Fake news is too big and messy to solve with algorithms or editors
backchannel.com
backchannel.com
* Traditional mass media has failed at manufacturing consent (stealing Chomsky's title here because I like the book and it fits). Election was lost to a TV personality even though mass media was supposed to prevent it. Google and Facebook didn't waste any time after noticing this market vacuum and signaled they are ready to be the new manufacturers of consent. "Pay us money and we'll properly inform people of your favorite brand/policy/candidate and block competing brands/candidates. Don't rely on TV news anymore. Come to us". That was a very good move on their part.
* Fake news term was a good PR term. It works well as a slogan, is short and very expressive. However it was appropriated by others. Disarming by appropriation is an interesting technique. So now the same media companies talking about fake news are defending themselves from being labeled as such. It went so far that WaPo journalist explicitly asked everyone to stop using the term as it apparently is backfiring too much: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-r... I think studying how appropriation happened so quickly and effectively is worth it just as much as the effect of lizard people or chemtrails on the outcome of the election.
I don't use Twitter much. But was searching the term a while back and saw in Google auto-complete of "fake news " CNN poped up as the 4th line. And still does, I just checked. I found that fascinating for some reason. Here is a $1B+ in gross profit mass media business reduced to being the only explicitly named news company in the Google search suggestion box for "Fake News".
There is spin and editorial bias all around...
read between the lines and investigate the editorial and philosophical slant and you will see this very quickly.
Two recent examples.
* https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/more-bad-r...
Fake news is an offshoot of the web being an advertising space with a seemingly unending supply of brain hacked human bots.
Facebook and google played a huge part in spreading clickbait and fake news titles and and now all of a sudden they are trying to "stop" it lofnl.
Getting your desired message heard and accepted is still a pretty strong motivator - though yes, this does deincentivize the purely 'fake news for profit' camp.
"simply"?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news
There was some usage earlier in the 20th century, 1920 - 1950 or so.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fake%20news&ye...
Well said. Are people savvy enough now to see through that?
> Well said. Are people savvy enough now to see through that?
This is the obvious critique you could give any media that claims trying to filter out falsehoods.
You can either trust nobody (which many people have unfortunately decided to do) or listen to the various news providers and see who makes the better case for you to trust them.
I don't know that Google and Facebook makes a worse case than so many other outlets?
Absolutely not. The internet has turned "I read it somewhere" factoids into a constant barrage of crap that is addictive and unfulfilling and kinda rage inducing. I'm hoping sometime in the future-ish that people will wise up, but its very hard when all of your media is tailor-made to keep you just pissed off to demand more.
1) New media becomes the elite's puppet just like old media.
2) New technology will disrupt and destroy old and currently new media and create decentralized social media where fake news will be the norm and the elites will lose control of information.
3) New uncensored platform appears to appeal to a general need of people wanting to see what they want to see which again reopens the debate.
The first is more likely than the second. But for the first time in a very long time the second option has a chance.
2) already the case. it's called world of mouth. we just use technology to propagate it now. We never had so many chat apps, social networks, content sharing services, etc.
3) this I want to happen, but every attempt is not only hard to use, but also used for very illegal/immoral stuff that makes it the target of regulations, preventing it from becoming popular. And even if it ever reach popularity, it can cross a threshold making it full of trash like the previous medium, and we would have to restart again. Maybe we should create a system that is hard to get it, to prevent people that are not interested enough to come and trash it.
Jump back before the web and Snopes and it was extremely difficult to even verify a story was fact or not. Facts usually meant going to a library and finding a book that was written years before. Even then, just establishing that the author's name was real was a long and very rough process.
I agree, we have come a very long way and are much better off today. This is hardly a crisis, just growing pains.
Exactly. So we (as a society) no longer have time to chew on things and think rationally. Instead, it's a race to speed of reaction / wit. It's an emotional race condition.
This is not something I can follow. Trump got the most screen time of any candidate, Clinton included (Sanders got the least of the top 4).
If the media was supposed to "stop" Trump, why did they pen so much ink and cut to Trump's random assertions in the middle of major policy positions of his adversaries.
Based purely on a "google fight" comparison of screentime, it was clear who the media wanted to win, and who would win.
