How Lies Spread Online
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Jonathan Swift (1710)
"A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on."
It's quite amazing that the researchers essentially quantified those idioms. And it's also somewhat surprising that none of the idioms found their way into the article. :)
One of the things that stands out in false stories is that because they are false they stay "on message" in their falseness. This contrasts with stories that are more truthful which tend to include questions and unknowns that might later contradict or modify the story.
So for an example, a false story about a series of events leading up to an outcome, there are no events mentioned that suggest randomness or any discussion of alternate ways the outcome could have come about. Where as truthful stories have either tests that were done for counter factual narratives or suggestions for other areas that were not covered as completely.
Basically a common theme in truthful stories was they still included "inconvenient" facts which might or might not be significant and the false stories contain no such facts or even hints.
If I still had an ontologist I could talk to I'd try to figure out if we score stories using an ontological structure score (where perfect scoring is most likely false :-).
This is the main barometer that I use to see if I live in an echo chamber or not and orient myself in the world. The people I listen to (Rogan, Peterson, Weinsteins, Rubin, and to a lesser extent Shapiro and Harris) tend not to speak authoritatively except in narrow circumstances and their opponents (and people I disagree with) tend to speak as if their opinions are self-evidently correct and disagreement is out of the question.
Unrelatedly, another tool is to examine my mentors' critic's arguments. It is very telling that Jordan Peterson is equally accused of being far left and far right.
I've found it to be a useful tool in other spheres as well.
The further you are from mainstream medicine, the greater the confidence signaling. Doctors tend to express the least confidence, and crackpots the most. This is why alternative medicine thrives.
Could be true, I guess. Everyone has "perspective" about what is important. That still doesn't seem to be a reason to disbelieve a fact checker when they tell you that, say, POTUS is lying, though.
> Though I have to say the whole concept of a single self-appointed authoritative source troubles me, what with its Ministry of Truth overtones.
There are literally multiple competing fact checking organizations. How exactly does that have overtones of centrally enforced authority? How in particular given that the actual central authority in this country has made a habit about calling correct but unflattering coverage "lies"?
It gives reason to doubt based on a known political bias.
>How exactly does that have overtones of centrally enforced authority?
Because it implies one is unable to determine truths and falsehoods for themselves
'It is impossible to overstate the degree of daily vituperation visited upon the president in the media. Comics and actors use their non-political programs to attack him, often to the implicit applause of the press. Virtually all coverage outside the conservative Fox News and isolated conservative outlets is negative, often couched in highly hostile terms. Virtually all of the columnists at the New York Times and the Washington Post, America’s two most respected dailies, despise Trump – and that includes nearly all of the conservative, libertarian and Republican columnists too. Trump supporters who follow news at all cannot escape the daily blast of negativity. This has, predictably, hardened the attitudes of many Trump supporters.'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/libera...
Can you explain again why exactly you don't trust answers you get from Snopes or Politifact? Don't tell me what "many Trump supporters" think. Tell me why you don't trust them.
Apart from that in my observation these organisations are not impartial, and I think in the context of the universal anti-Trump media they are easily dismissed as just another group suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I should make clear I don't live in the US and so have no direct stake in this and follow it more out of curiosity/amusement than anything else. I'm not going to try to argue Trump doesn't lie, but I think CNN etc are becoming hysterical.
> Can you tell me why I should trust them?
Because they have a years-long(11 for Politifact, 19 for Snopes) history of being right. They're consistently, reliably right. So yeah, I trust them. I trusted them under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. I trust them now.
Maybe you are the one who needs to re-evaluate priors: maybe, just maybe, the "universal anti-Trump media" environment is driven by some kind of objective (heh) truth about the Trump administration's relationship with (heh, heh) the truth, and not by mere opinion. Maybe.
Bush wrecked a ton of stuff. His administration spun like crazy. They didn't like like Trump lies. No one ever has lied like Trump lies. That's not "opinion", it just is.
