Considering that American's trust in mainstream media is an all time low [1], I'm sure there is a big demand for alternative news. I'm not surprised people are looking for content that fits their narrative and end up reading fake articles.
As someone observing from Mexico, I noticed almost all of the mainstream US media became an echo chamber for pro-Clinton content. I only realized this after after seeing how Sanders was sabotaged and the media collectively tried to bury it. Here in Mexico it's a similar situation with a few big media outlets protecting the corrupt status quo.
> I noticed almost all of the mainstream US media became an echo chamber for pro-Clinton content.
I like media in general and thinking how it is used to control and manipulate people. Especially the idea of the illusion of freedom. I've always recommended Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky.
That analyzes how corporatist media is used to manipulate and control public opinion, and I think at not time has it been truer than in the last election cycle. CNN's Cuomo "these documents are illegal to look at, let us interpret them for you" is such a wonderful example of it. I love it. (sorry everyone, I've mentioned that multiple times).
There is a new twist here and that is social media. I wonder what they'd have to say about that.
You're not wrong about the pro-Clinton content. I'm politically liberal, so I've kind of sheltered myself from the rightwing stuff. A couple of weeks ago, I started looking at it, after some conversations with some trump supporters. I was completely floored. I remember the situation in 2000, and 2004, and there was a lot of crazy stuff particularly from FoxNews, and commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Dinesh Dsouza, and others. In 2008, even MORE wacky wacky whackjobs like Glenn Beck and Michael Wiener (Savage).
But now, there seems to be a whole slew: hundreds of these weird little websites out there, generating crazy crazy fake news, sharing them around, and disseminating them, for the purpose of gaining ad-revenue from gullible conservatives. The side effect is something like a palm-oil land-clearing project, where a whole forest gets burned down, and everyone downwind is choking on the smoke and ash.
I think this is because of the corrosive effect of money in politics. So many billions of dollars going into political ads. So many very conservative elites, investing in major media channels and directing editorial content. Causing a major collapse in credibility of ALL major news networks, which creates an ecosystem for these little sites to pop up.
The problem is all the seriously delusional people who believe these stories about muslims marching to YOUR neighborhood to demand sharia law, and Hillary Clinton being a secret KKK member.
I guess Glenn must have stopped worrying about Obama's plans to spark a race war, overthrow the government and install a Communist Islamic Caliphate, then?
There were a handful of news outlets thoroughly reporting issues between DNC and Bernie Sanders such as Huffington Post and al-jazeera.
I suppose these are not 'mainstream'? Perhaps mainstream media is defined by having a dedicated TV channel, or at least primetime TV show? Isnt it almost customary for such outlets to prioritize ratings over comprehensive coverage?
Who knows the definition, but I can tell you who is included. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN.... Watching the anchors on these channels respond to Trumps performance on election night was jaw dropping. I was amazed that they weren't even going to try to pretend that they were impartially covering this election. I've always known the Fox and msnbc were a joke, but I have zero confidence in a single US based news outlet after this election.
BTW Huffington Post stands out as an exceptionally huge steaming pile of partisan garbage as well.
...big media outlets protecting the corrupt status quo.
They are doing their job.
How many of us buy paper newspaper? How many of us have paid news site account? or browse news site without ad blocker. We want to read content without ads so they are selling this content. Media is writing PR piece and getting paid.
In fact the article strikes me as more of the same reason why so many voted for Trump. The people who write these articles just can't accept the idea that people didn't vote for Trump unless they were tricked into it, or were fed lies. The idea that because they have a different reality they based their votes on never occurred to them.
What fake news do is reinoforce what people already believe to be true which is quite another discussion and anyone who have been debating with some 9/11 truther knows that no amount of data will convince them of anything else and neither are you going to be convinced it's suddenly true even though we all have been bombarded with claims from friends.
Also maybe my facebook feed is different, maybe my friends are different but I had and still have plenty of disagreement in my feed plenty of articles pointing both ways.
I didn't get that sense from the article. It was all about influence. False stories influence people's opinions, and that may have encouraged voters to turn out or not for their candidate.
There was a lot of false and misleading information distributed online during this election, and literally spoken by the candidates (one more than another).
The biggest lie is actually at the heart of Trump's campaign, that he can bring back the jobs. Those jobs he's talking about haven't just been outsourced to other countries, in many cases they have been automated into oblivion. Trump promised to bring these back, but how can you bring something back that doesn't exist?
Mind you the Dems and Clinton had no substantial story to weave for the people that are hurting from the lack of these jobs. So people chose the fiction over no substantive story. It's an uncomfortable thing to tell people that everything they know is irrrelevent in the modern economy.
Except to be fair to the Dems and the Clinton campaign, they did have proposals and white papers addressing exactly these communities. For example, a proposal to invest $30 billion into coal mining communities within the Appalachia regions with promises for infrastructure investment and private business investment, and retraining former and current miners into new skilled occupations. Of course all of this pales in comparison to Clinton's emails, while Trump's incoherent economic message of howling pain to reopen all the mining operations gets all the air time it needs.
