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Comment by sol_invictus | Hacker News Reader

People obsessed with ”fighting fake news” are the same people who want a single narrative shoved down the throat of everyone. I’m wildly more comfortable with the bottom-up style information flow we’re experiencing now; as with big structural changes, some growing pains are inevitable - but it will be much more beneficial and resilient on the long term.

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It's amazing how little even journalists care about fake news if it supports the right narrative. For example, there was a story which made the rounds here in the UK about expats who'd voted for Brexit being deported which ticked all the fake news warning signs: it was from a generic-sounding news site with a generic-looking logo and a standard Wordpress template, domain registered anonymously within the last year by someone in Kidderminster, with no apparent corporate backing, history, or identifiable staff or reporters, that had supposedly interviewed people in Spain and come up with a story that played perfectly to people's existing prejudices.

So I contacted one of the more reputable publications that had spread the story, The Independent, and pointed this out. The response from the author was basically that he didn't see the problem and it was up to readers to figure out if it was fake news: "The website quoted in the article does to me look to have a Spanish presence, although it looks like the rest of the news is aggregated. I don't believe there is any reason to disbelieve this particular article, and we have clearly attributed the quotes and included a link to Global247news, so our readers can always make up their own minds."

(For context, the "Spanish presence" was literally an address on the About page for an unnamed "Webmaster" which I'm not sure even exists as an actual address in Spain... and in itself seems a little fishy, given that the website was very definitely not registered to someone in Spain.)

But was it fake news?

There are metric tons of coverage over the last few years about this

https://inews.co.uk/news/brexit/brexit-latest-news-expats-sp...

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161108-the-expats-str...

I'm guessing this is a variation of your story:

https://www.joe.co.uk/news/british-immigrants-in-tears-after...

I mean the premise of the article definitely isn't fake. People are getting rejected for TIE cards, that's always been a thing.

Brexit now forces British expats to apply for a TIE card.

So what's left to be fake news?

For the record, most people associate fake news with stuff that's based in complete lies, not stuff that's maybe a little low quality.

> People obsessed with ”fighting fake news” are the same people who want a single narrative shoved down the throat of everyone.

That's an absurd, bad-faith generalization.

Absurd? Definitely not. Go ask the militant fake news fighters if alternate news sources should be banned and you’ll get a resounding yes.

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