As a disinterested observer it seems like every couple of weeks the media switch to a new script in a desperate search for something that will stick: Russia! Gun control! Sexist! Racist! Stormy Daniels! on and on yet apparently unsuccessful thus far as polling with his base looks pretty good for him. Perhaps it's all substantive, but even if it is I don't think the tactics are working. Surely better to stand back a little and let Trump make himself look foolish with his never ending ridiculous tweets?
Trump seems more conman than anything else to me, but the media would have us believe he's the Antichrist.
None of them have made that claim. Ironically, Trump actually has, more than once.
But, yes, those that make that claim should be approached particularly skeptically.
As the saying goes, truth has a liberal bias. :)
I think it would trouble anyone. However, there are many, many media sources and several major fact-checkers, including six used in the article:
We started by identifying thousands of true and false stories, using information from six independent fact-checking organizations
Then get 'quality' news to publish it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives.
The Wikipedia summary needs editing. The paragraph has a lot of weasel words. Who decides what is credible? Who decides what is likely an underestimate? And AFAIK, all the estimates are disputed - yet someone will get the impression that the Lancet ones are the disputed ones and not the PLOS one.
You should also stop using "treason" incorrectly. Here [1] is a great debate between Glenn Greenwald and James Risen where Glenn breaks down how important it is to not use Treason in an incorrect manner, and explains (sourced) exactly what Treason is defined as under US law with examples throughout history.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii
And then goes on to cite previous court cases and what charges were actually brought in them.
It's also my impression that the US intelligence community tried to warn the Bush administration about the 9/11 attackers, but that Condoleezza Rice blew them off.[0]
0) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-director...
Nah, the official report from the CIA was FOIAed. IMO this meme that the CIA saw it all right is just Washington internal politics leaking out.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/259216899/Iraq-October-2002-NIE-o...
Page 13
> High Confidence
> * Iraq is continuing, and in some cases expanding, its biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.
The report also spends a long time parroting that yellowcake BS too.
The FBI were reportedly also close to the hijackers.[1] And they also have lots of data on Saudi connections.[2]
Also, there used to be an article on salon.com about a team of Mossad agents that was tracking the 9/11 hijackers. But now I don't find it. As I recall, there were connections to young Mossad agents in the US, who posed as artists, selling their work door-to-door.[3] I've also read that it was rather a rite of passage for young agents. With the US being relatively safe for training.
0) https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/21/missed-calls-nsa-terror...
1) https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129563&page=1
2) https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-fbi-is-keeping-80000-secre...
3) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel...
What happened with Iraq was not just fake news, it was fake governing, it was another order of magnitude. Miller and the NYT were just some of the many useful idiots.
That said, singling out NYT as the OP did is sort of hilarious, all the media outlets ran the same terrible stories and often avoided booking guests that would speak against the war.
It is always better to judge outcomes. Actions, not words..
Lying, then, should be judged not on level of intent, but on severity. And on this metric, all those reporters involved should feel, and be judged, personally responsible for the deaths in the iraq war and aftermath.
I am not sure anyone should bother finding a proper label for each shade of those lies.
Except that the “MSM is lying” crowd still overwhelmingly supports W. bush and the Iraq war, and didn’t seem to mind what the media had to say for 8 years of his presidency. This whole thing kicked off under Obama when “alt” news was talking about FEMA internment camps and that kind of madness, and later when Pizzagate and other stories weren’t carried in the mainstream.
If your theory were right, you’d expect the Left to be the ones who rejected the media, but that isn’t what happened.
Edit To be clear, I’m saying that this is less about skepticism (healthy) than rejection of media in favor of preferable narratives. It’s the extension of disliking what science education has to say about evolution and seeking to have Creationism taught in schools. When you can’t beat them, avoid them, craft your own narrative and reject reality.
The left has been angry with the media forever though. Have you read Manufacturing Consent?
To clarify, though, I didn't meant to say that the right wouldn't be skeptical of the media, it seems like both sides have been more skeptical of news coverage in general which is (mostly) a good thing.