I find it incredible that even living in the liberal echo chamber I never heard news about this proposal! I am even from Appalachia!
Part of the problem is that those in the media forgot about people who are different from them--- for whom those $30 billion could have meant the difference between permanent regional decline and a new start.
Because all we've heard about Hillary and Obama is how they'll put coal out of business. I'd be curious how a supportive news media didn't pick up the second part of that story.
Hillary also was resistant to the $15 minimum wage which would make a _huge_ difference for a lot of folks in the countryside. Hillary of course wanted to treat them like second-class citizens with only a $12 minimum.
Who's going to go read white-papers after that sort of offer?
I live in London. In the UK we have a statutory minimum wage (like the federal min wage - we are having almost the same debate in the UK) and a voluntary 'living wage' that is higher than the minimum wage and set to a minimum level that you can raise a family on with some degree of comfort. Its meant to be a signal for UK businesses about what kind of wage is a 'good wage' for low skilled work that treats their employees and their employees' labour with dignity.
The living wage in London is £9.75 and everywhere else its £8.45. Nobody says the living wage council thinks that people outside of London are second class citizens. People think that the living wage council is wise to recognise that living costs are much higher in cities like London, and areas outside of London have a business cost advantage for locating operations outside of London because people living in smaller towns have lower living costs and hence can enjoy the same living standard on less income.
Don't be a jerk by taking the least charitable interpretation of a policy when you know full well that it's bollocks.
Clinton prefers a $12 minimum wage because outside of cities small business wouldn't be able to keep up with $15. Clinton wanted $15 minimum wage to be passed in cities that can handle it, and has explicitly supported people organizing those efforts.
From the primary debate:
"While Clinton believes $12 an hour is the right federal minimum, she is not steadfastly opposed to the idea of a $15 hourly minimum nationwide. On Thursday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked if she would sign a bill from Congress setting the federal minimum at that level (something that would be politically improbable). "Well, of course I would," she said."
The $15 minimum wage would have devastated the countryside.
I'm all over something like a minimum basic income that would effectively do the same thing as doubling the minimum wage, without putting the cost burden on businesses that can't afford it.
The perk of a national $15 minimum wage is to remove any incentive US only businesses that may consider relocating to less expensive parts of the country. I'm sure it seems perfectly reasonable in a high cost of living area, but outside of that it's a jaw droppingly bad proposal.
The problem with a straight-up $15 minwage is that it goes against what is becoming a huge force in this country: inequality. Minwage is meant to somewhat try to address inequality. But in fact, the difference between rural and urban cost of living is huge. So minwage needs to be sensitive to this.
The issue really needs to be completely depoliticized, and the minimum wage should really be set to some kind of local/regional indicator, and indexed to inflation.
But if we did that... politicians wouldn't get to flip this card out every 10 years to play it.
Personally, I think the minimum wage as it exists isn't very useful. I'd replace it with a federal base level minimum wage where the local (county) minimum wage is composed of the base federal + COLA (which gets reevaluated yearly, like SS.) and it'd apply to all workers, public, private, local, state, federal.
I dont' believe he can bring them back either but it wasn't based on a lie and I am pretty sure he means it which is why he wants to dig into the resources and rebuild infrastructure.
That does not make it a lie anymore than "yes we can" does.
Trump relied on one of the worst aspects of the Human existence, that someone else will fix your problems for you.
Giving people optimism about the future, bettering yours and everyone's existence is motivating for everyone. I believe this for anyone I've ever managed, and for any project I've ever worked on. People work better when they are optimistic.
"Yes, we can" is a motivational statement encouraging people to try. Trump's "make America great again" is based on some misguided notion of nastalgia. When is this period that that statement harkens back to?
Remember, the decades after WWII were great for the US because literally every other industrialized nation had been bombed so badly that they could barely make anything at all. America did well during this period because we had no competition.
Whether Trump or anyone can bring back jobs is subjective, and that is the biggest problem with separating "real" from "fake" - I don't believe it is possible to do without in any objective way at all.
The policies being proposed mean that the next time there is a leak, or stolen/hacked e-mail, the party involved can simply deny it is real and then the publisher would have to take the story offline or face some sort of negative weight or ban in Google and Facebook.
> how can you bring something back that doesn't exist
Quite simply, you take away labor protections. Automation does not eliminate jobs, it competes for them. If people are cheaper, businesses will opt for people, even in the presence of automation. Robots won't work for free; people have proven time and time again that they will.
There is some evidence[1] that Trump supports this method, at least to the point that he can push the blame onto lower levels of government if jobs don't materialize.
I know this is bleeding over from our previous conversation, but the only case I have made wrt this topic is my opinion that it would be nice if critical thinking was more of a cultural force than it currently is. I would play your game and try to make the case that you want me to make, but I am not sure what data I would be able to source for that even if I suspect it to be true. Nothing wrong with having triggers, I was just using "alt-right" rhetoric to tease you a little bit.
There is no such case to be made. If viral fake news influence even some tiny percentage, there is already responsibility on social media for how this elections turned out.
