People don't want to leave their bubbles, for the fear of uncovering uncomfortable truths. For example, I have friends who flat out refused to read any of the WikiLeaks e-mails that could potentially reveal something bad about Hillary, her campaign, the DNC, or any entity on the left.
That's just how some (probably a lot of) people are. When some people encounter something that challenges your pre-existing beliefs, it's easier to just ignore it and stay in your bubble of comfort.
And that mindset, IMO, is not an easy thing to fix.
I'm a liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton, despite basically loathing everything the Clintons stand for, and I read all the wikileaks emails.
That said, the torrent of pure bullshit based on those emails that was floating around on both sides was unbelievable. Either she was as pure as the driven snow or a she-demon, with nothing in between.
After a certain point, it wasn't even worth the effort to argue about it and I just started unfollowing half of my friends and family.
The mail dump was basically a free for all corpus to plug any preconceived narrative up to hamfistedly made up conspiracy you could grep out of this.
The rest is more of the normal mode of operation of any human organization:
"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe
People don't even seem to care if their news turns out to be fake so long as it confirms their beliefs - the fact that it was believable means there must be some underlying truth to it in their eyes.
>> People don't want to leave their bubbles, for the fear of uncovering uncomfortable truths
That may be the case. But in some cases, people dont want to leave their bubble because eating skittles in someone elses' bubble can mean "looking suspicious" and getting killed for it. That is why I only hang out with my own group and those who understand me, it is too risky out there. And Travon was not the only case, there are hundreds of cases like it which dont get publicized.
> For example, I have friends who flat out refused to read any of the WikiLeaks e-mails that could potentially reveal something bad about Hillary, her campaign, the DNC, or any entity on the left.
That's because of things like the "spirit dinner" bullshit or an email chain discussing drug pricing being reduced to "HILLARY FOUGHT LOWER DRUG PRICES".
When every single email is apparently awful evil shit then it's hard to differentiate things that are actually bad.
Show me some emails that you actually believe should convince someone not to vote for Clinton. Especially over Trump. Keeping in mind that the screwing around in the Primary isn't enough, and that I'm willing to accept a candidate I don't particularly like all that much.
It's not just a source of Facebook clickbait, it's one of the worst sources on Earth: nothing but empty outrage baiting and virtue signaling. I guess he watched his own talk and decided it would be more lucrative to switch to the Dark Side.
Saying "for whatever reason" is giving up on trying to understand what is happening. The reason might be anger, might be disenfranchisement, might even be that "they are stupid". But those things have solutions. Instead of just calling people ignorant and giving up it is much more fruitful to try to find why they disagree and talk to them. I know how frustrating it can be to talk to an "ignorant zealot" (anywhere on the political spectrum), but it is just cheap and sad to give up.
There are a lot of people just on the verge of being convinced, who consume mainstream media and probably know a little about Snowden and look up to him as an authority figure on the same level as any other "tech/science" personality (Elon Musk, Neil deGrass Tyson, ...), who will be convinced by his position and then influence the more naive/ignorant people around them.
> The people who were influenced the most by fake news are those who probably don't even feel there exists a fake news issue.
Which points the way towards the question of whether some people ever really want to know the truth about stuff they already decided is important to them, for whatever reason.
> Facebook itself is addressing the controversy by announcing they plan to ban fake news outlets from their ad network, cutting off the revenue source for these sites.
It's funny that the linked article[0], presumably from a "real" news source, very clearly says that Facebook's action will have basically no effect on the issue.
This might not be possible. People who actually swapped feeds with someone who had a different viewpoint decided they did "not like the news" because it didn't validate their very own viewpoint. So the problem isn't how fact checked the news is but more on the voter's views. That might be something very hard to change. [1]
Me too. I turned it off as well. However, like most, people want to log in and get their views validated. It makes them feel great, feel wanted, and belonging to something bigger. I am not sure Facebook wants this problem to go away.
There really are an amazing number of people who simply aren't interested in understanding the world as it is.
I think a big part of it is fundamentally not understanding how the brain works, and that just because your brain presents a convincing reality to you, that it doesn't necessarily coincide with actual reality. People don't understand that intuition can lead you very, very far astray.
So they're building up this concept of the world which seems solid and internally consistent to them, but it's built on sand. And they get annoyed when people start kicking at the sand. Because they're happy in the world that they built. When really what they should be doing is digging out the sand, looking for the bedrock underneath.
Yes, but ignoring the news and political changes is kind of a luxury, it means your life is secure enough that you can afford not to pay much attention to any of that stuff because you feel confident it won't affect you personally.
Except that following the feed gives you terrifying news that may affect you personally and isn't true, because no-one dares question it and it spreads rapidly. For example, I happened to take a note of the two most retweeted claims of Trump-related hate crimes I saw right after the election so I could follow what happened with them later - both turned out to be fake.
That's an interesting question, the question then becomes do people who like A because it conforms to their worldview like A because they where fed A and B because they where fed B or to put it another way have their views been shifted over time by the news they consume.
> People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds - Lord Vetinari (Terry Pratchett - The Truth).
I really think this problem is way overblown. Most people follow many different news sources. I personally don't even rely on Facebook for news at all.
I quit Facebook 1 to 2 years ago. I suppose that's one of the reasons I didn't understand the hatred during the election towards the other side.
I don't have a feed of "He's evil" "She's evil". I saw two bad candidates and I understand where people are coming from with their votes.
I'd like to see most independents / democratic people unite under a real progressive platform next election and stop the extremist cycle of social issues vs fear mongering.
> I'd like to see most independents / democratic people unite under a real progressive platform next election and stop the extremist cycle of social issues vs fear mongering.
There's virtually zero chance of this happening without another party collapsing first.
Hell, even then, independents are harder to herd than cats.
Its impossible to happen under the system as it is established, but you just needed to push for a constitutional amendment and / or state compact like the one to overturn the electoral college to change the voting system to support either proportional (doesn't work when you elect a single seat like the president) or STV (ie runoff voting).
The chance of that happening in the next four years? Really low. About as unlikely as it has been since the Internet established itself as a place to talk about how to fix the voting system. But unlikely doesn't mean you don't try, and don't talk about it where you can.
Changing from electoral college to pop vote also means the nature of campaigning will change.
California, for example, has a huge population of Republicans and now their vote would matter. I don't think Trump did any non military focused rallies there.
I am in Illinois. I didn't vote in 2008 or 2012 because I knew my vote would have no impact. Give me a popular vote and you might have Romney... Be careful what you wish for.
That's not a useful fact, because both candidates would have campaigned differently if the president was chosen by popular vote rather than the electoral college. It's very unlikely that the popular vote would have been the same.
Of those that voted. I think fixxer is saying that there are alot of people that don't vote (about half of the voting population) because they are an X in a Y state so they don't think their vote will change that. But if the electoral college went poof, a lot more of the missing 50% would vote and that could change the expected value of a popular vote.
This isn't so much directed at you, but this seems a great place to note that there are races on the ballot other than president, usually your local elections will have a bigger impact on your day-to-day life than the national ones, and your vote carries orders of magnitude more weight. Pay attention down-ballot!
Are you actually saying the difference - in number of votes - for President for your state was smaller than the difference - in number of votes - for every local judge, school board member, etc?
I mean, not impossible, but surprising. Where are you located?
> California, for example, has a huge population of Republicans and now their vote would matter.
And at the same time votes from Democrats in California would also matter more. I'd assume a number of people who'd vote Democrat in CA don't vote because they know the Democrats won't lose anyway.
It would drastically reduce the voting power of several red states. Only recently (since 2000) has the EC being different than the popular vote been a problem. Both times it's gone in the republicans favour.
The system isn't fair, voters in low pop states have more power than california.
The system emphasizes swing states above others, as the country is so split right now.
The system is worse for third party candidates (especially if a STV or ranked system was used. This would also please the Bernie or bust folk).
The system is outdated, it was meant to have a group of well informed electors make the decision about who is president. This doesn't makes sense anymore as the electors are pretty much bound to the will of the states popular vote, and people have access to more information. Plus the whole safeguard against someone unqualified idea has been tossed out the window now anyway.
It's hard to imagine a democratic system where swing voters don't hold disproportionate power. Rusted-on supporters will support you whatever may come, and the opponents' rusted-on supporters will never support you, so as a candidate you spend more time, effort, and money appealing to the noncommittal folks in the middle...