Just saying Trump had more screen time is a small picture of what the media have been doing to Trump. The lack of screentime for Clinton was a benefit as we saw. We actually saw correlation with lower national polling the more screen time she got. The more she was under wraps (remember the LONG countdown since she had had a press conference, it had been something like 250 days I think). Many talking heads were saying that was on purpose.
Such a contrast to John Kerry's swiftboating... Somehow Trump repelled any smear attempts. Personality? Media? Society?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan%27s_Neshoba_County_Fair...
I'd thrown quotes around the term to indicate some level of irony / metameaning: the term was intentionally borrowed and adapted, to make a point, and one which Chomsky's first readers would fairly likely have been aware of. Chomsky's use of the phrase has now almost certainly eclipsed Lippmann's, one of the occupational hazards of re-working this palimpsest of social consciousness we're all engaged in.
I just think there's a lot of people who will take any buzzword and angrily throw it at things they don't like.
I'm continually amazed by the things I see described as "political correctness", and "clickbait" or "virtue signalling" are all the same as "fake news" in common usage. They all translate as "stuff I don't like or agree with and is therefore bad" and any genuine meaning they may have once had has been stripped.
Part of what makes that idea so plausible to me is that there's no need for conspiracy. It's not the "mainstream media setting out to trick people" and it wouldn't be "google and facebook setting out to trick people." It's also not the government (or any other body) coercing the media into toeing some policy line.
The factors that result in "the manufacture of consent" are tangled and hard to pin down. Most of them boil down to internalized assumptions leading to the inability to think objectively about geopolitics.
The media lost a lot of credibility from the second Iraq war which (almost to the publisher) they were cheering for. So when Washington Post (among others) started the Ra Ra for invasion of Syria to topple Assad more than a few eyebrows went up.
The public might be generally uninformed and uninterested but they aren't flat out stupid. And memory isn't quite as short as is apparently believed in some quarters.
This leaves an information vacuum. Which predictably is filled with anything that can match up with what people already "know" or otherwise want to believe.
Less is more when it comes to propaganda. Make it unreasonable and it all stops working.
The moment I heard the word "fake news" I recognized it as the big red flag for this transitional period. As expected, the term was appropriated instantaneously by opposing political groups because we all at some subconscious level realize what is happening and understand just how powerful the term "fake news" can be right now. It perfectly eclipses with the idea of consumer retention in media organizations.
The idea that services like Google and Facebook are going to use more algorithms to counter the tracking and ad servicing algorithms they developed in the first place is laughable. The solution (if they were actually trying to counter 'fake news') would be to get rid of this harmful technology entirely, but that's all these companies have to bring in revenue so I doubt that'd happen.
'Fake news' is not Breitbart or CNN or one news outlet. 'Fake news' is really the way these internet companies have distorted our collective reality for their own short-term gains. It is irresponsible, dangerous, and in my opinion, not profitable in the long run unless they completely usurp all our species' communication. Which they are actively trying to achieve.
Propaganda is common throughout history to gather supports.
Fake news didn't just happen on Facebook. Mainstream media have been criticized for all forms of malpractices or unfair reporting by misquoting, taking a quote or story out of context, using unauthentic images or using different random parts of a clip to create a story. Is NYT more fair than Fox News?
I recently came across a YouTube video called "The Sinter Reason Weed is Illegal" [1]. I am not a historian, but from this video I learned that perhaps the ban of cannabis was perhaps not based on scientific facts at all. The whole ban was just a political move by provoking racism to rally up against the Blacks and the Mexicans.
After the 2016 Election, I started to follow a Facebook Page called "Now This Politics" (NTP). Given the page's political nature, most of the stories are about the current administration. I started to get more news stories from Facebook. A few days ago United Airlines was reported to have barred girls from boarding a flight because of their leggings. NTP created a video about the incident. I felt UA was being ridiculous. Legging isn't the most inappropriate dress code. I didn't approve UA's defense. But when I went to the comment section, I started to change my stand on the issue because apparently these girls got their tickets via an employee discount program, for which the ticket holder is subjected to a stricter dress code. While I don't dispute this dress code might be outdated for legging (what about Yoga pants?), NTP's video was able to impose a negative view on me. Yes, the video did include UA's defense statement UA said the employee discount ticket holders are subjected to dress code requirement at the end of the video, but at that point the negativity had already been planted.