Yes, quite possibly >90% of the people would have voted the same way regardless of news, still we all know the "swing" makes all the difference
If only 45% voted for Trump, they wouldn't have valid opinions? If 5% made the difference, then 90% of the votes for Trump don't form a mandate?
There's a problem here - first past the post voting - but there's also another problem: denial of the legitimacy of an opposition. The vast majority of the people who voted for Trump have valid opinions. You can't just dismiss them.
Because you arguing that rampant misinformation is not a threat to a well functioning democracy is so manifestly nihilistic and trollish there's really no point in even discussing it further.
There's a lot of people in denial that there is a genuine grievance at the heart of voting for Trump.
People who voted for him are not all misinformed racist sexist delusional hicks. There's too many of them to all be fooled. Many of them voted for Obama last time; the numbers make that clear.
Denial is the biggest thing I see in the US media right now, and it's worrying. Because it will probably lead to opposition to the symptom (Trump), rather than the cause (what motivated people to vote for him), and will promote internal opposition. It brings heat, not light.
How well do you think the average voter, whether Trump or Hillary supporter, would do on a Politifact quiz?
I believe most of us are misinformed and delusional, and I do not believe people having Facebook as their primary news source is improving the situation.
Here is an examples which illustrates it perfectly well:
"After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race. That’s wrong. There are, of course, viral fake anti-Trump memes, but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left."
We are talking about whether it effects election which is what the article claims he is in denial about.
"Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world."
The fact is that Facebook is not a media company. In some countries (e.g. most of Europe) where this distinction makes tremendous differences (the media being much more regulated than other for-profit companies), they are pretty adamant about it. Understandably so, business-wise.
Regardless of whether their assumption is true or not, I wouldn't expect the CEO of said company to just come out and say "oh yeah, sure, we're influencers like any other media and we forward fake news too". It's just business sense imho.
As for what Mark truly believes, on a personal level, you'd have to be a close friend, not a journalist recording, to get privy to it.
>The people who write these articles just can't accept the idea that people didn't vote for Trump unless they were tricked into it, or were fed lies.
I agree with what you're trying to say, but you are being overly broad.
Talk to Trump supporters prior to the election, and with the exception of "anti-establishment", most of them will give reasons that they were tricked into believing.
Go to fact checking web sites and look at all the statements Trump continually repeated that were demonstrably false, and see how many of them the supporters believed (hint: many of them).
So yes, they were fed lies and believed them.
However, you are correct in that it was not the only reason why they voted for him. They believed those lies as post-hoc justification for their picking him. Really no different from people who pick any candidate, including Hilary.
I think there are fake stories that reinforce your current predisposition and then there are fake stories that a vulnerable human being reads and it takes their beliefs to the fringe.
Also, I have a hard time believing that seeing one or two stray bogus stories is the same as seeing bogus stories everywhere you care to look.
In one case a vulnerable human being might have enough reason to doubt what they're reading, and in the other case they suddenly feel like the world is caving in on them.
2) In one breath you dismiss this article as elitism, and in the very next admit the problem of fake news, which is exactly what this article is talking about. It's not another discussion. It is exactly this discussion. I've never seen such a blatant use of straw man.
I don't even know what kind of point you're trying to make now. In your post you describe a class of individuals so out of touch that they can't believe Trump voters weren't tricked, yet admit that fake news exists and is a problem. Which is it, bub?
Is this the new meme now? Things we don't agree with are "more of the same thing that got Trump elected"?
What fake news do is reinoforce what people already believe to be true
Sure. And it also reinforces things people don't yet know (because it's fake) but which fits into one's preexisting worldview. It's a multiplicative factor. An amplification.
The claim by the article is actually very measured -- that fake news is a part of the whole picture. Do you really disagree with that?
I disagree that it's enough to explain the election result even remotely or that it's something the facebook should do something about right now.
Fake news are easy to debunk and the same lie which takes advantage of network spread can also be debunked by the same measures.
Again if people really want to believe in something no amount of rebuttals are going to change that.
What's far more concerning is the kind of exaggerations that the traditional media use to blow everything out of proportion.
We all live in filter bubbles some in very tightly controlled bubbles others in more open bubbles but they are all bubbles.
I have yet to see any proof that fake news are effecting how people vote on any serious scale. Maybe some people here and there. But to claim that it's a problem for the election is simply another attempt at trying find a reason other than the obvious one, that many people who voted for Trump did so because they live in another bubble than those who votes for Hillary. That they have different perspectives and different problems, different dreams and fears.
Thats the reason we votes different and fake news aren't going to change the overall world view we have there.
As a non-FB user, I hit every day a Facebook captcha to test if I'm a bot, each time I land near a Facebook site. When it's not a captcha, a panel hides a third of the Facebook page.
I have a "shadow" empty FB account that I sometimes use: if I'm logged in, anything I watch online ends up polluting recommendations and suggested sites. I looked up information on Syria and Trump the other day - I now have creepy sites displayed on my suggested sites. I also get giant "YOU ARE NOW QUITTING FACEBOOK" alerts anytime I try to click a link to, yes, go to this address.