Even excellent voting systems like Condorcet don't change this particular equation; a hardcore supporter of you just simply doesn't need as much of your attention in an electioneering frame of mind.
This all being said, that doesn't mean the current systems in the US aren't horribly misrepresentative. Gerrymandering is a particular problem there.
Minor point: Swing voters and swing states are two different beasts. In the later case you can concentrate effort in one area to gain a quantum all-or-nothing jump: generally, all the EC votes in the state. To target swing voters you need to address a much larger geographic area, and only get the incremental advantage of one vote per person.
It doesn't matter which way the partisan advantage would run (and it most likely wouldn't be to the permanent advantage of one side anyway), if it increased turnout then that would be an unalloyed Good Thing.
The electoral college doesn't need to change. The two bigger problems to me are:
* Winner-takes-all means that in any state that is %60/%40, the 40%'s votes don't affect the election at all.
* Congressmen are representing too many people.
If more states worked like Nebraska and Maine, then people in rural counties in California could decide a few seats on the electoral college. And there's an amendment outstanding to change the number of representatives:
I'm in a similar boat as you having quit Facebook several years ago after the revelations about the emotion manipulation experiments they were running. At first I did not understand why people were so polarized about the candidates. Now I'm attributing this mainly to being cut off from Facebook.
EDIT: By polarized I mean intense hatred, coming from both sides
Were you also cut off from all forms of media? Even the most neutral sources had stories about how both candidates were the most disliked in history, protests and violence at rallies, etc. Even if you personally didn't have any strong opinions, anyone who even casually followed the news should have understood the general sentiments of the country.
It is possible to (use FB and) steer clear of news about the candidates while still consuming media (including HN & Reddit) on a daily basis. I successfully did it for the entirety of the run up to the election (including the night of). The most I knew were a few headlines about Hillary's email scandal and that Trump wanted to build a wall.
That said, I happen to live abroad (which doesn't stop local media and locals from trying to talk about it).
I'm not that poster, but I try to stay well informed while avoiding any kind of spam and mass media. I understood the general sentiment of the country, but I didn't understand why we'd regressed so much. Classic media always promoted some amount of fear, but now it's competing against digital media... a world filled with pandering and blatant lies. There's no more journalistic integrity or accountability.
If knowledge is the life-blood of democracy, America is suffering from leukemia...
The polarisation of opinions is a nasty side effect of some filters: people going in the web to be in conflict will click/trust/consume less. They are more aware of potential lies.
Thus the algorithm must provide the best un trollesque experience possible.
For this, it is better to have people feel cumfy with people sharing same believes/opinions. This way the CPC diminishes bringing more ad conversions.
Do the experience on yourself: did you prefer to go to school where diversity was greater than in your actual probable IT job, or do you prefer going to a conference on «your favorite whatever tech» it is. I have used noSQL techs because I thought it was cool after a python conf while I was pretty much dubitative. And I should have kept my doubts they had solid grounds.
Basically, conference and school are the same ; people talking thinking they share something, except school is full of conflict because of diversity whereas conference feels amazing because you feel in communion and you are more receptive. (I loved every conf I attended in the beginning until something itched me (my nosql conversion)).
That is also the secret recipe of churches, sects, successful corporate cultures, modern musical tendency to be based on genre that are caricature of themselves, even meme ... polarisation of the mass in one direction and fervor and a feeling to share something common, making you feel more likely to embrace new paradigms.
What we should fear is not facebook, algorithm or even google: it is our on Nature to feel cumfortable in uniformity and avoid conflicts.
The side effects of the algorithms is just that it turns us people in fanatics because we are not able to deal with diversity anymore. It is the experience we all wish: PEACE, shared progress and experience!
However believe it or not, since we are not always right, we sometimes need to have painfully disagreeing opinions. (real life). But in our bubble of agreement, opponents get marginalized as pisse froid.
And I know the tendency is to fight/blame the trolls, but trolls are not the problem at hand. It is a growing tendency to prefer avoiding conflicts, and I am concerned, only for one reason: it makes crappy software. Regarding politics, I don't really care that a globally skewed system towards the person rich by birth is getting unstable.
They wanted the power, no one was concerned since everyone was thinking it was a great idea: now they have it and I just grab my popcorn and sit.
The world can burn, I will rejoice myself with it but I did not bring the oil nor scratched the match that set it on fire. I am innocent, I was just a troll doing my job of trying to wake up people on the dangers coming...
One day us trolls will be given a medal for trying to save the world. Or maybe, I am still trolling...
Facebook was never really an important part of my life, it was more something I was kind of "forced" into because everyone else used it for communication, planning, etc.
However, I stone cold quit about 6-8 months ago because the election nonsense was ramping up and it got bad. I mean baaaaad. Both sides talking nonsense about the other.
I just didn't want to deal with the emotional toll of having to sift through that nonsense every damned day, and since FB wasn't really something that was important to me, it was extremely easy to just walk away. I'll log back in occasionally, and every time I do I remember immediately what caused me to quit.
If the problem is that Facebook provides an echo-chamber that exacerbates the influence of one particular viewpoint, wouldn't the solution be for Facebook to begin injecting opposing content directly into the newsfeed?
You can kind of see this with trending topics. If you don't follow a particular topic but suddenly see it trending in your feed, there's a chance you may random walk into clicking it. If Facebook opens up a global/regional/local newsfeed that isn't highly targeted, then you could potentially start seeing more original content.
And reinforced with advertising algorithms which keeps everyone at FB employed, it is a FB problem as it is now the Fast Food of news...very unhealthy.
It's not just your circle that determines what show up in your feed. The algorithms re-enforce peoples views by putting stories in your feed it thinks you will 'like'. If it thinks you're pro-Trump, you will have more pro-Trump stories even if you have an even mix of Trump/Hillary supporters in your circle. Many times the sensational stories that are most likely to be 'liked' are also the fake ones. There no warning that the story came from an unreliable source.
Back in late August when I started my new job, my first purchase with my first paycheck was to get a subscription to Le Devoir, Montreal's independent newspaper. It's amazing how much more informed I feel now: because the content only changes every 24 hours, I have the opportunity to get to the less sexy stories, stories that would be buried on a fast moving website because they don't generate clicks, but which still deal with important local issues.
I highly encourage people to research their local newspapers and support one: you get so much out of something that costs the equivalent of a couple Starbucks coffee pet month.
Your definition of propaganda probably is a little to inclusive. In my experience, the Economist very rarely gets the facts wrong (including by omission of major elements). The "letters to the editor" at the beginning of every issue are also almost always critical of previous issues of the magazine, and they don't have a problem with publishing them.
What the Economist constantly does is give its opinion on the facts, and that opinion usually sums up to how good free-trade and libertarian policies are. I definitely wouldn't count that as propaganda. You could, but then any newspaper with opinion pieces would be propaganda, which is not what is normally meant by "propaganda".
I honestly think it's impossible to find truly unbiased news sources. That being said, at least most trusted biased sources still root their information in facts and have journalistic integrity. I'm not going to throw out NYT, WP, NPR, Vox, WSJ, National Review, etc. just because they lean in particular directions.
If anything, I'd rather have news sources that are widely known to lean a certain side, because then I know their potential bias beforehand, which I can balance it out by reading articles from opposing publications.
The thing i like about Al Jazeera, is if 20 people die in the west and 50 people die in say Sierra Leone, almost all major media outlets (including international ones) will ignore Sierra Leone and plaster the western incident all over the front page. Al Jazeera at least tries to give some fair coverage to what happened in Sierra Leone and give it a spot on the front page (even if nobody clicks it).
It's certainly not an unbiased publication, it's an opinion paper. From their "about us" page:
> The same page describes the Economist as “a Friday viewspaper, where the readers, with higher than average incomes, better than average minds but with less than average time, can test their opinions against ours. We try to tell the world about the world, to persuade the expert and reach the amateur, with an injection of opinion and argument.”
From the same page:
> "What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage."
So you are certainly not going to get "unbiased news reporting". It's a "viewspaper" that takes declared, informed editorial stances. You will get extremely well thought out and researched opinions and analysis.
"Propaganda" is a word usually reserved for intentionally contorting facts to favor a specific political entity. One can have an opinion without spouting propaganda. That's more the MSNBCs, Pravdas, and Fox Newses of the world. If you've ever read an economist article, the difference is obvious.
