extreme example, but many people find it very difficult to critically analyze everything they come in contact with. It helps immensely that things like political opinions are controversial, so we are at least aware of other possibilities, but it is still very difficult to accept something that contradicts what is established in our minds, even when that which is established is wrong. So it isn't just that we need to be critical, it is we must be somewhat critical[0] of even things we believe when there is at least some doubt to their validity.
[0] I actually wouldn't call this being critical, but rather, being open-minded to being incorrect.
Why make this an attack specifically against Americans?
Plenty of dumb people everywhere. Fake news, state news, no news, they'll eat it up.
I've basically given up on trying to show anyone any sort of truth. A third of my life is over and we're not even to the point where 10/10 people could tell you which way is up without consulting some blog or CNN.
I just gotta carve the best life I can, regardless of any mob rule.
Pff, yeah, as if this was a thing only Americans specifically were susceptible to.
Not to mention doing a sweeping generalisation on 300+ million people.
read Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying. He lays out the bigger manipulation of the media. False blog posts get picked up by slightly bigger media sites. Then larger sites like Huffington post pick the story up. There is no validation of these stories.
In the absence of real news fake news will flourish. (turns out nature does indeed abhor a vacuum).
Censorship isn't a workable answer. The answer is for mainstream media to attempt to regain credibility by providing non-biased reporting and leaving off the propaganda.
This isn't an ideological statement either so please don't misconstrue. If you prefer, think of it as a strategy.
BTW.. I'm personally am sick of the "fake news" whining. I suspect I'm not alone in this. If it was a problem it was a problem a year ago.
I generally don't agree with Zuckerburg but in this case I do. Fake news didn't win the election. So please just stop it. Threatening forms of censorship isn't going to win more respect. Try behaving respectfully.
_Last article about fake news I intend to ever read or comment on_
"Fake News" is a Orwellian double-speak for alternative news.
Mainstream media lost its grip on propaganda and now they're trying to push for censorship of opposing views (this past election is the proof of that). Read this interview with the founder of Snopes for the background of this [0].
Never mind the fact that "real news" organizations have been caught lying so many times and have collaborated, behind the closed doors, with Hillary's campaign, for example. [1]
And they're also grouping WikiLeaks under the "fake news" category as well. I guess that's the punishment for exposing how corrupt the mainstream media really is.
[0] https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not...
[1] http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-hit-l...
The article is specifically about an event which was a mistake. Perhaps they are making a larger statement about alternative media by posting that, but that wasn't the point of the article.
I think the commenter is addressing the overall implication of the article (that "fake news" is common and widespread) rather than the specific instance they're investigating. If this was a one-off, it's not really newsworthy.
You're right. I think the article might be casting doubt on the sources after reddit which carried the story, but I feel the main issue the article addresses is false news stories, not the credibility of news sources, which Jerry2 seems to be talking about.
The point of the article is to discourage 'non-approved' news sources because they must all be fake like this bus thing was. Its propaganda to try and keep the NYT relevant despite their lies and deception such as promoting the war in Iraq.
To be fair to the article, the origin of the misconception was a single tweet, which I'm not sure really counts as "non-approved" news sources. The second stage of the stories spread was reddit, which I think too isn't really a news source, or may be that's what you mean.
Of course primary sources are 'non-appoved'. Thats why CNN was caught telling listeners that it was illegal for anyone but CNN to read the WikiLeak Podesta emails.
When I saw the bus thing I questioned how the guy knew the buses were full of protestors, and then stopped caring because it was just some guy on twitter. The MSM want you to blindly accept their narrative and lose the ability to tell fact from fiction.
Hm... I'm curious, would you consider the Holocaust to have been "fake news" ?
Even though you provided some "reputable" sources, it's hard to take anyone that uses the word "leftist" seriously. Especially when:
[0] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
[1] http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/the-strange-strange-story-of-gay-...
Maybe instead of reading that WND crap you instead try reading the article you're commenting on?
If he knows in advance that he's not going to believe it anyway, why would he bother?
Obviously the article doesnt mention wikileaks. The point is that this article isnt being published in a vacuum.
In this context, "fake news" means just that: verifiable falsehoods echoed misleadingly as fact.
This is hardly Orwellian, although I do enjoy an overwrought appeal to his name now and again.
I remember reading a great deal on Judith Miller, the Iraqi National Conference, and the selling of the fake news out of (originally) the New York Times that propagandized the American public into invading Iraq.
There's a number of ways that state narration becomes viral. The contacts that officials have with the media (the DNC leaks about media contacts pales in comparison to how the industry and government function together on a larger scale) coordinate messages, themes and ideas across distribution outlets - enabling large bodies of the American public to receive the same information (however fake it is or is not) in roughly the same time span.
This messaging is able to set the boundaries for the ideological debate. For instance, the Snowden Documents were reported across media outlets under the terminology "Bulk Collection" rather than Mass Surveillance, and they all made the same arguments provided to them by the state for what was going on, what was and was not legal and what data was and was not collected. Almost all of this was fake information that went viral immediately. American citizens had discussions about whether or not Merkle and Obama were upset with one another - rather than discuss the actual contents of the leaks, which the media broadly did no technical reporting on.