And I do think a lot of people on the left have been disbursed of their enchantment with the media, there was a strong skew in coverage during the 2016 primaries in the democratic party.
It doesn’t matter what they like or dislike, it matters who they vote for. For most of the USA’s history, Americans have consistently voted for national candidates who ended up starting or continuing unnecessary war. This is true for both major parties. The country has been involved in voluntary military conflicts for how many years of its history?
The internet in the '90s was a fervour of "indie media", "citizen reporting", "the revolution will not be televised", culminating in the Iraq war build-up, which was a watershed of sorts. Now the exact same attitudes are being exploited in a coordinated manner by the right, anti-vaxxers, astroturfers and other special interests.
This is not just a US phenomenon, by the way -- the same can be observed pretty much globally.
Yes; many of the specific bases of support they pointed to had been debunked before they were publicized by, among others, UN weapons inspectors. While it's far from proof, that alone is reason to believe that they were knowingly fabricating their claims.
Some links: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174708587/u-n-weapons-inspect... https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-insp...
Here is something about the Iraq-Al Qaeda link they tried to proof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...
I don't know if Bush and friends really believed their claims but if you looked at it from a neutral point of view it was very clear that they had made up their minds to invade Iraq and desperately tried and failed to find evidence.
I'll never forget being handed the same picture C Powell showed at the briefing and told "this is what we are looking for", given how we found out later that was bullshit.
Iraq was for other reasons. WMD was just one piece of how it was "sold".
I think you're both right and wrong. Wrong because there are still interesting questions about how falsehoods propagate over networks in the case of Iraq and WMD. But right in the sense that there's an underlying structural difference how and why the falsehoods are being generated in one case vs the other.
Oh come on. The NYT et al have not hesitated or been reluctant in any way to criticise the current US government. They equally gleefully supported the WMD story because it suited them to do so, pandered to them feeling important.
Check out Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent".
Edit: actually, since you've done this repeatedly after we warned you, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Your statement, while accurate, says nothing about the veracity of the current article.
I wish I could do more than downvote you.
It’s off topic garbage, and generated an equally garbage subthread, so flagging is certainly appropriate.
Are you saying that had the NYT reported things differently the Iraq war wouldn't have happened? That seems unreasonably strong because it implies that the New York Times had a greater responsibility for the war than did the president and congress.
The media certainly should have been more skeptical and critical of the government, but I'd say at that early stage, the blame mostly falls on Bush and his advisors. If you were working at one of these news outlets at that time, I bet you would have reported it similar to the rest of the mainstream media, too.
Even if Saddam did have WMDs, so what? So does North Korea and other hostile regimes, and so does the US. Couldn't the media have questioned whether or not that was a valid excuse for war?
That's the type of thing Phil Donahue of MSNBC did, and his questioning of the war got him fired.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program
History is important, too, but apparently not to them. Was it ever mentioned in the mainstream media that the US itself had provided billions of dollars in military equipment and support to Saddam, including dual use technologies used for chemical and biological weapons?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Ir...
"You know we armed Iraq...during the Gulf War those intelligence reports would come out"--
'Iraq, incredible weapons! Incredible weapons!'
"...How do you know that?"
'Well...we looked at the receipts. But as soon as that check clears we're going in!'
-Bill Hicks
Another thing no one talks about? The massive consolidation via mergers and acquisitions in the media/journalism world. It's been show multiple times that ownership is used to influence those things, but when those ownerships become monopolies owned by fewer and fewer oligarchical uber-rich, there are less and less voices in the wilderness speaking truth.
What I do is find a truth teller and read all his or her stuff. Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Steve Coll, Matt Taibbi, Michael Hastings (assassinated), Gary Webb (assassinated), Jeremy Scahill, Richard Grove, and John Perkins are just a few on my list.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-iraq-war-cost-2-tril...