You'll see the left bias in the editorial pieces, but in news stories the writing is as neutral as I've seen. In Montreal, the alternatives are the Journal de Montréal (too much gossip, not enough hard information), La Presse (very good, liberal bias), The Gazette (liberal bias). Another important reason that pushed me toward Le Devoir: it's the only paper (not just in Canada, but everywhere I've looked) that has a PDF version; you get facsimile of the paper edition, which is very nice to read with something like zathura.
What I wonder is how many humans he actually stands or sits next to each day and talks. Not online. Not camera to camera. But human to human / human to HIS mother-father - child
I know it's off-topic to comment on the quality of a submission, but this is the first time I've been truly shocked by a #1 HN story. Normally when there is some discussion about relevance to HN, I can at least say "this is not really for me, but there's no problem with it being here". This is so mundane and obvious that I suspect non-normal voting. If you found this story interesting - why?
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Well this ends up being on topic since the content touches on "fake news". Perhaps this site should be classified as such by whatever voodoo standard Facebook implements.
Where you are shocked, I'm glad. While you and I may have the knowledge, many/most people still thinks Facebook is a good source of information. It is good that more visible voices are saying otherwise, so debate and questioning happens.
Like it or not, tech now has a huge, huge place in society. A tweak in Facebook's algorithm could easily decide an election (I'm not saying it has, but it definitely could).
For many people on HN, their work has the potential to have social implications in a way that was never the case twenty years ago. I for one am glad to see stories like this posted to HN, as I think engineers that make things like the algorithms that decide news feeds have very valuable input.
Right, sure. I'm absolutely not surprised that people want to talk about the role of Facebook in society, or fake news, or the algorithms used. And much of that has been covered recently in other front-page articles. Some of them have been interesting to me, some haven't, I definitely won't complain if there are more of them.
However, this particular article doesn't provide any interesting commentary on Facebook algorithms, its role in society or fake news. It's borderline content-free and I find that puzzling. Snowden says we should be wary of getting our news from a single source. Did this add something to any of the subjects you mention?
Facebook sponsored a hackathon to solve this issue and a team of college students found a somewhat trivial answer in just 36 hours. That's pretty cool.. and related to the topic of this news article... Its worth discussing I guess? But the article itself is pretty paltry.
One thing's for certain: Facebook AI research is running deep-layered natural-language ANNs right now on a year of election comments and likes. I think well before four years they'll know exactly how to detect bubbles of alternate political reality and also how to break them up. There will be some interesting decisions facing them before the next election.
Is this really different than TV news? Most people stick to one network (Fox news, NBC, CNN, etc) and not only do they not watch the others but believe they are corrupt, fixed, and lying.
The problem is we don't have multiple major news organizations per major area like we used to. Back then there was bias, but it was easier to be called out on it. Now I think many people are fine living in the bubble.
It's different because Facebook has captured nearly every American adult and they have a Google-like (in search) dominance over social. There's no news platform in US history that has ever come even remotely close to being able to claim that. They're just about worth more than every US media company combined, their reach and financial power are already incredible; four years from now they'll be as profitable as Google is today and their reach will likely have expanded further.
I can't see a scenario where Facebook manages to avoid anti-trust action against it in the next four to six years, both in Europe and the US.
There's got be some non-political algorithms. Maybe tracking news articles to their sources (text/phrase similarity searching), showing sources, and flagging quality by accuracy of details? A few years of improvement on automatic text summarizing might be able to catch political "telephone" articles that erase and morph crucial details.
That just pushes the problem back, unfortunately. Do you trust the people who designed the algorithm? Even if they were wonderful, apolitical idealists, do you trust the people who maintain the systems after those guys leave the company to stick with it, no matter what? After all, this election is the Most Important One In Our Lifetimes, so surely it's okay to put our thumbs on the scale just a little bit in the name of truth and justice... it's for the sake of the children/gays/whoever, you know... what kind of heartless monster would just stand by when they could make a difference?
Ultimately the only way to really address this problem is to have a diverse variety of competing news sources so at least they aren't all captured in the same way at the same time. There's no way to line this up with Facebook being the One News Source, any more than if it was the government doing it.
This article is on a "How to make money blogging" website, not exactly a source I'd turn to for trustworthy anything let alone news about not relying on other news...
Anyway, here are some more legitimate sources for the same topic for anyone interested:
I'm at the point where if it claims to be "news" and it's not on an immediately identifiable brand domain, I would assume it's fake or some variation of content spam.
Things in the realm of opinion, insight, tutorial, reviews, etc, can get more leeway.
Note that when confronted about false stories (which were sourced from white aupremacist propaganda) he retweeted, the President-elect, while still a candidate, responded fairly similarly, so, yeah, it's definitely an attitude that is becoming quite normalized.
It's that combined with the echo chamber effect of their algorithms. I've watched a diverse group of smart and average people across political spectrum this election. Most of them consistently shared unsubstantiated claims or biased media. As expected, their media was always presenting evidence for their side and agsinst the other. Corporate media always did that for maximizing ratings and ad impressions.
However, there's a difference. People often had these discussions face to face with other views visible or at least some consequences for bullshitting. Now, the like-minded naturally group together with Facebook making the others (esp moderates) largely disappear from the feed. Showing them what they wanted to see with convenience of scrolling past opposing beliefs reinforced the echo chambers and false beliefs. That few counterpoints are displayed reinforces it further by creating illusion of false consensus for their side. All the resulting upvotes and shares reinforce the algorithm's effect.
I speculate such things are why the divide seemed so much stronger in this election than before. They need to bump into each other more for the necessary conversations to occur. The tech increases isolation instead. The effects will only get worse over time.
It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments as they're doing nothing to reinforce the polarization, anger, and frustration we find so vital to drive engagement, page views, clicks, and time on site.
"The effects will only get worse over time."
I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. My imagination (and knowledge of history) are too limited. Anyone have some good examples? Or know of projects that are working on similar topics?
"It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments"
Lol. Believe me, a few people on social media agreed and I can't see their stuff any more. ;)
"I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. "
Similarly having a hard time. This particular one got reversed temporarily each time new mediums were invented. Then, the people using such tactics mastered them for the new mediums. Helps when the start rolling in money then use it to ensure the dominance. The social media has more potential to counter this than ever if they just adjust the algorithm to bridge the groups a certain percentage of time. They can mostly create a comfortable experience for the ad revenue but should make sure articles citing at least half-ass sources float into opposing feeds while letting bullshit stuff Snopes counters fall lower. That simple change, applied to everyone, might have a significant effect on the situation at least for moderates or rational people likely to effect change.
The Democrats are just as bad. Hillary opened the first debate with the false news that women only make 73 cents for every dollar men make. The Left also insists that 1 in 4 women are raped in college, and that a massive international sex-Slave business accompanies every Super Bowl.
It's not just on Facebook. I have a close family member who was genuinely excited by Assange insinuating Clinton's camp murdered a DNC staffer (without offering any proof to that effect), simply because it would lower her chances of winning.
Just from a cultural perspective, I feel like worldwide we are again celebrating that "my team at all costs!" mentality that was so prominent during the 1980s.
This is not to say that the opinion landscape in other decades didn't have problems; but they were somewhat different in nature.
Did you notice that you are replying to a person with no facebook account to a link that requires a facebook login to view? Maybe that's unavoidable, given the topic, but it's not visible without logging in.
My site, Newslines, addresses the fake news problem in a simple way. Our objective over the next few years is to create a news search engine by summarising all of the world's news into timelines. All of the news our crowdsourced team summarises goes through an editorial check before it is posted to the site, so it is extremely difficult to put fake news on the site.
During the summarization process we also strip out all the commentary and bias, resulting in what we hope will be an unbiased news archive of the topic. We have had good results so far, for example, our newsline of "Mattress Girl" [1] is the most unbiased account of her case on the web, despite being curated made from exceptionally biased sources. If you like what we are doing please join us.
Had the same thing happen where I pointed out something was false to an acquaintance who shares frequently and he said "well we each play our part, thankfully there are people like you" or something to that affect.
The idea that it was my job to screen the bullshit...
I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed.
Yes. Rarely ever visit facebook.com . Unfollowed everyone before they released messenger.com but now use that primarily. The only other benefit of FB now is party invitations.
I've had similar experiences on Facebook. Facts don't matter. Even when linking to proof that something is fake news, the fake news doesn't get removed or addressed.