"Should we set up safe zones in Syria, or should we put boots on the ground?" is a safe ideological spectrum to coordinate for the American public, but it's difficult to see private-public partnership on messaging the American people to include, for example, criticism of American regime change, the US led coalitions' support of al Qaeda/Nusra/Fatah/Sham and the Islamic State Group. Both context and opinion are narrowly scoped to present particular fake perspectives that ultimately leave the American public uninformed and anxious.
Virality in general, of course, is studied by the Department of Defense, and it's Strategic Communication in Social Media (SMISC) research effort has sought to create the operating conditions and strategies to control virality of information in populations (strategic communication or "stratcom" is a DoD term for propaganda, replacing the older terminology psyops).
I think we're going to see evolving threats and technologies to detect, thwart and control virality more and more in the future - and people volunteering to be part of those networks of controlled information because its default, cheaper, has a better user experience, or just plain has all the other people.
An anonymous blog entry titled 「保育園落ちた日本死ね」"Couldn't get slot for my child in nursery school, Japan should drop dead." got discussed in the Japanese parliament. The opposition party picked it up.
I wish political discussions were more evidence based, but I don't know how to do it.
I think the original fake tweet author's response to this is pretty revealing. He essentially retracts his tweet, while reserving the right to repost it again, and to post such false things in the future. Let's read his own word:
"While there’s no such thing as absolute certainty, I now believe that the busses that I photographed on Wednesday, November 9, were for the Tableau Conference 2016 and had no relation to the ongoing protests against President Elect Trump."
In other words, he is saying in that first sentence that he doesn't rule out that his original interpretation will eventually be proven correct. There's no such thing as an absolute certainty, after all! It remains possible that the 2016 Tableau conference and its 13000+ attendees were all an elaborate ruse to cover up an astroturf protest. We can't rule anything out prematurely! But he _currently_ believes that this might not be the case, in agreement with the overwhelming evidence. Currently.
"I don’t know that Donald Trump was talking about me (posted 24 hours after my post), but he’s among many with doubts"
Many people doubt this fact, in the face of overwhelming evidence, because people like Eric Tucker, Donald Trump and his campaign apparatus have spent the last year priming the public to believe crazy things that aren't true.
"Let’s not be afraid to say things when we aren’t completely sure"
Well actually yeah, let's just be afraid to do that.
"I value our ability to discuss with each other in a civil and respectful tone regardless of where our views may stand."
Except for that part where he gets up on Twitter and makes stuff up about people with whom he disagrees, and posts those made-up things as facts, he is totally 100% down with respect. Very respectful. None more respectful.
For reference the original tweet was "Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI"
Here's the news story that Fox News posted in its non-opinion, non-blog, supposedly-factual reporting section of their site.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/trump-protests-intensif...
Here's some quality facts from that article.
""" But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes - a telltale sign of coordination.
“Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem,” one local in the Texas capitol tweeted Wednesday, along with photos offered as evidence.
[...]
Rumors have also been circulating that the new batch of anti-Trump protesters has been bankrolled by individuals like billionaire liberal activist George Soros and groups like Moveon.org.
“WTF, @georgesoros busing in & paying #protestors to destroy cities is domestic #terrorism. #fakeProtests #BlueLivesMatter have tough days,” read one tweet in response to the viral picture of buses in Austin. """
Fox News runs pieces using these fantasy tweets as their primary source. They also run these stories on their TV network that your mom watches all day.
The focus on the corrosive effects of money on the political system has hidden what looks like the real threat to the American constitution: the Internet. The founders understood the threat of monied interests pretty well--after all the problem was described by historians of the late Roman republic like Sallust. The mechanics of communication in social networks are completely different from anything in the classical world. It's a genuine paradigm shift.
Does anyone remember the Foundation Trilogy by Asimov? There's a point in the story where the calculations of the future developed by Hari Seldon are derailed by the arrival of the Mule, a black swan event that could not be predicted easily. It's hard to understand paradigm shifts when they are happening but it feels as if the US has hit a similar point where an unforeseeable event overthrows the stable equilibrium of the past 225 years. What happens next is hard to guess but the range of outcomes seems pretty broad. I don't think you can rule out the breakup of the United States.
Snow Crash combined with Selfish Gene and infection theory provides a neat mental model of what's happening. Basically you get a constant bacground of competing memes all the time. But since the competition is fierce, none of them becomes too powerful. The elections made a lot of people more susceptible to infections and ideas become to spread. The social media provides the number of contacts necessary as well as increasing the transmission likelyhood as it forms echo chambers. It all makes sense.
Something that can help people ferret out false news stories in addition to what has been discussed is to follow-up on stories or at least to be open to follow-ups. It is definitely as difficult as being critical of your own biases, as has been suggested here before, but this is at least one other step we can take to be less swayed by information which can seemingly confirm our biases.