We all obsess on Google/Apple for privacy and yet do not hold Facebook to any standard regarding an open, honest web.
I feel we're all getting slowly conditioned by Facebook (and others) to stay siloed. To fear that the web we browse will have "consequences" and that we should avoid being curious altogether.
It's by now clear that the entire purpose of FB is to build a "unified profile" that advertisers can track on- and offline.
We're all in denial on the consequences of this unified tracking. If we were in the Renaissance, anonymous publications like Spinoza's would be impossible. Free speech and opinion _requires_ freedom to change mind, wander around.
I think it's too early to tell if these fake stories had any effect on people's political leanings, so diving in without knowing much about it is a bit of a different kind of fake news. It's hunches and opinions without critical examination.
Now it's definitely a question to ask but I'm afraid it's being asked as a way to explain Hillary's loss because it's easier to find a scapegoat than look introspectively --and Dems at least publicly say we want to avoid scapegoating, politically speaking.
In the end, I wonder, had Hillary won, would be seeing the same examination? Would we have people at the Times wondering if Hillary had won because of the spread of false news, or wonder about a conspiracy to railroad Bernie? Hard to say, but one wonders.
On the other hand, I can't agree more that they should surface more than mostly self-reinforcing news or information to their users.
It doesn't matter whether the fake stories actually had any effect on people's political leanings, because the media narrative is that they did. Ultimately, the mainstream media are in denial. Every single media organisation backed Clinton, including ones that had never backed a presidential candidate before, they published articles pointing to this as reason to vote for her whilst insisting that it was ridiculous to believe they could in any way be biased towards her. They were absolutely certain she would win, mocking those who though otherwise. They were wrong. Rather than look inwards, they found a scapegoat.
That's why they don't care about the 130,000 retweets for a fake claim that people were chanting "We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back" at a Trump rally from a known British hoaxer, or the quarter of a million for a photoshop of Trump's parents in KKK outfits, or any of the other fakes that don't fit the narrative.
As a liberal; I completely agree with what you say about the media organizations, and I'll add to that, some of the more-respected leftwing media; which used to be reliable, went into a phase of spewing absolute garbage. I found it disquieting, because it came about gradually, and I realized it suddenly, after the fact (about 6 weeks ago), that they were really playing fast-and-loose with standards of credibility on some of the stories they were posting.
Then, I basically kind of started to "shut down", because I felt that there was really no source that was trustworthy.
Around the same time, I saw some previously neutral forums, go "hard-Clinton". To the point where there was obvious brigading (downvoting and banning dissenters) going on.
On the other hand: There was copious material available, of direct quotes straight out of Trump's mouth. Live TV footage at rallies. Live TV footage at debates. Where he said some things that were not just; "oh, he's a bit careless and doesn't know what that's implying." He said some things that were very hard to interpret in any way other than how he said them. There's also the actual wording of actual policy positions on his own web site.
I think this is what is meant by the assertion that "false stories from the left are not nearly as big a problem".
It's true that there's still some crazy stuff coming from the left. (A lot of the news organization sites breathlessly speculating about who Trump is appointing, before he's actually made any appointments - and turning them into outrageous scandals).
But a lot of the negative things coming out about Trump are absolute facts that you can't sugarcoat, because he said them while being recorded.
The thing I accept, possibly wrongly, which others have stated, is that many people voted against Hillary and there was not much that could have gotten in their way.
Given Trump's past political opinions contrasted with his campaign claims, people who voted against Hillary often times took what Trump said more metaphorically than literally, whereas they took Hillary literally probably because she asked people to take her literally (that other guy flip flops, I don't). They saw Hillary as an ideologue and Trump as more of a pragmatist, something Obama apparently believes as well.
Trump is appalling. But media went from reporting that Trump was horrible, to cheerleading for Hillary. Some of them went further, and tried to be on the playing field on Hillary's team. That's a problem, and it's not justified by how horrible Trump is.
My favorite plausible one was the one where supposedly back in the 90s Trump said "he'd run as a Repub because they're the most gullible". I found it amusing that Hollywood actors/actresses tweeted it in a non-jokey way.
And yes, it is telling all their examples are about ones which targeted Hillary.
>> I think it's too early to tell if these fake stories had any effect on people's political leanings
Facebook isn't the only place people get 'fake news'. Just look at their peer groups. My cousin is a member of a labor union and they tell all kind of goofy tales about what will happen is candidate X gets elected or candidate Y gets elected. You should hear the coffee shop rambling the old men do at Tim Horton's in the morning. And you should heard the rambling the young kids do at the independent coffee shop at night. All of it is just FUD.
You make a great point, although I think it's different. These are just people opining privately rather than a "news" organization presumably publishing news/information based on some kind of rigor --now, which one has more influence on voting, yes, I agree, your circle of friends is typically more influential, disinformed as it may be.
Your circle of friends has more influence on you. One-sided media may have a bigger influence because it is national, not just a few people who have coffee together.
To be honest, considering how no one (or very few commentators, that I missed) was talking about the fake news phenomenon before, this debate does feel like a talking point being propped up.
