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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as fake news. There's only news, otherwise you're insinuating that some speech is 'fake', and conversely, some speech is 'genuine'.

News can be false, misleading, disproven, untrustworthy, and many shades in between. In fact there are a lot more angles to information than a False/True boolean. Some things can be true in a certain context, but not others. Sometimes untested or fringe news outlets have real stories (Drudge Report, was, for example, was the first news outlet to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal). Sometimes trustworthy news outlets deliver a misleading stories, as in the case of Iraq WMDs or Y2K.

A better way to phrase things would be to use more nuance to describe the state of reporting on current events. But since skepticism and logic don't increase readership or viewership, unfortunately those qualities aren't encouraged among the discourse going around these days.

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It looks to me that you are spreading unnecessary confusion. Let me give you two scenarios:

(1) I go to a marketplace and buy a service to plant a news story. Assume that the title of the story is "oceanplexian is part of DC pizza scandal". This story is posted on their affiliate websites, by bots on Twitter/Facebook, it is even reported on your local TV as "rumors emerge about oceanplexian (with a healthy dose of nuance, skepticism, logic)". This is certainly fake news, right? (I hope so!)

(2) In the second scenario, imagine if two of your coworkers contact a journalist with information that "oceanplexian is making bombs at home". Then the journalist finds out that you are buying fertilizers even though you live in a multi-story building. The police refuse to comment. Then a news story is published with the title of "suspicious behavior by oceanplexian". Later it turned out that you had joked to your friends about making bombs and the fertilizers were for your science experiments. So this was a false story, the people involved in spreading this story apologize and move on.

Also, the meaning of words depends on context and the context changes with time. There is a current meaning of fake news. And we can easily classify many fake news stories with 100% certainty as fake. I do not know how muddying the water with Iraq War, Y2K, etc. helps in the discussion about fake news in the current context.

Because this shit has been going on a long, long time! That's why--you can't discuss fake news and then not bring up the key examples put out by official media sources. It's like talking about just Nigerian scammers when scams have been going on for thousands of years.

> In fact there are a lot more angles to information than a False/True boolean

There are lots of colors between "red" and "blue". The neural excitations and/or wavelengths of light we associate with those words may even vary from person to person [1]. Yet the terms are still helpful.

Demarcating continuous variables, even if the specific delineations are somewhat arbitrary, can be helpful.

[1] http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx

Well it's a weird sort of problem because lots of knowledge is highly paradigmatic. In that within a certain paradigm it's true, outside of it is untrue or labelled as irrelevant. Like look at the paradigm of social justice, or conservative, or liberalism, communism, christian conservatives, ufo believers, russian nationalists, etc. Within each of these frames there are things that are true, which are absolutely false or at least somewhat false outside of them. The point here is that there was a paradigm that supported the status quo and generally worked that is now being challenged by fragmented paradigms that were before essentially censored or at least relegated as the political fringe which are now going more mainstream who are trying to assert dominance or at least relevance of their paradigm through what is termed fake news. This is bad news for those who run these systems because it means their power to control thoughts and force decisions, whether right or wrong, good or bad is diminished. Will it stay that or will they be able to reclaim their position? Remains to be seen. Also these fringe paradigms are being manipulated for power gains by players that before had no such ability such as Russia or China. Before such ability was only in the hands of the "good" guys.

Only insofar as a lot of 'news' reporting is really opinion in disguise. The who/what/when/where of the story shouldn't be changing and only the fact that so many organizations fail to link to, e.g., official court rulings when they discuss a decision, or to full video of political proceedings they quote from, allows for that kind of variance.

Think of Groklaw vs. normal legal coverage for example. One gave you every court document & context. The other brings on some random expert to give a few words and then starts printing reactions of random people on Twitter or whatever.

Motivated reasoning guarantees that rationality is always colored with opinion and bias. Like look at the flat earth society for an ridiculous example of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

That will change how people interpret facts, yes. But it can't really change whether, e.g., a court ruled for or against someone in a case.

Well yes that's true. But you don't have to agree with what the court ruled, I was not trying to argue against your point... but in the real world many things in the real world are not about interpreting an agreed upon authorities decisions otherwise you are in that paradigm. Like for instance in this case you are a person operating in the paradigm of the law.

I guess we have different ideas of what 'news' is, then.

To me, 'news' consists only of the objective facts and 'opinion' covers all the rest of the analysis. I normally care only about the 'news' portion and I look for links, video, etc. to verify those facts.

The 'opinion' side of the stories is generally not of interest to me.

> News can be false, misleading, disproven, untrustworthy, and many shades in between. In fact there are a lot more angles to information than a False/True boolean.

Ideally this range could be quantified using publisher trust scores where publishers rate the reliability of each other using cardinal utilities and distributed public web of trust.

> sometimes trustworthy news outlets deliver a misleading stories, as in the case of Iraq WMDs or Y2K.

If the conclusions which a rational reader is likely to draw from reading an article are incorrect, then the reliability and trust score of a publisher should decrease, and we should not be able to claim that the news outlet was in fact wholly 'trustworthy'. As you stated, 'shades in between'.

> But since skepticism and logic don't increase readership or viewership, unfortunately those qualities aren't encouraged

News agencies which publish high quality information for an initially small number of readers should in principle still be able to generate profit by generating greater total utility per person. Part of the problem as to why they are not able to do so is that they are not able to implement 'value capture' for this utility using current web browser technologies.

This might be because there is no open one-time payment protocol associated with electronic news reader applications analagous to giving a dollar to the operator of a local newspaper stand on the street, where people used to be able to pay for a 'little bit' of the news on the margin.

The definition of news is "newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events."

If your news is about events that never happened, and not just biased towards one particular ideology but completely fictional, it shouldn't be considered news.

The Onion for example is fake news, not just an angle on particular information. I agree that this label is overused to describe REAL news that doesn't from a different point of view.

But completely fictional stories, made by papers that don't exist, that happen in towns that don't exist, about people that don't exist, made exclusively for profit, can't be included in your definition of "news".

> The Onion for example is fake news

No, the Onion is overt satire. To be fake news, it would have to try to make you believe that it is news.

I've listened to Rush Limbaugh read satirical news, as real news on his Radio show before to get conservatives agitated. If it is ever pointed out by someone that the news isn't factual, he says that "it is true, in a deeper way, in that it expresses an important point about what is going on."

I might add that many times over the years notable people have mistaken Onion parody as real news.

There are news sources that try to report an accurate account of events by enforcing simple journalistic standards (e.g., multiple sources) and after-the-fact corrections and retractions. They're easy to spot -- look for links to their corrections on their front pages.

Everything else is, or might as well be considered, fake news.

Devils advocate I guess: Snowden leaks was a single source. Fake news?

Snowden was a single source until confirmed.

"Fake news" as a term appeared in the corporate media one day after the Presidential election:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news

They chose to focus on fake news instead of Hillary's failings as a candidate. As far as I can tell it was a narrative tailored to exculpate her of blame for losing.

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