Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

What is your solution? Every single source of news, every last one, will have perhaps 1/3 or more of the population calling it fake news.

View on HN

Not to label things you haven't researched yourself as "facts." You can instead label them with their sources. Even better, you can not jump into it at all if you're just copying from a another secondary source, and allow that source to get the traffic.

If you are the secondary source, you should of course include your references. If you're the primary source (e.g. you're quoting anonymous administration officials), feel free to declare it a fact; people shouldn't just believe you, but putting your reputation on the line is actually a good signal to me (contingent on said reputation.)

Anything that isn’t a large donor-funded private organization would be an improvement.

The wiki model seems alright to me. It just needs a better way to view changes.

>What is your solution?

To be necessarily skeptical of all things, at all times. Understand that the search for "truth" is a journey, not a destination.

Worth remembering that the term “fake news” did not exist in the mainstream until 6 years ago. It used to be called “liberal bias in the media” but fake news is a political slogan like Death Tax or Cancel Culture and like political slogans of previous generations I am optimistic we will not be stuck here forever.

"Fake news" was a phrase originating from the Clinton camp. Trump's political history has many examples of him taking Clinton's ideas that were getting a little traction and turning them on her. They were very close at one point.

The best defense against it is good journalism, honesty, clarity, and disclosure.

While on the topic, I remember reading articles during the 2016 election where journalists were doing legit work to track down the sources of those original "fake news" articles and the trail led to basically a business model that could be successful in poorer eastern european countries that just replied on clicks and they posted anything that'd garner a click. I even read an interview with one of them.

Then, when the narrative shifted to it being Russian intelligence, I never heard anything like my previous story again.

I'm really unclear what actually happened. Was that a progression of events, was it always Russian, was it never Russian?

“Fake news” emerged literally minutes after Trump won the election, in a seemingly coordinated way on most cable news. They were saying it in their most serious journalist voice, to imply that Trump voters were duped into voting for him. Then shortly after it was appropriated by Trump himself, and everyone wanted to disavow the phrase, which was deeply hilarious.

>Fake news” emerged literally minutes after Trump won the election, in a seemingly coordinated way on most cable news.

No, it didn't. the term became popular during his campaign to describe fake Facebook and other social media posts presenting themselves as legitimate news, but spreading false information. The term itself predates Trump's campaign entirely, though.

>They were saying it in their most serious journalist voice, to imply that Trump voters were duped into voting for him.

You expect to be taken seriously with juvenile caricatures like this?

>Then shortly after it was appropriated by Trump himself, and everyone wanted to disavow the phrase, which was deeply hilarious.

Trump used it all the time to describe any media coverage he didn't like, and later Trump claimed he invented the term (he didn't.) He probably wants royalties.

CSPAN has less than 1/3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com