Now I have to be extra careful not to side with the video creator right away, just because their other videos do make good points exposing the uglinesses of our current government. The fact I agree with them before would mean I am now vulnerable to social influences and perhaps beginning to deindivdiualize in my capacity to distinguishing my own views from others' views..
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlqsdezhhk
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/us/united-airlines-leggin...
This is interesting, I didn't know about that. However, I remember a sociology class I took in college. It showed that crack and cocaine fines / jail times were very different from each other (doing crack was legally more Dangerous than doing cocaine). But crack and cocain are pretty much the same thing. The biggest difference is that a few décades ago (I don't know if it's still the case), white people did cocaine and black people did crack. Because crack was cheaper than cocaine. Sad how régulations are made sometimes.
It's "the President issued an executive order" vs "the President, in a Hitler-like move, issued an executive order"
Journalism was needed because people wanted to know what happened across the globe. Citizen reporting on twitter, Periscope, and YouTube erased that need. Journalists also didn't help themselves last year by being completely one sided. People noticed that.
"Fake news" is the journalism's last attempt to save itself. It's already dead from self inflicted wounds.
fake news is a subset of disinformation.
if I disagree with it then it's fake news
else it's just news
But that's the point. There seems to be a large number of people and organizations (including the US President) who are NEVER interested in issuing retractions or admitting fault - when something is pointed out as factually false, they just repeat the falsehood louder even when there is stuff like audio or video evidence that directly refutes it.
Sources should be critically evaluated constantly, but sources that are usually more off should be treated differently than sources that are usually more on.
And yet in the social media world (Facebook was the big offender) links like this are just treated as "news" and presented to their users alongside other stuff. There is a gatekeeper role for these companies that used to be provided by the traditional media. And Facebook wasn't even trying. So we got Pizzagate.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news,pizza...
The rumors and allegations against the Podesta brothers, the various associated instagram accounts and all the other information you can find in various youtube exposés (example: https://youtu.be/beqdw19Uj6E) were quickly trashed and ridiculed. Ben Swann's career got destroyed.
The concept of 'news', as torturously discussed in the Danah Boyd piece, is entirely dependent on what information is allowed to be discussed and in what context.
Most news outlets are extremely biased for political and advertising demographic reasons. The internet has been a wonderful medium for allowing people to discover and explore, and the only 'fake news' I see is created by Outbrain, Taboola and other click bait insurgents into the news media.
Which is (in a less dramatic way) pretty much how standard media operates when they want to promote a position.
Point being, effective fake news isn't all fake. It's 90%+ real making the critical 10% palatable.
I'm not really interested in arguing about details nor starting any kind of flame war and I certainly don't believe in an international pedophilia Democrat child sex ring run out of a Pizza joint. You can look into if you care to. But suffice it to say, there were real people and events that provided enough for the narrative to be built on. Well beyond the Podesta emails.
<edit>The other reason I'm not interested in discussing details is because I don't believe in the existence of a pedophilia Democrat sex ring and the details I'm talking about were largely innocent behaviors in my opinion and thus aren't worth trotting out in public where more people can go "humm... maybe there was something going on". Like I say, you can look into more if curious. But there was more going on than the mainstream news "fake news" accounts portrayed. Enough to build the narrative on.
After looking long enough at it, basically PizzaGate warrants just as much suspicion for me as any JFK theory at this point. I believe there's something to it. There is a mountain of little details that make it impossible to flat out deny it, I just don't go as far as levying accusations at people withouth knowing facts. Others have accused people w/o evidence beyond a reasonable doubt and I think that's wrong. I think the police should be interested in Pizza Gate, and I think a few of them are. But again I don't go further than that.
What people think bubbled over Pizza Gate was that guy with the gun who went in the restaurant. But actually that smelled like a hoax to me. It just seemed wildly incomplete and a convenient way to say "See what fake news does!" And that guy had a strange background with him, and the media chose NOT to go too deep into his story either. It was like they just needed that for their narative.