At the root principle of the article, I agree that a platform which spreads erroneous information should be held accountable in some fashion - but it's the following kind of set up that is troublesome:
>In addition to doing more to weed out lies and false propaganda, Facebook could tweak its algorithm so that it does less to reinforce users’ existing beliefs, and more to present factual information. This may seem difficult, but perhaps the Silicon Valley billionaires who helped create this problem should take it on before setting out to colonize Mars.
Right, in principle Facebook should do this for the benefit of society, but on a practical consideration, would becoming a highly-involved arbiter of content be good for making money? Facebook isn't under any legal mandate to act as a referee - consider it unfortunate if you like, but I kind of shrug it off. Individual user responsibility should be a noteworthy counter-point, because as trite as it might sound, if Facebook is rife with issues and rot, then going there is probably not a good idea. If they happen to make more money by allowing junk in their system, then that's their decision to make. Eventually will it cost them users?
>The company’s business model, algorithms and policies entrench echo chambers and fuel the spread of misinformation.
If they want to serve up a garbage buffet and make a profit from it, I can't sit back and scold them too hard, I just have to excuse myself. It's not just on Facebook - commenting communities of any sort tend to generate clusters of like-minded folk. "Right" thinking or "wrong" thinking. Personally I don't walk around downtown digging through the trash for my lunch, and I don't get my worldview from Facebook. I do keep up with some people, but can count my weekly minutes on the site with two hands pretty much. Just my approach, YMMV.
Facebook can do whatever it wants. Personally, if facebook does not stop the spread of false information I will stop using their services and will do my best to convince my friends to stop using their services. If they want to create harmful social bubbles for profit that's their prerogative, but I won't be part of it.
In my experience, Facebook in 2016 is akin to what AOL was in 1994 - to a large swath of people, Facebook is essentially "the internet" they use. Kind of subscribing to cable TV but only watching one station. It's not too far out of the realm of thought that bubbles exist because people seek them out and like having a bubble (notions of bubbles being good/bad outside the scope of this).
For a while early on, I recall enjoying Facebook when it was .edu email addresses only, because it was a good way to keep tabs on people I went to upper education with and parted ways with shortly after. It was a nice contact resource in that regard. Now the platform is a behemoth, the AOL thing.
Hardly anyone does this, but it's certainly possible to follow a varied set of people on Facebook. Left, right, non-political, religious, irreligious, American, European, Trump-loving, Hillary-venerating, and so on.
Nothing stops a person from creating a set of signals that Facebook will use to generate a mixed content feed that's representative of a broad range of views.
The problem is that almost no one uses Facebook like that.
I had a feeling Trump was going to win due to the viewpoints I was seeing on Facebook... but I trusted the polls, which were in their own bubble that I didn't recognize.
If Hillary won this wouldn't have been an issue for the NYT. Close to the election I repeatedly saw articles comparing Trump to Hitler and predicting the end of free society of he were to win. The only fake news I saw was satirical "news." I did not vote for Trump, but it's crazy how hysterical and witch-hunty the left is right now.
not just crazy, it's legitimately scary. i have friends who's opinion and perspective i can usually trust makes making bold declarations about topics on which they are highly misinformed.
that's to say nothing of the calls for censure of thought-crime from the commenters on HN
I tend to agree with you, but in the days after the election several of my acquaintances witnessed hate crimes accompanied by Trump slogans. This, along with the surge in reports of hate crimes in the media, tells me that this isn't just a repeat of 2000.
This is fact. This is actually occurring. I've seen it, and I've heard first hand accounts.
What is also significant is that I see it being largely ignored in the media, as they frame peaceful counter-Trump protests as "riots" and "thugs destroying property".
This is the opinion I'm seeing coming out by moderates, who are decrying the protests, and ignoring the fascist violence coming from hate groups.
Really? The only (mainstream) articles I've seen have always put "riot" in quotes - as if we the media don't really think it's a riot, but the police say it is, and even implying that the police saying it is might be some kind of a problem. This about events where there is actual, documented (and even photographed) property being destroyed. (This was in Portland.)
> ... it's crazy how hysterical and witch-hunty the left is right now.
Well, see, Trump was really horrible as a candidate. Really incredibly weak. And yet Hillary lost. That couldn't have been because Hillary was an even weaker candidate! It had to be because of a witch! If we can find that witch, we'll be fine in the next election!
I'm scared people are going to keep pushing for social media to implement stronger filters.
I believe very strongly that the free flow of information (even when it's just wrong) is critical. Information gives people power, but withholding information takes power away. If a company like Facebook implements the filter, we're giving that power to them and hoping they are ambivalent.
The solution to fake news is for people to learn how to live in this new world. There used to be only a handful of news organizations, but now there are an infant amount of them. This is GOOD, it's democratizing, but it puts a burden on us as citizens, and consumers of information to understand the motivations of the authors.
This is an opportunity we should be happy to have and be scared of technological or manual solutions that threaten it.