This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading:
This has me deeply, deeply concerned. The election is one thing, but what happens if/when elected officials start screwing with something like Social Security, resulting in a generation of people who had their tax dollars deferred, but saw no benefit when they retired? In a post-fact world, I'm not convinced that the people will take action against such a thing.
Is the world so radically different in this regard now? I'm not disagreeing outright, but I still think that lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time. Remember the chain e-mails that were oh so popular prior to social networks? And before that, before electronics, there must have been a lot of bullshit that was spread in the written word on paper and before that by word of mouth. The fake news business is largely the same old thing in new wrapping IMO.
With communication enabling faster communication with greater reach, there might be more noise, but is it worse in terms of percentage of communication?
> lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time
Yeah, but they were never shrugged off. Even the worst charlatans insisted they speak the truth; they didn't just go "meh, maybe it's not true after all, what is truth anyway".
The feedback loop is much tighter now. The more outrageous a story is, the more people click it, and the more money that story makes. You can immediately measure the effect (the Macedonian teenagers quickly zoomed in to the more gullible Trump supporters, because they made more money).
In the past news sources had a reputation to protect, so crazy stories were confined to tabloids and some radio shows. Now all these stories just pop up in peoples streams, without anything to distinguish them from stories from reliable sources.
Couple that with the fact that, even with trustworthy sources, you can paint an inaccurate picture just by editing which stories you present (which Facebook is incentivised to do and actually does), and I think the problem is much worse now.
Saves Medicare for current and future generations, with no disruptions for those in and near retirement.
For younger workers, when they become eligible, Medicare will provide a premium-support payment and a list of guaranteed coverage options – including a traditional fee-for-service option – from which recipients can choose a plan that best suits their needs.
Were they PAID at scale to do so in the past though?
That's the frightening part. The financial incentives in the system are all screwed up. These kids are doing it purely for the easy dollars; they don't even care about the politics at all.
It's like schoolyard taunts, except the kids are getting paid for who can come up with the most viral rumour. Something seems deeply, deeply broken about this at a systemic level that's different than say, people spreading misinformation to others they know by word-of-mouth.
The only difference is that you need to pay lots of untrained people to lie on Facebook, while you needed to pay just a couple of highly trained people to lie on a newspaper.
These people are in dissonance and don't understand they need to do the work to get out of it because it's too damn easy to get the work for free off the Internet.
For people in China where Facebook is not accessible, however, the same things happen in WeChat, especially in its Moments timeline which more or less resembles the one from Facebook. Fake `news', rumors, (unreliable) hints for health/food and click-baits are just more than popular.
WeChat did provide a process to flag inappropriate articles, but people around the age of my parents just won't stop forwarding.
The flag can only stop a small amount of them. The real problem is that people unaware that they are reading fake news and share them to more and more people. This is doing a lot of harm.
I've been "unfriended" more than once for doing this -- people don't like being called out for spreading fake news, especially when the fake news supports their own personal worldview.
You assume people ever cared about facts. People are more emotional than they are rational when it comes to things that are outside of their control. While someone might be perfectly rational and logical in their life (e.g. they pay their taxes, they go to work, they make smart choices in their day to day lives), when it comes to things that are outside of our control (politics, economy, death, etc).
We have always been pretty irrational and easy to manipulate.
Feelings don't care about your facts. It's actually amazing that a breed of primates made it this far when you consider how irrational we really are with regard to so many things: who we cede power to, how we judge truth and falsity, etc.
I think you may be begging the question. You might be right that we're here because of our irrationality, but using your conclusion as its own argument isn't very convincing.
No, all you can infer from the fact that we're still here is that it's possible to succeed while being irrational. It tells you nothing about whether we succeeded despite or because of it.
It's come down to "the end justifies the means". And I'm not sure there's a way to stop it given the core buttons being pushed: confirming bias, bringing audiences to companies, giving people attention.
Facebook could probably give people a public rating based on the accuracy of the information they shared, and shame the worst offenders, but neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established.
I don't like the idea that you can play a straight bat but be overrun by hustlers.
> neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established.
I'm on the fence about that one. On the flip-side:
1. If they don't police it, then Facebook as a whole gets a reputation for disinformation. (When I look at Facebook, I personally ignore most shared articles because they're mostly crap, and I don't want to look at them. I only care about the personal goings-on of friends, and the signal-to-noise gets worse over time.)
2. If you take someone who doesn't care about truth, they're not going to introspectively seek-out a metric which might report "You're misinformed and stupid!" BUT If you're self-righteous about the truth, then you might want some objective metrics which say, "Look I don't spread misinformation or live in an echo chamber! But Cheryl does! Look, Cheryl, I'm smarter than you!" That might provide some basis for a viral dynamic.
True on the latter. A bit like the verified tick on Twitter being a desirable thing. Social networks could open additional features for someone with a better record.
Remember on your first point though that it might not be a factor for the majority of people. Can also reach people through ad networks, or social networks, etc.
There was a paper published about how being presented with disconfirming evidence causes people to double down on their belief in a lie if it has an emotional connection with them.
"In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
I'm aware of the studies - I remember reading of them at the time - and find them fairly convincing.
It's just that since that time we've become more aware of the "replication crisis" in science generally, and it'd be nice to see independent researchers confirm Nyhan's findings.
Anecdotally, it's replicated by several individuals I've run into (it seems to be the exceptional person that can process incoming data that conflicts with their worldview) and pretty much every other commenter has had similar experiences on this thread. Not scientific, of course...but...
We don't really have an independent press anymore, and blog-sphere can be trivially gamed by interested and powerful actors. Have we as a civilization ever witnessed such a pervasive disinformation culture?
I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not.
So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us.
(Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.)
That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.
>>So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it.
I think a lot of people develop acceptance of fake news from their camp because they just assume the other camp is doing it as well and see it as leveling the playing field.
When I put on my rose-colored glasses and look back at the past (1950s??) it seems that lying was very much looked down upon. Not so much any more. Seems like it's 'anything goes that you can get away with'. Is this because we're not teaching ethics in school? Decline in churches? Apathy from feeling helpless?
No, just lying about different things. Back then you were absolutely supposed to lie about things like having sex before marriage, where your teenage daughter went for six months just after she started dating that guy and putting on weight, how much you love being a housewife, the attraction you have for your own sex, your interest in non-gender-conforming behaviour, what your creepy uncle did when he babysat you...
I agree with you that humans are prone to lie, and that cultures have developed protocols around that, but we can distinguish here on both degrees and categories of lies. If your daughter became pregnant in school in the 50s, something terribly had gone off socially acceptable script. (It is irrelevant how we view that script today.) All of your examples are specimens of social remedies to deal with these social hot potatoes. But adopting domestic propaganda as a norm is another thing.
Or take the somewhat analogous history of torture in USA. Of course that shit has been going on in this country (and elsewhere) from day one, but it is one thing for individuals or units or even communities to lose it, or do it out of sight, and another thing entirely for the state to officially adopt it as a tool of state craft.
Those lies were as much in support of the system as they were ways to deal with it. The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.
> The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.
(Their neighbor should have lied too.)
I tend to view societies as non-linear and catastrophic systems. The system above was trying to maintain a social order and it wasn't attempting a 100% conformity to rule x. There is a threshold of violating rule x that would destabilize the social order and the governing social rules are optimized to keep violations well below that threshold. By lying about a violation event, both the fact of the violation is leaked (because the lies are transparent), and, a family unit is protected from suffering the consequences of publicly breaking rule x. But if a family of daughters repeatedly had presented daughters with cases of 'eating disorder', then you can be certain that family would be subject to social scrutiny.
Every culture develops a variant of this mechanism. For some it is a first class device (e.g. Ta'arof in Iranian culture) and for others it is an implicit device.
The key issue is always "where is that threshold" and not that these mechanisms exist. They exist for a reason, since as every school child knows:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
[p.s. to be clear, imo, the contemporary lies we're discussing have crossed those thresholds and are destabilizing and we can possibly trace the seminal event to Watergate and Deepthroat and acceptance of anonymous sources.
Here is a very interesting example of a key leader discussing transparency in the press. It is interesting in the sense that it both addresses this issue and is itself the source of a fairly prevalent disinformation.
Perhaps the penalty for lying has gone down? Much broader reach, so you can potentially dupe a lot more people, and you can either hide your true identity or you're so removed from the individuals you duped that they can't effectively affect your real reputation. There's gotta be stuff out there on reputation that looks into this.