1. As a psyops to stop the potentially very damaging allegations against powerful senior Washington DC political operatives on the eve of an important election.
2. To repair the damage to the mainstream press, who were steadily losing paid readership.
Both of these objectives have been successfully achieved however you perceive it.
Meanwhile the mainstream press is flooded with click bait advertising while at the same time pushing 'we are the only credible, trusted news source' messaging to readers, along with begging requests for funding so they can continue with their work.
The reality is that investigative 'reporters' were either let go or resigned in disgust from the MSM around the time blogging became a viable means of disseminating writing and making money.
We are now in an era of crack downs on free speech and debate: it will be interesting to se whether the mainstream mastheads can regain their 'trusted voice' relationship with large numbers of readers, or whether there will be an increase in cynicism and mistrust. Pravda, the old Soviet newspaper/mouthpiece comes to mind.
An example of that
https://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2006/06/22/there-is-truth...
>1. As a psyops to stop the potentially very damaging allegations against powerful senior Washington DC political operatives on the eve of an important election.
If you're referring to "pizzagate", if you were paranoid you might also think that was the psyop. Paranoid people think a lot of things.
>Both of these objectives have been successfully achieved however you perceive it.
I'm not certain that's true. Damage to the mainstream press hasn't been repaired, and the people who believe in pizzagate still believe in it, and it was covered by the mainstream media, albeit briefly and as an example of, ironically, the fake news phenomenon.
> [Weird emails...] I believe there's something to it.
vs.:
> [Guy discharges an actual weapon] actually that smelled like a hoax to me.
Yeah. We're done here.
You're proving my point. Precisely BECAUSE somebody discharged a firearm, in your mind now the case is closed it's ALL fake news. I'm saying that the reporting on this guy is light, but we're supposed to dismiss the strange coded emails now. Nah I think I'll continue to keep my eye on it.
Lesson learned for anyone want to sweep something under a rug. Just pay some mentally ill person to discharge a firearm nearby, say they did it because Jodie Foster or Alex Jones told the place was suspicious and then CNN will ensure to brand the act as a "lesson of fake news" and impossible to discuss now.
To clarify (but not debate, like I said we're done): I'm pointing out that your willingness to believe in "something" about pizzagate based on nothing but email inuendo yet your inclination to disbelieve that a guy who shot actual rounds into the air and got himself arrested and charged was sincere are... sorta in conflict.
You aren't being serious. You're just believing what you want to believe. Feel free. Maybe there are some, um, "news" sources you can focus on to further reinforce your priors.
Side topic, St. Louis recently had a pizza incident make the news. Odd.
That is one disturbing takeaway. Props to the author for seeing that and pointing it out. I for one feel stupid for having believed such a thing could happen. But then, hindsight is always 20/20.
But we also can't dismiss the responsibility of the platforms. The sort of systemic change that this piece alludes to needs the companies to be involved. They are a huge part of "the system" — part of the problem.
As the piece itself says: "We need to work together and build coalitions of groups who do not share the same political and social ideals to address the issues that we can all agree are broken." That cannot happen when the incentives and UX promulgated by the platforms are fighting against any sort of social cohesion.
Platform changes are critical to bootstrapping ourselves into a better media ecosystem.
For example: "Trump approved an oil pipe.". This is no fake news. But the conclusion most outlets made was: "See, Trump is working with the Russians because it's Russian steel.". And even one part of the conclusion is true: it is partly Russian steel. But the steel was already bought years ago.
So my questions is: how could Google and Facebook do reliable fact checking on this? So yes, maybe they can't make fake news disapear.
What tipped it all over is the advent of three things: 24h news channels, demanding a spectacularization of news to fill an entire day of broadcasting; the Web, of course; the need to find a way for monetizing news on the Web, that led to dancing with the devil of online advertisement. We're currently in a phase where the shortcomings of the ad based business model for media are clear to everyone.
How many previously respectable outlets have already burnt their integrity at the altar of clickbait and ads for the sake of keeping the lights on?
What we are witnessing with fake news is what happens when a balancing power of society (media) is losing its grip and importance. The problem here being that the actors who are actively weakening that power (Google and Facebook) don't want to affirm a different flavor of that power. It's only about the money.