Or we can stop obsessing over the news and politics as a whole? I know that sounds contrary to common sense but I largely avoid any official news for mental health reasons and just for the fact that 9 times out of 10 I've been right as to their original sources (usually think tanks). Ditch the news from your Facebook or at least treat like you would being handed a pamphlet by a stranger: disregard it and throw it away. If you're really itching to know the facts of something in this modern world then Google is your best friend especially if you want to search academic papers on specific subjects like whether or not gender dysphoric children should be given puberty blockers (read the medical journals, the abstracts aren't as dense as say your average physics one). Or if you want to know if the EROI on solar is worth it, you got the department of energy papers, various consumer review sites, and much more. Basically, go do your own journalism because modern journalism is garbage and it'll never recover. Also accept that being more read doesn't mean you're more informed. Especially being well read in politics is like being well read in the DC New 52 lore. It's neat you put the energy into it but it's just a hobby of little objective value.
Maybe instead of filtering they can label the items that are not real news, or label the real news as news(I am not from US so the use case I am thinking of is fake medical/scientific news so in this domain would be easier to start with)
Free flow of information isn't going away, it will just move into channels where that information can't be corrected. It will create even greater information bubbles.
The Times is in denial that anyone considers it anything other than a mixture of Democratic party propaganda and clickbait legacy media. The stats are not looking good for them and dying industries always lash out reflexively and ineffectively at random opponents.
You speak as if this is only a problem for the New York Times.
How can a democracy function without an informed populace? If not the New York Times or some other existing "news" entity, what entity can possibly provide reliable information going forward?
Also, this isn't just about bias. Reporting with a bias can still be useful for informing people, as long as the information presented is accurate. Over time, outlets with varying bias can cover various sides of an issue, or various scandals, etc. from different perspectives, and as long as the information is accurate, over time most of the relevant facts should become known.
Not sure leaving it to the Macedonian teenagers will work out as well.
> How can a democracy function without an informed populace? If not the New York Times or some other existing "news" entity, what entity can possibly provide reliable information going forward?
The New York Times forfeited that position. If I wanted a Democratic Party propaganda rag, I could find one - I don't need the New York Times for that. If I wanted accurate information, I do need the New York Times, or someone like them - but they won't do it. They used to, but they won't any more.
The NYT? Really? I would agree if you were describing Huffington Post or various other left-wing rags, but the NYT is pretty far from a Democratic Propaganda paper.
I wouldn't call it propaganda, but as a foreigner it was amusing to read the NYT front page on election day. There was no attempt at neutrality whatsoever.
(The NYT has no obligation to be neutral and I'm not complaining about their editorial position. They have a right to take sides. It is still useful to keep their previous positions in mind when analyzing what they're saying now.)
12 Trump hit pieces in one day alone. More like establishment propaganda paper, I don't think they would have given Jeb Bush or Rubio such a hard time.
Would you have liked them balanced with 12 pro-Trump pieces or 12 anti-Hillary pieces? Sometimes things are true. Saying they're true isn't bias. It makes no sense to have "balance" when what that means is publishing a non-true thing in order to balance out the true thing you just said.
It's true that Donald Trump is lying, feckless fool. That doesn't need balancing. We can argue all day about why people voted for him, why they rejected the incumbent elite, why they wanted a change, and so on. But that doesn't really change the facts.
> It's true that Donald Trump is lying, feckless fool.
Lying? Sure. Feckless fool? Not a fact.
> But that doesn't really change the facts.
You mean, facts like Hillary arming radicals and destroying governments? Or facts like Clinton getting millions of dollars from major banks? Or facts like Clinton wiping email servers? There were floodlights on the liar, but a crook sneaked in behind them. Rampant editorializing drove people away from the media. People suspected a collusion between media houses and the Clinton campain. Wikileaks confirmed those suspicions. What do they do? CNN tell its viewers that it's illegal to read or download stuff from Wikileaks.
He's a feckless fool. Campaigns on deporting ALL illegal immigrants and building a wall. Says (on 60 minutes, this is not fake, he said it): he's only going to deport illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes. This is exactly Obama's policy. He just won an election, and he's pushing the status-quo.
Again, on ACA repeal, he was VERY CLEAR in the debate: "repeal and replace Obamacare" (just not clear on "replace" with what). On 60 minutes, he's walking that back and talking about the parts he'll keep.
Trump is feckless. And a fool.
And Hillary may have armed radicals, but you look at photos of McCain shaking their hands. This policy will not change under a Trump administration, I guarantee it. Because he will do whatever this Republican congress wants. This is also true for Trade deals.
Just like Hillary, then [1][2]. She changed her tune this campaign season. Why exactly? I don't know. But the only explanation I can come up with is "my opponent's policies are bad"[3]. Most politicians do that when dealing with the opposite party, but Hillary seems to be unique in doing that against her own partymen, be it Obama (earlier) or Sanders now.
> ACA repeal
Just like Hillary, then[4]. However, Clinton had a different endgame in mind.
> Trump is feckless.
This, I cannot deny. Would you say the same of Hillary?
> And a fool.
That remains an opinion. Would you say the same of Hillary?
> you look at photos of McCain shaking their hands
... and I wonder how many of those people were hand-picked for the task by puppets the Americans put in place.