Issues of going to magazines for current-events aside, I do not understand what your underlying argument is when you say:
how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it
If we step away from the context of what happened, are you stating that anything a politician denies must not be true? If you'd like, I'm happy to go into the context of this as well.
I think reputable organizations risk their integrity each time they quote an unnamed source - this is the basis of the public's acceptance of unnamed sourced.
I imagine NBC has a process for using unnamed sources; I know the NYT has one and has written about it in the past.
Thus, I recognize your frustration but do not see the link between 4Chan and a well-known news organization. You might raise the issue of the Vanity Fair reporter's lawsuit, to which I would suggest not reading VF if you no longer believe in their integrity.
I am using a standard line "It's fake. In general you should consider anything you see on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp or the Internet to be false by default."
Engaging in refuting online garbage constantly is a painful waste of time, and keeping silent or blocking it just allows it to fester.
I'm hoping that this makes a difference, and I've used a trivial and non-threatening example of fakery (fake supermoon pics) to plant the idea that nothing online can be trusted, within my social circles.
I should add to the Urban Dictionary 'Is that a Facebook joke? - said in response to any sub-par attempt at humour.'
This is my standard line for those that spend too long on Facebook and believe that nothing in the mainstream media should be read under any circumstances whatsoever lest the propaganda lead to brainwashing.
My snarky response to someone's effort at being funny by repeating some drivel they read on one of their friend's pages is a bit miserable but it condenses everything I feel about how Facebook is a waste of time and quite dangerous for one's personality makeup. There is no need to have the discussion about why I am not on such things, opportunities arise for me to use the 'Is that a Facebook joke?' expression of sentiment.
I have the same experience as you. Most people just don't care and they only care about the topics that they can talk to their friends, without researching for even a bit to prove it.
Then they would claim that reputable sources too are biased against their beliefs and they'll come up with their reputable sources. Paranoia is some people nurse and profit from—unfortunately.
Are they changing their mind based on those news? I assume those kind of people don't read news to educate themselves, they use 'news' to confirm the beliefs & thoughts they already have and will likely never change.
Check out the most recent Last Week tonight. Features clips of President Elect Trump making almost identical comments. In March he claimed a man who rushed the stage at one of his rallies had ties to ISIS. When confronted with the fact that the source he'd linked to was a hoax, his response was, "What do I know about it? All I know is it was on the internet." [1]
Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly:
Bill: "You tweeted out that whites killed by blacks - these are statistics you picked up from somewhere - at a rate of 81%. That's totally wrong; whites killed by blacks at a rate of 15%."
Trump: "Hey Bill. Am I going to check every statistic? I've got millions of people... you know what? Fine. But this came out of radio shows and everything else."
Anyway, worth watching the whole show. It's funny, in a painful way.
This extreme partisanship is one of the reasons I'm wary of John Oliver. For example, Politifact, despite its biases or subjectivity, has documented examples of practically every major politian making untrue statements. Including the current POTUS.
We need a systemic approach to dealing with lies and untruths of the people who weild power. If you make it partisan, the liar/politican will just block you out, and so will their followers.
I agree with you that reporting selective truths can still be a very strong form of bias. However, Oliver is completely open about the fact that he's entirely biased. It's clearly editorial. (And also clearly a comedy, not a serious news program.) I could still see an argument that the bias is unfair, but in my opinion far more insidious are organizations like Breitbart (and I'm sure some left-leaning ones as well) that use this selective truth-telling to serve their biases while making an effort to appear unbiased.
To be fair to John Oliver, in the episode he points out stuff from both sides, calling out how many fact news articles are left-leaning. He also points out his own show's bias and mentions Politifact in his episode. To be fair also to John Oliver, Bill Oreilly calling out Trump for not checking facts is amazing, and Trump saying he has no time to check facts is even more amazingly scary.
I don't think anyone is unaware of his partisanship. But partisanship is only relevant if it affects reporting, which by your statement would seem like we are of opposite convictions. I believe both the old Daily Show (and likely the new one as well, but I never watch it) and Last Week Tonight work really hard to put everything they report/joke about in a relevant context without leaving anything out, and I have yet to see anything hinting otherwise.
I've seen a lot of critique for Clinton on Last Week Tonight, but even if I hadn't, why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?
But speaking of politifact [1] [2]:
Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies? I find it wholly unsurprising that all politicians lie more than "regular people", but I find it supremely horrifying the amount of Trumps lies that are swallowed whole to the extent that Hillary is the one portrayed as "crooked" when comparing these statistics.
> But partisanship is only relevant if it affects reporting,
It does, here.
> which by your statement would seem like we are of opposite convictions.
I have no idea what you mean.
> without leaving anything out, and I have yet to see anything hinting otherwise.
I don't share your belief. Haven't you seen his hit-piece on third-party candidates? You had two big candidates with little or no integrity, and yet, he paints the third party candidates as not even worthy of consideration because they said one or to silly things, or were unaware of some details.
> why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?
Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.
> Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies?
Not even remotely close to what I wrote.
> when comparing these statistics
The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.
> I don't share your belief. Haven't you seen his hit-piece on third-party candidates? You had two big candidates with little or no integrity, and yet, he paints the third party candidates as not even worthy of consideration because they said one or to silly things, or were unaware of some details.
I have. And I happened to agree. This could've been THE year for third party candidates, had they not been complete dullards. There was basically an open door. And I disagree with you about "both" third party candidates only saying one or two things wrong. They were fundamentally inequipped to respond to basic political issues.
> Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.
If it was true, yes. Where we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald. That seems to be the horrifying root to this entire election.
> The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.
Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think. [1]
Even if they were dullards, I'd prefer them to people who have shown tendencies to destroy countries. I think I saw this joke on 4chan: if Gary Johnson does not know where Aleppo is, that's one less place for him to bomb.
> Wehre we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald.
Well, one of them is an egomaniac, talks garbage, has misbehaved with people, and has run shady charities and a university. The other one has received millions of dollars from banks and foreign powers, and has demonstrated that she will say exactly what her audience wants to hear. Not only has she threatened to up the ante against Syria, she has shown she can deliver, in Libya. I think the worst-case difference we are looking at here is a history of misdemeanor and fraud vs a history of fraud and felony. I prefer (peaceful) dullards to these.
> Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think.
Depends of the topic, I guess. Politifact is biased, and my recommenation for using both resources is the same.
While I agree that exposing untruths (and reporting facts) is important, I welcome obvious partisanship. I believe that all journalists and news organisations have biases, but feel they ought to conceal them. Having an opinion doesn't prevent anyone from telling the truth. All news reporting is selective, even if it is somehow unbiased.
I like multiple-award-winning journalist Clare Sambrook's idea of investigative comment:
These are pretty much the defining characteristics of a hit piece. I do not enjoy such things, and I do not recommend such things, for reasons I have already given. Many people think that they are being educated (while being entertained) by such programs. In reality, they develop a very distorted view of politics and of reality. If the media keeps at it, the next two candidates will be no different from Clinton and Trump. Who am I kidding? This is what will happen.
> So if you don't go into off topic material, it is a hit piece?
That question can't be answered. What do you think the topic of this piece was? The title was "President-Elect Trump". The piece was not about "let's talk about Trump as the future president". Rather, it was about, "things are going to get frighteningly bad under Trump".
Staying on topic and selective blindness are very different things. The latter was on bold display here, and is a defining characteristic of a hit piece.
There are numerous studies that also show significant selection bias, that is they cherry-pick statements they fact-check.
Politifact itself makes no attempt to evaluate and correct for their own bias. The newspaper that runs it is liberal leaning, and has endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Because of the fact that Politifact tries to appear unbiased, their apparent bias is even more disappointing. Truly neutral fact-checking is something that would be very desirable. Perhaps the only way this will ever happen is by some sort of aggregation of left- and right-leaning “fact-checking.” Sort of like metacritic.
Those are different claims. Bernie specifies that he's talking about youths who only had a high school degree or dropped out. Further, Bernie's campaign replied to Politifact's questions and pointed them to a specific source. Trump made a completely different claim (about all African-American youths), and then ignored Politifact's questions. Trump's claim is wrong, and Bernie's is coming from a slightly weird source but has reasonable support. Further, Trump's campaign refuses to provide support...so of course they're not going to have as favorable a response... they don't even claim to have support for their statement.
The quotation in the article is cherry-picked to make Sanders look good. With little research you can see he’s been repeating this claim non-stop without any such disclaimers.