The reward mechanisms for our world are clearly optimized for dishonesty and deception. This isn’t to make some kind of statement about our culture, rather it’s an observation about reality. Dishonesty and falsity are everywhere, and you even find it in nature and animals.
I don’t think it has anything to do with good or bad per se, as it does with the path of least resistance; a lie is almost always more connvienent than the truth. People who are most successful tend to be those that are the most dishonest and are also very good at knowing how to tell fact from fiction which they then use to create more elaborate offensive and defensive models of the world.
If you think about it this way it doesn’t seem that odd, as even nature and evolution are constantly truth testing, it’s like at some level you must assume everything is a lie until proven otherwise, and even that evidence may itself be just a more elaborate falsehood.
People rarely go to the movies to be entertained by the truth.
Telling the truth has way less cognitive load, and people generally aren't going to be stupid enough to get stuck in weaving an elaborate net of lies just to support that one original lie that they refuse to come clean on.
But there's also certain levels of dishonesty or lies by omission etc that people will do at a social level. Sometimes it's even beneficial for greater harmony between people.
I bet game theorists have studied this type of stuff quite a bit.
If you think about it, most people are honest most of the time. Most comments in this discussion are honest; if I go to the store, the salesperson doesn't lie to me. My coworkers and family don't. There are exceptions, but honesty is pretty normal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/russian-agitprop-lan...
(And of course some right winger was quick to downvote this.)
Edit: it looks like you've been doing this a ton, as well as posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments repeatedly. We ban accounts that do this. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Another possible reason is that if you tell your friends something is true, and later find out from a more reliable source that you were deceived, you then look gullible believing it in the first place, and even if you don't tell them, you'll feel gullible unless you hang on to your original belief.
This turned up as a meme, but it seemed a litle too good to be true.
Still, the story had legs, getting passed around progressive-party newspapers of the late 19th centuries (or at least the ones with snoozing or unscrupulous editors who didn't denounce the author), in books, and by Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. (father of the aviator) on the House floor in Washington, D.C.
And in contemporary Internet memes 125 years later.
The denunciations are piquant. This from The advocate and Topeka tribune. (Topeka, Kan.), 14 Sept. 1892:
In an editorial note last week calling attention of editors of reform to the so-called Wall street circular fake first published in the Chicago Daily Press, we wrote that "the thing originated in the fertile brain of T. W. Gilruth, who held a position for a time on the editorial staff of the Press." The compositor transformed the name into Gilmore. We desire to make this correction lest there be somebody named Gilmore who might object to the charge, and because the fraud should be placed where it belongs. Gilruth is a snide, and if anyone who knows him has not yet found it out, he is liable to do so to his sorrow.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-14...
That corrects an earlier account which misstated Gilruth's name:
The Great West and one or two other exchanges reproduce the Chicago Daily Press fake purporting to be a Wall street circular. The thing originated in the fertile brain of F. W. Gilmore [sic: should be T. W. Gilruth], who held a position for a time at the Press. He has been challenged time and again to produce the original if it is genuine, and has failed to do so. The thing is a fraud and so is its author, and neither of them is worthy of the confidence of the people.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-07...
I've not found another substantial examination of the particulars, so I wrote one myself.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
Interesting to read that fake news is just part of our culture. It seems like a real problem now is the hyper-awereness that the internet has brought us all.
And not, I think, just because they're more shocking. Also because they're more interesting. And more validating. Because they simplify complexity and ambiguity.
While it's unfair to single out NYT's role, the Iraq War was indeed a major propaganda effort. It worked, I think, because it helped many people deal with 9/11. But the largely unasked question has been "Whose propaganda effort?" Except, ironically enough, for stuff that many would call "fake news" or "conspiracy theory".
I suspect that much of the "fake news" that mainstream liberals are upset about now is driven by Russian propaganda. Back in the day, Russia targeted mainly the radical left. But by the mid 80s, they were focusing more on the radical right and libertarians. And for those that remember Joseph McCarthy, that is extremely ironic.