Anyway, this is precisely why I'm laughing so much about Trump's victory.
How, I wonder, do you report on a candidate, who we have a recording bragging about sexual assault, and avoid a "hit piece"? To make a derogatory article attacking trump literally all you have to do is quote what he's said on the record; No editorializing necessary.
Even labeling lewd sexualised comments ("locker talk") as "bragging about sexual assault" is bias. People have different ways of communicating that not everyone might agree with, but what you're doing is trivialising the victims of actual sexual assault.
I refer you to the department of justice's definition of sexual assault [0].
"Sexual assault is any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient."
Grabbing by the genitals, yeah I think that covers it. Personal definitions of lewdness aside, you don't get to change the laws.
I agree they probably wouldn't have been as critical of Bush or Rubio, because it's unlikely that either of those two would have provided them with anywhere near as much material to be critical of.
NYT is not a great paper, it's not the worst, but it has issues. It has been demonstrated in the past that they change or skip coverage of important stories in order to maintain access. Often when they do have important stories they get buried in the paper while the front page exposes something significantly less meaningful.
Basically, I do trust that what they write is true, but I don't trust them to always write it...
I am tired of seeing this argument over and over with no alternative news source presented. The New York Times is a whole lot more accurate than various extremist sites, your Twitter feed, Facebook or the frontpage of Reddit. With the NYT, at least there is somebody to accuse of bias.
Social media people are happy to peddle outright lies one day, never follow up when they are proved wrong, and get on their high horses about "mainstream media".
His job is not get this or that candidate elected. It's more like the New York Times is in denial blaming everybody but the poor candidate they endorsed for her failure to get elected.
The New York Times was also in denial during the campaign dismissing Trump's candidacy as a joke, then giving Hillary 99% chances to win.
Had they taken Trump seriously from the get-go and try to do a proper rebuttal with fact checking and not just "Pepe the frog is a fascist symbol", maybe the outcome would have been different.
This is more than a little bit ironic coming from the New York Times, which just issued an apology for its blatantly biased, divisive, and disappointing coverage of the entire election cycle: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reader...
That will be one of the issues that Facebook will need to deal with, if they're serious about this.
From the article:
>Worse, Facebook doesn’t flag or mark credible news websites
Okay, so who's judging what is a credible news website/source? Is CNN a credible news source, is The Huffington Post, how about the National Enquirer? People can argue that CNN get so many facts wrong, that they aren't a credible news source.
If you're an expect in a field, you tend to notice that the media often make massive mistakes or gross misinterpretations when dealing with news regarding your field. Now realise that they make the same mistakes for pretty much any other field. Are ANY mainstream media actually credible, given the knowledge that they misunderstand and misrepresent an incredible amount of topics every single day.
I've mentioned this before in another thread. It does not matter if it was less than 1% of facebook content. The problem is, it's also every where else. Have you guys seen the front page of Yahoo lately? And also, some how this crap crept into my Google Now news feed. Probably because I visited a dumb link on Reddit. I had to manually block them. But that probably means people who regularly read this crap, gets a ton of them.
Lack of any self-awareness can only be attributed to arrogance. This is exactly the type of arrogance that got their candidate defeated and made Trump an underdog.
Facebook has 1.79B MAUs, and users do not inject enough self-generated original content into the system to make Facebook consistently interesting for those 1.79M MAUs. Therefore their links to outside sites – good and bad, and it isn't particularly simple to decide – will continue to be core to Facebook's business.
I always find it funny when I see HNers complaining about The Wall Street Journal's paywall. Pay it, man! And read the news.
Too much emphasis on Facebook's alleged influence. It's a link/aggregation/search application, and the complexion of its output is strongly going to reflect what users input.
I don't trust the main stream media at all. As part of my long term research on NLP + text mining, I got in the habit of using English language news article from around the world as a text corpus. As part of this process I noticed the disconnect to US coverage compared to foreign news sources. Realizing that everyone has their own agenda, this experience still makes me sceptical of our news.
That said, I am also very sceptical of what I read on the web. I follow several people's blogs and what they post on social media because over the years what they say usually turns out to be correct.
Mostly dealing with our military operations (e.g., civilian casualties), that we are savior of the free world, how life in other countries is so much worse than in the USA (large dose of American exceptionalism).
The USA is a great place, but there are also many other countries that are also great places.
Someone was talking about how, when you use existing systems to translate an poem written in arabic by a ten year old it comes out unintelligible, but the same process is flawless for descriptions of terrorist attacks.
> The Macedonian teenagers found this, too. They had experimented with left-leaning or pro-Bernie Sanders content, but gave up when they found it wasn’t as reliable a source of income as pro-Trump content. But even if Mr. Zuckerberg were right and fake news were equally popular on both sides, it would still be a profound problem.
Perhaps because the market was already saturated with pro-Hillary pieces from mainstream media? If they produce only one-sided hit pieces on Trump, are you surprised those on the right will share anything positive they can find?
I can't believe how people are trying desperately to find a culprit, a reason, an explanation and turning to Facebook for their choice of scapegoat. I mean if half your country is voting for a person whose face could easily illustrate the entries for both demagogue and ignorant in a dictionary, you have bigger problems than Facebook.