The following is a direct quote from The Nation interview linked in the very same Politifact article:
> Do you know what real African-American youth unemployment is? It’s over 50 percent.
The fact is both Trump and Sanders were factually wrong. Their usage of the term “unemployment” was at best misleading.
Politifact is however willing to massage Sen. Sander’s statement to make it only “mostly true,” instead of false, which is a clear example of bias.
There are numerous examples of Politifact asserting editorial control in this manner, skewing the results on the Mostly-True–Mostly-False range of the “truthometer.”
And yet while fake news is prevalent on Facebook, I think the big lesson we all should have learned this election cycle is that mainstream media peddles fake news as well. We learned most major media outlets were in the pocket of the HRC campaign from the beginning of the primaries onward. Major media outlets would happily broadcast an empty podium where Trump was waiting to speak for hours during the primaries during primetime while other candidates were giving passionate speeches to a room of cameras which were turned off. News anchors and pundits were essentially stenographers for the HRC campaign team. The news media televised 'debates' in which one candidate was leaked the questions early. On facebook you get fake news from your little bubble of friends, but if you turn on the news on TV or open the New York Times or Washington Post you get fake news as well, news curated by a tiny group of elites who have their own bias -- generally liberal, but first and foremost in favor of continuing the status quo, which is responsible for their positions of respect and power. I'm more likely to get a facebook post from a different viewpoint that I am reading/watching corporate media. I have mainstream liberal and conservative, pro-trump, pro-sanders, pro-johnson, and pro-stein Facebook friends. The media lied constantly this cycle, sometimes blatantly, sometimes not so much, and much more important than the statement of actual facts is curating the facts and subjects you choose to cover -- they shape the zeitgeist. If you run a hundred pieces called "Does Trump support the KKK?" it doesn't really matter that the answer to that question is factually "no". http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...
John Oliver split from doing opinionated, issue-oriented informational pieces with plenty of research to hackish hit pieces near the end of the cycle. Look at what he said about third parties: instead of bringing thoughtful attention to an often-dismissed issue, his sole purpose was to destroy support for third party candidates without regard for fairness, honesty, or truth and it was pretty clear to anyone who'd actually looked at them honestly before watching it.
If you ask any Sanders supporter (or Trump supporter I'd imagine) what they learned this cycle, it's that corporate media is not honest, not objective, and not to be trusted or even given the benefit of the doubt. Even NPR lied through their teeth.
I agree fake news on facebook is bad. But I'm not sure fake news from other sources is better. I don't know what the solution is.
Your rude and dismissive tone aside, you are incorrect.
The difference is not significant. Reporting the news /is/ what the news becomes. A slant like the kind I'm discussing is exactly a lie: taking a story, and instead of telling it, saying what you want.
And I'm also talking about explicit lies: the Oliver hit piece on third parties contains some, and if you want to look for explicit lies from MSM they are easy to come by. For example consider the Nevada Democratic primary "chair-throwing" incident, reported as such by every pundit and agency in the media although objective fact is that no chairs were ever thrown. The reports of the incident devoid of context are actually even worse here than misstating the actual fact (why were people angry? crickets), but the lie is still there. Retractions were offered days later in fine print by ombudsmen and ignored by journalists (at the same organizations) presenting the actual story.
According to the FBI, in single-victim, single-offender homicides in 2015, 3,167 white people were slain and 500 of those murders were committed by black/African-American people. In the same year, 2,664 black/African-American people were slain and 229 of those murders were committed by white people.
Simple division: 15.8% of whites who were murdered were killed by blacks/African-Americans while only 8.6% of blacks who were murdered were killed by whites. The percentage of whites-killed-by-blacks is about 83.7% higher than vice versa.
So maybe O'Reilly may have garbled his delivery of this factoid?
You're probably right that that's the original source of the messed up "fact", but what Trump originally tweeted was an image, now removed, with these contents according to politifact[1]:
"Blacks killed by whites -- 2%"
"Blacks killed by police -- 1%"
"Whites killed by police -- 3%"
"Whites killed by whites -- 16%"
"Whites killed by blacks -- 81%"
"Blacks killed by blacks -- 97%’
Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.
Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart.
…
"Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values."
People will almost always take the shortcut/easiest way out. Facebook for news = the fastest way to get news. Doesn't mean it's going to be accurate, but do people care? Apparently not.
I have a lot of mixed feelings on this one. Of course one shouldn't rely upon Facebook for the news, just as one shouldn't rely upon Fox News. But people are going to anyway.
The problem in this election was that Facebook did exactly what it was designed to do: show people more of what they wanted to see. Unfortunately that creates extreme echo chambers, where blatantly false news ricochets around the site, blindly liked by partisans on each side.
So that leaves open the question of what to do.
On the one hand, Facebook is a massive media company, and I am not comfortable handing them carte blanche to police and control the speech of their users. On the other, Facebook's current policy of "neutrality" creates an environment that favors political isolation and the spread of outright falsehoods.
At the very least, it seems Facebook could do something about purveyors of those falsehoods algorithmically. But even then I have my misgivings about a private corporation, or really anyone, determining the acceptable range of public discourse.
Perhaps in the near future, the only "journalists" anyone will trust will be algorithms. Of course, any system can be manipulated. But I think we are dealing with such an unprecedented deluge of information, an increase in population (and therefore motives) and connectedness, that it may be time to consider this.
But your comment begs the question: who will be the gatekeepers of these algorithms?
I can't believe so many people actually use facebook. It's a time suck, a voyeuristic and narcissistic view into people's lives, a government database, etc...
I have to point out again that the media is making money by manipulating the masses. If you not pay for it, you are the product. Your time, attention, data, money and also your vote. FB is not better or worse than any other media company. Only more efficient.
Fake news, hoaxes and scams existed long before Facebook. People just use Facebook more, things can spread faster, and all in all it amplifies an existing problem.
Email forwards (and in their newer reincarnation, at least in the Middle East, Whatsapp forwards) spread false news for as long as I remember using the internet. A part time job for me was to respond and debunk these emails when they landed in my inbox. I even put in the time to explain to people how to spot false information (e.g. if the email ends with "forward this to x number of people or else" is 100% a hoax or a scam).
Maybe Facebook -- as our times' Master Switch -- can fix this, and for the first time we'll be happy with centralization.
I used to subconsciously judge email based on the amount of "fw:re:fw:fw:fw" on it. The more fwd:/re: the less I trusted the data. I wonder if this was ever valid signaling, but I also wonder if people trust articles more on FB because, AFAIR, it's hard to tell how many times an article has been re-shared, or "forwarded".
I mean it was Wikileaks that more or less decided this election, but sure... let's all be worried about Facebook's unchecked power, unaccountable methods and unknown motives.
After all, it's not as if one of the Presidential candidates, now President, implied that the entirety of American media was controlled directly by the DNC, and thus not to be trusted, while praising and legitimizing Wikileaks by name. There's no possibility of a dangerous political or cultural precedent having been set by having half the country believe in nothing other than what Wikileaks publishes.
Facebook is evil, but I don't believe it's the elephant in the room.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadObviously easier said than done. But personally that's what RSS feeds are great for.
Long ago in 2011, there was a lovely TED talk about the possible bubbles forming. https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...
That's just how some (probably a lot of) people are. When some people encounter something that challenges your pre-existing beliefs, it's easier to just ignore it and stay in your bubble of comfort.
And that mindset, IMO, is not an easy thing to fix.
That said, the torrent of pure bullshit based on those emails that was floating around on both sides was unbelievable. Either she was as pure as the driven snow or a she-demon, with nothing in between.
After a certain point, it wasn't even worth the effort to argue about it and I just started unfollowing half of my friends and family.
The rest is more of the normal mode of operation of any human organization: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe
That may be the case. But in some cases, people dont want to leave their bubble because eating skittles in someone elses' bubble can mean "looking suspicious" and getting killed for it. That is why I only hang out with my own group and those who understand me, it is too risky out there. And Travon was not the only case, there are hundreds of cases like it which dont get publicized.
That's because of things like the "spirit dinner" bullshit or an email chain discussing drug pricing being reduced to "HILLARY FOUGHT LOWER DRUG PRICES".
When every single email is apparently awful evil shit then it's hard to differentiate things that are actually bad.
Show me some emails that you actually believe should convince someone not to vote for Clinton. Especially over Trump. Keeping in mind that the screwing around in the Primary isn't enough, and that I'm willing to accept a candidate I don't particularly like all that much.