Now imagine groups that have vast amounts of resources to spend doing the same. Doing studies and only paying attention to the ones that agree with a certain view point. Scanning through other studies and statistics to find plenty of statistics that back their point even when relative to the whole body of statistics on the issue the findings are in the minority. Using psychology to find the best way to present facts with the goal of causing false conclusions to be drawn. Find legitimate critiques of opposing research but not uniformly applying them.
One example is the effect of listing crime rates by grouping based on total vs per capita rates. Group X is 10% of the population but commits 20% of the crime. You can list the data as they only commit 20% of the crime, or that their crime rate per capita is double that of group Y which is 40% of the population and commits 40% of the crime. And even this might not be correct is treatment of Group's X and Y by the police are not equal. Perhaps Group Y commits more crime, but isn't as likely to be investigated?
How can someone trust the facts they are being given when there are groups whose purposefully work to be able to give true facts in a way that encourages wrong conclusions?
Read here and make up your own mind: http://www.allsides.com/
Thanks for share.
"Discursively, this frame is used to highlight every form of problematic content, including both blatantly and accidentally inaccurate information, salacious and fear-mongering headlines, hateful and incendiary rhetoric produced in blogs, and propaganda of all stripes (driven by both the State and other interests)."
Did you read all the different types and make a mental note of which news you recently heard falls under which category? Probably not, because we are cognitive misers.
Sometimes, the underlying issue is that humans simply do not have the capacity to sift through so much noise to get to the heart of the matter. To proof yourself against fake news will involve so much thinking that it will become a full time job.
People really like to "sort and label", as a famous economist put it. It conserves our mental energy and can even be very helpful for economic and social progress. The sorting and labeling is going to be personalized to their upbringing and cultural norms, with a strong affinity towards news, fake or not, which agrees with such an upbringing.
Fake news could just be an unintended side effect of the increase in opportunities to consume (information) and communicate, because humans won't go from cognitive misers to cognitive spendthrifts ever. And who wants less opportunity to consume and communicate?
And certainly, stop asking Google and Facebook to make fake news disappear. This is like requesting burglars to make sure they bolt the door after they are done with their burglary so that other people don't vandalize what is left of the shop.
Stories that challenge a person's world view are generally ignored, stories that support a person's world view are liked.
I enjoy casual conversations with people i disagree with. In person i can keep it genial and friendly. On line i don't have that control, and criticizing an idea becomes tough to distinguish from criticizing the person. Because the person i'm interacting with isn't really thinking much at all, and just reacting in an emotional way.
At least that's how i believe they're reacting, because i catch my self reacting that way more often than i like to admit.
edit
As a concrete example, I've had a bunch of in person conversations about gun ownership, and a fair number of online discussions. With the in person examples, generally, i feel like i've learned something, and my interlocutor has a better understanding of my point of view. Any time i try that online, i just get pissed off and i'm pretty sure my interlocutor does as well, judging by being unfriended.
That kind of response died along with USENET in the 90s in the eternal September
I've had the same experience.
I'm a gun owner. I also believe that guns are dangerous and every gun owner should be thoroughly vetted before being allowed to own one.
As a New Yorker it took 11 months for my pistol permit application to be processed. My finger prints were taken, as well as a mug shot. It cost over $100. A county sheriff came to my home to inspect it and interview me. And I was fine with all of that, because it meant others had to go through this same strict process. I think it should not be easy to obtain a gun, and it should be easy to lose the privilege.
But I've shared this opinion online with other gun owners before and to say it was not received very well is a massive understatement. Apparently, not only does my belief in tighter restrictions mean I don't deserve to own guns, it also means that I don't believe in any part of the Constitution at all, and should my life be in danger, gun owners who may be able to help me shouldn't come to my defense. That was seriously what I was told. To these people online it's preferable that I be killed than defended because I believe guns shouldn't be easy to obtain. It's absolutely crazy.
But now you can interact orders of magnitude faster and with more people with it, thus changing the nature of interacting.
'Fake News' needs to be put in the context of on-going propaganda that comes from the mainstream media (including in the United States).