The only problem is: you can't fix stupid. It doesn't really matter. If it's not Facebook, it's Gawker, Buzzfeed or a thousend other clickbait outlets.
If somebody actually believes the pope would endorse an American election candidate there really is nothing you can do.
I was anticipating the end of this election, now I find that the situation is just as bad or worse. I'm not talking about which candidate won, but the vitriol coming from both right and left. The intensity is killing me.
<Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.
We are so so so much better now that newspapers matter less and that the network news is not the main game in town. How does more sources make democracy worse even if it's "buyer beware?" it's arrogant to think truth is always hidden.
<<People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, but their information diet is a crucial part of the picture.
We had a choice of candidates that was leftovers or diner food for Thanksgiving. That was the problem
Do you really think the NYT will say good things in an op-ed about it's nimble young competitor?
This "fake news" thing goes all the way back to the founding of our country (USA that is). It has always been a problem. And the solution now is the same as then - be critical and know thy source.
"Fake stories" are not the biggest problem, and focusing on them could fix surface issues without addressing the underlying echo chamber effect. This piece is better than most, but I wish all people arguing for Facebook and Google to stop enabling opinions to be manipulated weren't so distracted by simple lies. It's the series of cherry-picked facts that create a narrative that we have to watch out for.
Fake stories are a huge problem. A trump supporter just shared a story yesterday about a mob of muslims marching through an American neighborhood demanding that Christmas decorations be taken down.
Doesn't even pass the smell test: yet this person believes them implicitly. This election was decided so narrowly, you have to wonder what the impact was.
And this is coming from NYT, a bullshit venue, whose boss said in a recent letter: "... we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor ...". NYT should close the business, nobody trusts them anymore.
"considering the newspaper just had a 96% drop in profits last quarter."
Without knowing what the drop in profits is due to, I think it's. For example, is it because people are getting more of their news online and letting their paper subscriptions lapse? In my area home delivery is between $5–$10 per week, and that's at the 50% off introductory rate, compared to $3.75/week online only. Of course, that doesn't take into account printing and delivery costs.
Another reason could be that people no longer see value above and beyond what's available elsewhere that they can get for free online. That's different from no longer trusting the paper.
Looking up the reporting on the NYT profit decline, they note
- decline in print ad sales, increase in digital ad sales (which is expected given the print -> digital migration)
- significant investment in digital publishing
- net profit losses mainly due to restructuring charges related to reducing workforce
NYT is so out of touch. After extreme bias during the election cycle and a 96% drop in profits last quarter, they released a statement to their subscribers. Here's my favorite part:
>We cannot deliver the independent, original journalism for which we are known without the loyalty of our readers.
"A recent BuzzFeed News analysis of giant hyperpartisan Facebook pages found that 38% of posts on conservative pages and 19% of posts on liberal pages featured false or misleading content."
This is not so bad. I think that lies in the media are good if they help to balance public opinion.
The world that I'm really scared of is one where everyone agrees about everything and people who disagree are locked up; that's where I saw things going before the election (when I thought that Hillary was going to win).
Chaos and disagreement is one of the most important things in our society. We always need at least two sides to every story (even if one side is a complete fabrication) - Balance of public opinions is the most important thing for freedom.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that lies are good. I'm in favor of a robust debate, but let's base it on facts, and even feelings/understanding. The last thing we need to do is mis-educate more people... that'll never lead to agreement.
What about all of the fake Trump news? My friends on Facebook still think Trump is a rapist (he never raped anyone), Racist (I'm still not sure where this one came from), and homophobic (he is not reversing gay marriage).
When his first speech came out about immigration, he said he wants to deport illegal immigrants (which is actually already law). The media turned it into just 'immigrants' and we now have entire groups of legal immigrants that are afraid Trump will deport them. Did nobody watch the speech or does the mainstream media have problems comprehending English?
There is anti-Trump violence growing in the US and people have been assaulted and harassed for even saying they supported him. The protests aren't 'peaceful', they are riots.
This is all ignored on the news, however. The only thing they can spew out is the story about the girl that got her Hijab pulled, which turned out to be fake. MSNBC still reports it as fact.
Will Facebook ban links to MSNBC for this fake story?
This is exactly why half the country voted Trump into office. Even now, you still can't figure out that it was your own fault and want to blame the rest of American for losing the election.
The other irony is complaining about bias and marginalizing and then painting an entire group of people (Trump supports) as 'racists' and 'islamaphobes'.
It really shows me that all of the people that claim we need more 'love' and 'peace' are just using it for political gain and power. When they don't get what they want, the fangs come out.
You want understanding and compassion when it comes to gay marriage and the transgender community, but give none of it in return.
As someone observing from Mexico, I noticed almost all of the mainstream US media became an echo chamber for pro-Clinton content. I only realized this after after seeing how Sanders was sabotaged and the media collectively tried to bury it. Here in Mexico it's a similar situation with a few big media outlets protecting the corrupt status quo.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/185927/americans-trust-media-rema...