The people who were influenced the most by fake news are those who probably don't even feel there exists a fake news issue.
leppr's comment above shows how this really matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972521
Politics is never black and white.
Which points the way towards the question of whether some people ever really want to know the truth about stuff they already decided is important to them, for whatever reason.
They clearly make a mint off of this stuff, so good luck affecting change.
It's funny that the linked article[0], presumably from a "real" news source, very clearly says that Facebook's action will have basically no effect on the issue.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-fake-news-201...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/16/facebook-bia...
I'm happier, more productive and a better dad when I'm not being a feed-junkie. Maybe I'm an outlier.
I think a big part of it is fundamentally not understanding how the brain works, and that just because your brain presents a convincing reality to you, that it doesn't necessarily coincide with actual reality. People don't understand that intuition can lead you very, very far astray.
So they're building up this concept of the world which seems solid and internally consistent to them, but it's built on sand. And they get annoyed when people start kicking at the sand. Because they're happy in the world that they built. When really what they should be doing is digging out the sand, looking for the bedrock underneath.
This site is starting to get bad as well though. I would love it to be only tech.
Here's a thought: what if most news is misinformation?
> People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds - Lord Vetinari (Terry Pratchett - The Truth).
I don't have a feed of "He's evil" "She's evil". I saw two bad candidates and I understand where people are coming from with their votes.
I'd like to see most independents / democratic people unite under a real progressive platform next election and stop the extremist cycle of social issues vs fear mongering.
There's virtually zero chance of this happening without another party collapsing first.
Hell, even then, independents are harder to herd than cats.
The chance of that happening in the next four years? Really low. About as unlikely as it has been since the Internet established itself as a place to talk about how to fix the voting system. But unlikely doesn't mean you don't try, and don't talk about it where you can.
California, for example, has a huge population of Republicans and now their vote would matter. I don't think Trump did any non military focused rallies there.
I am in Illinois. I didn't vote in 2008 or 2012 because I knew my vote would have no impact. Give me a popular vote and you might have Romney... Be careful what you wish for.
I mean, not impossible, but surprising. Where are you located?
And at the same time votes from Democrats in California would also matter more. I'd assume a number of people who'd vote Democrat in CA don't vote because they know the Democrats won't lose anyway.
I'm all for a popular vote, but I don't think you're going to see a swing to the left necessarily.
It would definitely be radical change though.
The system isn't fair, voters in low pop states have more power than california.
The system emphasizes swing states above others, as the country is so split right now.
The system is worse for third party candidates (especially if a STV or ranked system was used. This would also please the Bernie or bust folk).
The system is outdated, it was meant to have a group of well informed electors make the decision about who is president. This doesn't makes sense anymore as the electors are pretty much bound to the will of the states popular vote, and people have access to more information. Plus the whole safeguard against someone unqualified idea has been tossed out the window now anyway.
It's hard to imagine a democratic system where swing voters don't hold disproportionate power. Rusted-on supporters will support you whatever may come, and the opponents' rusted-on supporters will never support you, so as a candidate you spend more time, effort, and money appealing to the noncommittal folks in the middle...
Even excellent voting systems like Condorcet don't change this particular equation; a hardcore supporter of you just simply doesn't need as much of your attention in an electioneering frame of mind.
This all being said, that doesn't mean the current systems in the US aren't horribly misrepresentative. Gerrymandering is a particular problem there.
* Winner-takes-all means that in any state that is %60/%40, the 40%'s votes don't affect the election at all.
* Congressmen are representing too many people.
If more states worked like Nebraska and Maine, then people in rural counties in California could decide a few seats on the electoral college. And there's an amendment outstanding to change the number of representatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am...
Ranked choice voting is also interesting, but I think not as important right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
But, ditching the electoral college is only a small part of the solution to the core problems in US politics.
Hence, they are hard to herd because they are actually already decided.
This isn't conjecture. I've seen the base files.
> This isn't conjecture. I've seen the base files.
Until you share, it's conjecture.
The name of the game isn't changing hearts and minds (generally), but turnout. 2016 isnt an outlier. Look at county level returns.
> Independent white men are generally Republican voters
?
EDIT: By polarized I mean intense hatred, coming from both sides
That said, I happen to live abroad (which doesn't stop local media and locals from trying to talk about it).
If knowledge is the life-blood of democracy, America is suffering from leukemia...
Thus the algorithm must provide the best un trollesque experience possible.
For this, it is better to have people feel cumfy with people sharing same believes/opinions. This way the CPC diminishes bringing more ad conversions.
Do the experience on yourself: did you prefer to go to school where diversity was greater than in your actual probable IT job, or do you prefer going to a conference on «your favorite whatever tech» it is. I have used noSQL techs because I thought it was cool after a python conf while I was pretty much dubitative. And I should have kept my doubts they had solid grounds.
Basically, conference and school are the same ; people talking thinking they share something, except school is full of conflict because of diversity whereas conference feels amazing because you feel in communion and you are more receptive. (I loved every conf I attended in the beginning until something itched me (my nosql conversion)).
That is also the secret recipe of churches, sects, successful corporate cultures, modern musical tendency to be based on genre that are caricature of themselves, even meme ... polarisation of the mass in one direction and fervor and a feeling to share something common, making you feel more likely to embrace new paradigms.
What we should fear is not facebook, algorithm or even google: it is our on Nature to feel cumfortable in uniformity and avoid conflicts.
The side effects of the algorithms is just that it turns us people in fanatics because we are not able to deal with diversity anymore. It is the experience we all wish: PEACE, shared progress and experience!
However believe it or not, since we are not always right, we sometimes need to have painfully disagreeing opinions. (real life). But in our bubble of agreement, opponents get marginalized as pisse froid.
And I know the tendency is to fight/blame the trolls, but trolls are not the problem at hand. It is a growing tendency to prefer avoiding conflicts, and I am concerned, only for one reason: it makes crappy software. Regarding politics, I don't really care that a globally skewed system towards the person rich by birth is getting unstable.
They wanted the power, no one was concerned since everyone was thinking it was a great idea: now they have it and I just grab my popcorn and sit.
The world can burn, I will rejoice myself with it but I did not bring the oil nor scratched the match that set it on fire. I am innocent, I was just a troll doing my job of trying to wake up people on the dangers coming...
One day us trolls will be given a medal for trying to save the world. Or maybe, I am still trolling...
However, I stone cold quit about 6-8 months ago because the election nonsense was ramping up and it got bad. I mean baaaaad. Both sides talking nonsense about the other.
I just didn't want to deal with the emotional toll of having to sift through that nonsense every damned day, and since FB wasn't really something that was important to me, it was extremely easy to just walk away. I'll log back in occasionally, and every time I do I remember immediately what caused me to quit.
It's bad.
You can kind of see this with trending topics. If you don't follow a particular topic but suddenly see it trending in your feed, there's a chance you may random walk into clicking it. If Facebook opens up a global/regional/local newsfeed that isn't highly targeted, then you could potentially start seeing more original content.
I highly encourage people to research their local newspapers and support one: you get so much out of something that costs the equivalent of a couple Starbucks coffee pet month.
What the Economist constantly does is give its opinion on the facts, and that opinion usually sums up to how good free-trade and libertarian policies are. I definitely wouldn't count that as propaganda. You could, but then any newspaper with opinion pieces would be propaganda, which is not what is normally meant by "propaganda".
If anything, I'd rather have news sources that are widely known to lean a certain side, because then I know their potential bias beforehand, which I can balance it out by reading articles from opposing publications.
It's certainly not an unbiased publication, it's an opinion paper. From their "about us" page:
> The same page describes the Economist as “a Friday viewspaper, where the readers, with higher than average incomes, better than average minds but with less than average time, can test their opinions against ours. We try to tell the world about the world, to persuade the expert and reach the amateur, with an injection of opinion and argument.”
From the same page:
> "What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage."
So you are certainly not going to get "unbiased news reporting". It's a "viewspaper" that takes declared, informed editorial stances. You will get extremely well thought out and researched opinions and analysis.
"Propaganda" is a word usually reserved for intentionally contorting facts to favor a specific political entity. One can have an opinion without spouting propaganda. That's more the MSNBCs, Pravdas, and Fox Newses of the world. If you've ever read an economist article, the difference is obvious.
https://medium.com/@dominicbasulto/russophobia-and-the-dark-...
