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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic to argue the definitions of post-truth, but no. Fake news refers to stories that are fabricated, and usually calibrated to be attention-grabbing, masquerading as news. That is a separate phenomenon from bias, and much worse.

Bias is a problem that can interfere with the output of people who think they are doing good-faith journalism. But anyone with a blog can write what other people will mistake for news, and if they're good, can make it go viral. No relationship with the truth, not even an attempted one, is involved.

Conservative slant headline: Hero CCW Bystander Stops Mass Shooting.

Liberal slant headline: Mass Shooting Underscores the Need for Gun Control Now.

Fake news headline: New Proof That Lizard Men Hired Crisis Actors in Plot to Take Your Guns.

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> Fake news refers to...

That might be how you use the term, but that might more correctly called "false news". In common parlance, "fake news" refers to an overall pattern of filtering and narrative-pushing such that consuming lots of these stories (possibly each of them factual) will leave the reader with gross misapprehensions about the world.

This is not a productive argument, but it may be worth nothing that Science [0], Wikipedia [1], and NPR [2] are using it to refer to fabrication, not bias.

[0] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/majority-americans-we...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

To be honest I think they're pissing into the wind. (As am I when I tell people to use the word "propaganda" instead of "fake news".)

Wikipedia does not belong on that list.

It's useful for non-controversial stuff. I love to peruse it, I love to quote from it. But it can't possibly be trusted for anything as topical as "Fake News".

I love the Michael Scott comment:

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.

(For those who aren't familiar with the US version of The Office: Michael Scott is not meant to be taken literally).

The history is that 'fake news" was used to refer to fabricated stories. Following it's surge in.popularity following the 2016 election, Trump realized the term was catchy and claimed falsely to have invented it, but used it instead to refer to "news Trump doesn't like" of various sorts, thus making it a contentious term.

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