Most HN readers are unaware of this context. I urge the reader of this comment to research the history of (war) propaganda, and carefully examine his/her belief system if he/she feels that the United States is exempt from history in this regard.
See 'The Myth of American Exceptionalism' http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/10/25/obama-putin... and research the history of propaganda in the US. At some historical point where it becomes uncomfortable to acknowledge it, people will suppose that it ceased to exist. This is not true.
It's the difference between running these headlines: "Secret child sex-trafficking ring led by Hillary Clinton" vs "Trump lies, yet again"
Witness the fact that noone is talking about all countries attempts to influence the US elections on all sides, despite the fact that this is almost certainly the case..
Add that to these idiots becoming sanctimonious and now you've got a lot of disaffected audience who just know something doesn't add up seeking alternative news. If the only options you got are people wagging their fingers, you might as well just find someone who's not constantly calling you an asshole over things you cannot control about yourself.
Probably because the experts struggling over this aren't expert enough to notice that borders of those categories are not questions with answers that can be investigated, but instead they're categorizations people choose to apply. (Oh, and the author should know better than to casually drop the implication that they're non-intersecting categories.)
And to the extent discussing "protected" speech introduces the legal questions, there is no amount of experts expert-ing that can come up with a mathmatical proof to replace a nation's amalgamation of different societal philosophies figuring out where to draw legal boundaries.
@ericdykstra has addressed the question of definitions of fake news, so I'll just repoint to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001745
https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/a-case-study-in-the-fake-new...
The frustrating thing about all this is that civilised people worked out, back in the 18th century that the solution is to let bullshit and truth have free play so that free people can decide for themselves.
That doesn't mean interweb giants won't have there work cut out for them. But that should be workaday stuff like blocking spam and the like. "The like" includes stuff like folks who make up stupid stuff just to get clicks -- but it doesn't mean every kind of lie or misinformation.
As soon as you try to crack down or limit "fake news" you play right into psychology of reinforcing the fake news "media" and "they out to get us".
Also lol at the concept of google and facebook knowing whats fake news and what isnt and trusting them to do so.
Maybe what's needed is more like a DMCA takedown mechanism, if the verified target of a piece (eg a politician or their agent) files a complaint, then the piece is temporarily taken down, and the person who posted it has an opportunity to prove the substance of the allegations and if they fail it gets taken down permanently, otherwise it goes back up permanently.
This would also have the advantage of killing all of those useless "anonymous source" articles too.
Key to that educated outlook would be healthy skepticism and application of the null hypothesis precept from science -- the assumption that, without positive empirical evidence, a claim is assumed to be false.
If readers were educated and skeptical, if they understood and appreciated how science works, the fake news epidemic would starve and die for lack of an audience.
1. Complete fiction presented as fact up to push a narrative [1]
2. Reporting on conspiracy theories as fact, presenting circumstantial evidence as hard evidence.
3. Intentionally misleading by cherry-picking statistics/data/etc [2][3]
4. Taking things out of context to paint a picture of a person that doesn't exist [4]
5. Criticizing someone's words rather than their position to construct a straw man (most character assassination pieces do this)
6. Presenting biased reporting on stories
7. Only presenting stories that paint a story of the world that the author agrees with
The first is unequivocally fake news. Any source that reports a story like this should be suspect, and any that doesn't issue a retraction should be ignored.
The second is what the mainstream media pins the Alex Jones type on, calling them fake news.
The 3rd, 4th, and 5th are usually the tactics of what people call "alternative media," but almost all legacy media companies use these tactics, at least occasionally. This is why WSJ, CNN, WaPo, etc often get the fake news label from the alternative media and other critics. If fake news is defined as fiction presented as fact, then it's not unfair to label these tactics as fake news.
The last two are just punditry and audience pandering, and the only ones calling them "fake news" are partisans that can't stand partisan viewpoints from the other side.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/1...
[2] http://theparadoxproject.org/blog-1/2016/12/4/mostly-false-p...
[3] http://theparadoxproject.org/blog-1/2016/12/20/picking-your-... https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa...
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-severs-ties-with-youtube...
further reading: I love this essay by Nassim Taleb: "The Facts are True, the News is Fake" https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa...