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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

"factually incorrect news" is not the same thing as "fake news". Fake news is like a fake Rollex. The correctness of the time on the dial isn't the thing that makes it fake. Fake news is fraud without the monetary connotation.

If I went and lifted the NYT CSS files and registered some intentionally misleading domain / company name like "Times of New York", I could go around saying whatever I want and a good number of people would believe it. Fake news is worse than wrong, its divorced from reality. There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with. Fake news is a click farm in Macedonia, not a news outlet that made a mistake.

See also: "deep state" (which has now been bastardized to mean "shadow government").

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Well, sure. So "fake news" is like a fake Rollex. But then, what the "regular" news are is a genuine Rollex, except the company secretly swapped out internal parts for low-quality, less-precise but much cheaper ones, and are selling the watch for the same price, with the same SKU[0].

Sure, buying the genuine watch supports the IP holders and gives you bragging rights, but both the genuine and the fake are bad choices when you're looking for a high-quality, durable and precise watch.

> There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with.

By this standard, regular news would be fake news too. You don't get manipulative language in the article when someone is trying to "get it right" - it only shows up when someone is trying to get it wrong, on purpose.

[0] - I.e. what computing hardware and home appliance vendors do all the time.

There's legitimate gripes you can have with news, but you can't say they don't literally send a person out to conduct interviews and whatever. "Fake news" isn't just less precise or some subjective quality issue about the internals of the organization There is no internals. That's the part that's fake.

Fake news is like the man at the store told you it wasn't ticking because it just needs to be wound up, wouldn't let you take it out of the box, and you got home with it to find the dials are painted on and the inside is a few coins glued together. Whatever legitimate gripes one may have about Rollex cutting corners, it would be laughable to pretend like the time on their dials is just as useless as the ones painted on the fake watch and really its all just an opinion which one is "real".

What do you call something that looks deceptively like a watch but is actually just a prop? I'd call it a fake watch. What do you call a website that looks deceptively like a news organization but is actually just outrage headlines made from mad libs for clicks? I sure wouldn't call it real news.

Not wanting to get caught up in this analogy war but I think there's a clear distinction between "proper" news which tries hard to be factually correct and "fake news" that's just made-up lies. The problem I see is that people judge the former type as being informative and the latter as misinformative. In reality, both intentionally mislead people using different techniques - proper news by exploiting human reading comprehension weaknesses to plant false ideas in readers' heads without technically lying, and fake news by exploiting gullibility by actually lying.

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