I have an hypothesis that I believe predicts very accurately how information will be treated in this segment of the American political right-wing (hard to define, but Fox and the WSJ editorial page to the right-wing blogosphere to talk radio to it's many participants on social media). I invite you to test it out:
The NY Times is asking the wrong question; they implicitly acknowledge that it lacks predictive power: The accuracy of information does not predict if it will spread and be believed.
* Ideology predicts it. If information matches their ideology, they spread it and believe it. If not, they don't. I believe this is now taken to its extreme: Ideological compliance, not factual accuracy, determines 99% of 'truth'. No matter how factually unsound, they will believe ideologically 'true' information. And no matter how factually sound, they will deny and attack ideologically 'false' material. Consider climate change, as an easy example - factually undeniable but ideologically unsound. It's a full-fledged ideological movement, which seems an anachronism in this educated age, happening right under our noses..
I've been reading about Medieval philosoph, and I recognized the pattern. It's a per-Enlightenment approach, placing ideology (back then it was mainly religious dogma rather than political) ahead of reason as the test for truth. Note also the attacks on sources of factual credibility, such as serious journalists, intellectuals, academia, scientists, education in general, etc. Those sources provide factual accuracy, but ideological 'falsehoods'. Again, it's in some ways similar to what was experienced in the Enlightenment. Finally, note that leaders of this political group prove themselves not by knowledge, leadership, good decisions, etc., but by saying things that are both crazy by normal standards but acceptable by the ideology's standards - their and their followers priority is that they prove their commitment to the ideology.
....
Finally a couple caveats: 1) In a way it might seem obvious because everyone tends to believe things that meet their preconceived notions, but this is far more extreme - usually accuracy does have a large influence on people, including probably most people reading this. 2) Yes, some people behave similarly on other parts of the political spectrum, but the reality is that in 2016 there is relatively very large and very powerful movement on the right - IMHO it just elected a President and has corrupted major U.S. institutions such as the FBI.
How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how many will end up on HN?
Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really, this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim Hunt?)
Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's obvious why.)
I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social media during Arab Spring.
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Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you want to count every blog post and every comment as such.
Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so either.
At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is.
The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true. No one in the pipeline is a journalist or an editor with incentives to do fact-checking. And everyone can always link to the original post, say "Joe Shmoe posted such and such on Twitter" and thus completely relegate responsibility for the content. (Modern mainstream media pulls these kinds of stunts all the time: http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-co...)
It's almost as if there happened some event of global proportions less than 2 weeks ago that was perhaps in great measure directly caused by this phenomenon?
Do you really believe that seeing a picture of two buses on Facebook changed the candidate someone voted for?
No, not this case in particular, though I'm sure it changed quite a few minds. I'm taking about the "fake news" and "post-truth" phenomenon as a whole.
This entire thing is a fucking joke... Wait a second!
Ahhh... I see now, got your tin-foil hats on? Make sure you stock up because four years is a long time. Assholes.
Strange, so many fake news about Trump and he still managed to win the election somehow.
"Fake News"
Yellow Cake? Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
Said the newspaper spreading cheap pro-Hillary propaganda the entire election cycle.
I'm curious what you would call Breitbart. Or is this a case of people saying things I don't like = propaganda?
I am amused by how often people these days defend NYT by comparing to to Breitbart. How the mighty have fallen... Breidbard is a right-wing propaganda outlet. There are facts somewhere in there, but they spin those fact to the utmost degree. Sadly, NYT is going down the same route right now. They used to be much more objective just several years ago.
already submitted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981
And this one already has 15x as many points, so deal with it.
Actually, it's normal in HN historically to post links to previous discussions on the same link. There's no reason to get upset about such a comment.
There are literally zero comments on those other two, so they aren't discussions.
uh, no shit
Constructive as all hell.
NYT = fake_news(newspaper)
Looks like their site is using ads from Google, their party will be over soon.
edit: already banned by facebook, that was fast.
The trouble, of course, is who gets to decide what is "fake" and what isn't. Even history books get constantly rewritten because people change their minds about what is accurate and what isn't.
It's why professional historians try to stick with original sources, for example.
What are your trying to suggest? This is objectively fake. The claim (that protesters were bussed to this place to protest against Trump) is objectively, demonstrably, false.
It's not a big step to go from using obviously fakes to sell the idea that fake news must be stopped, to having someone decide if less obvious cases are fake or simply don't fit the agenda.
Censorship of news is always sold as keeping people from being misinformed.
Hold on a minute there, you almost disappeared down that slippery slope...
All this piece is pointing out is that the difference between 'fake news' and 'real news' is the act of verification prior to publication. The thing journalists do, which makes what they publish worth paying attention to.
I've been personally involved in some news worthy events, and then watched the reporting of it. The professional media was invariably sloppy and flat out wrong with many of the facts of the case. And these were events where there was nothing political - the reporters simply couldn't be bothered with fact checking.
It's made me skeptical ever since.
Granted, but that's not the case here and I have no reason to believe such a slippery slope is a reasonable fear.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”