I like the newspaper and I would like to subscribe, I'm just saying I often heard some bias complaints.
It also has a cool founding history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Devoir
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Though you may not be supprized by it, how many people in your life would be shocked by it.
Have you shared your thoughts on this matter with them? Have you changed any minds?
For many people on HN, their work has the potential to have social implications in a way that was never the case twenty years ago. I for one am glad to see stories like this posted to HN, as I think engineers that make things like the algorithms that decide news feeds have very valuable input.
However, this particular article doesn't provide any interesting commentary on Facebook algorithms, its role in society or fake news. It's borderline content-free and I find that puzzling. Snowden says we should be wary of getting our news from a single source. Did this add something to any of the subjects you mention?
http://www.businessinsider.com/students-solve-facebooks-fake...
What's truly dangerous here is that one organization has so much control over what news people see.
The problem is we don't have multiple major news organizations per major area like we used to. Back then there was bias, but it was easier to be called out on it. Now I think many people are fine living in the bubble.
I can't see a scenario where Facebook manages to avoid anti-trust action against it in the next four to six years, both in Europe and the US.
Ultimately the only way to really address this problem is to have a diverse variety of competing news sources so at least they aren't all captured in the same way at the same time. There's no way to line this up with Facebook being the One News Source, any more than if it was the government doing it.
Anyway, here are some more legitimate sources for the same topic for anyone interested:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/snowden-discusses-facebook...
https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/15/snowden-we-rely-too-much...
Things in the realm of opinion, insight, tutorial, reviews, etc, can get more leeway.
http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-...
38% Never, 18% hardly ever, 26% sometimes, 18% often.
Note that none of this excludes people getting news from non-social sources such as going directly to whatever news sites they like.
It's not clear that this is really much more of an issue than hearing what Bob in marketing thinks of issue X, Y or Z.
I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true.
However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments."
I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times.
Her response:
"That's comforting."
I was shocked.
And yet, that is the reality we now live in. Many, many people are acting, and thinking, exactly like her.
However, there's a difference. People often had these discussions face to face with other views visible or at least some consequences for bullshitting. Now, the like-minded naturally group together with Facebook making the others (esp moderates) largely disappear from the feed. Showing them what they wanted to see with convenience of scrolling past opposing beliefs reinforced the echo chambers and false beliefs. That few counterpoints are displayed reinforces it further by creating illusion of false consensus for their side. All the resulting upvotes and shares reinforce the algorithm's effect.
I speculate such things are why the divide seemed so much stronger in this election than before. They need to bump into each other more for the necessary conversations to occur. The tech increases isolation instead. The effects will only get worse over time.
"The effects will only get worse over time."
I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. My imagination (and knowledge of history) are too limited. Anyone have some good examples? Or know of projects that are working on similar topics?
Lol. Believe me, a few people on social media agreed and I can't see their stuff any more. ;)
"I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. "
Similarly having a hard time. This particular one got reversed temporarily each time new mediums were invented. Then, the people using such tactics mastered them for the new mediums. Helps when the start rolling in money then use it to ensure the dominance. The social media has more potential to counter this than ever if they just adjust the algorithm to bridge the groups a certain percentage of time. They can mostly create a comfortable experience for the ad revenue but should make sure articles citing at least half-ass sources float into opposing feeds while letting bullshit stuff Snopes counters fall lower. That simple change, applied to everyone, might have a significant effect on the situation at least for moderates or rational people likely to effect change.
Usually, even for HN comments, I'm a little better at editing before anyone else sees it, though.
This is not to say that the opinion landscape in other decades didn't have problems; but they were somewhat different in nature.
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%...
During the summarization process we also strip out all the commentary and bias, resulting in what we hope will be an unbiased news archive of the topic. We have had good results so far, for example, our newsline of "Mattress Girl" [1] is the most unbiased account of her case on the web, despite being curated made from exceptionally biased sources. If you like what we are doing please join us.
[1]http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/
The idea that it was my job to screen the bullshit...
I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed.
Same. Now its just a messaging platform now, its great
This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
Edited to add: /s
and
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...
With communication enabling faster communication with greater reach, there might be more noise, but is it worse in terms of percentage of communication?
Yeah, but they were never shrugged off. Even the worst charlatans insisted they speak the truth; they didn't just go "meh, maybe it's not true after all, what is truth anyway".
In the past news sources had a reputation to protect, so crazy stories were confined to tabloids and some radio shows. Now all these stories just pop up in peoples streams, without anything to distinguish them from stories from reliable sources.
Couple that with the fact that, even with trustworthy sources, you can paint an inaccurate picture just by editing which stories you present (which Facebook is incentivised to do and actually does), and I think the problem is much worse now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
I envy your optimism.
Buckle up!
http://paulryan.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=9969
Saves Medicare for current and future generations, with no disruptions for those in and near retirement.
For younger workers, when they become eligible, Medicare will provide a premium-support payment and a list of guaranteed coverage options – including a traditional fee-for-service option – from which recipients can choose a plan that best suits their needs.
I'm thinking TRyancare.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975066
That's the frightening part. The financial incentives in the system are all screwed up. These kids are doing it purely for the easy dollars; they don't even care about the politics at all.
It's like schoolyard taunts, except the kids are getting paid for who can come up with the most viral rumour. Something seems deeply, deeply broken about this at a systemic level that's different than say, people spreading misinformation to others they know by word-of-mouth.
The only difference is that you need to pay lots of untrained people to lie on Facebook, while you needed to pay just a couple of highly trained people to lie on a newspaper.
Those who know better, do better.
WeChat did provide a process to flag inappropriate articles, but people around the age of my parents just won't stop forwarding.
We have always been pretty irrational and easy to manipulate.
I'd argue a lot of our best inventions required a certain amount of irrationality to create.
Facebook could probably give people a public rating based on the accuracy of the information they shared, and shame the worst offenders, but neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established.
I don't like the idea that you can play a straight bat but be overrun by hustlers.
I'm on the fence about that one. On the flip-side:
1. If they don't police it, then Facebook as a whole gets a reputation for disinformation. (When I look at Facebook, I personally ignore most shared articles because they're mostly crap, and I don't want to look at them. I only care about the personal goings-on of friends, and the signal-to-noise gets worse over time.)
2. If you take someone who doesn't care about truth, they're not going to introspectively seek-out a metric which might report "You're misinformed and stupid!" BUT If you're self-righteous about the truth, then you might want some objective metrics which say, "Look I don't spread misinformation or live in an echo chamber! But Cheryl does! Look, Cheryl, I'm smarter than you!" That might provide some basis for a viral dynamic.
Remember on your first point though that it might not be a factor for the majority of people. Can also reach people through ad networks, or social networks, etc.
http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07...
It's just that since that time we've become more aware of the "replication crisis" in science generally, and it'd be nice to see independent researchers confirm Nyhan's findings.
I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not.
So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us.
(Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.)
[1]: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushn...
That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.
I think a lot of people develop acceptance of fake news from their camp because they just assume the other camp is doing it as well and see it as leveling the playing field.
Or take the somewhat analogous history of torture in USA. Of course that shit has been going on in this country (and elsewhere) from day one, but it is one thing for individuals or units or even communities to lose it, or do it out of sight, and another thing entirely for the state to officially adopt it as a tool of state craft.
Those lies were as much in support of the system as they were ways to deal with it. The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.
(Their neighbor should have lied too.)
I tend to view societies as non-linear and catastrophic systems. The system above was trying to maintain a social order and it wasn't attempting a 100% conformity to rule x. There is a threshold of violating rule x that would destabilize the social order and the governing social rules are optimized to keep violations well below that threshold. By lying about a violation event, both the fact of the violation is leaked (because the lies are transparent), and, a family unit is protected from suffering the consequences of publicly breaking rule x. But if a family of daughters repeatedly had presented daughters with cases of 'eating disorder', then you can be certain that family would be subject to social scrutiny.
Every culture develops a variant of this mechanism. For some it is a first class device (e.g. Ta'arof in Iranian culture) and for others it is an implicit device.
The key issue is always "where is that threshold" and not that these mechanisms exist. They exist for a reason, since as every school child knows:
[p.s. to be clear, imo, the contemporary lies we're discussing have crossed those thresholds and are destabilizing and we can possibly trace the seminal event to Watergate and Deepthroat and acceptance of anonymous sources.Here is a very interesting example of a key leader discussing transparency in the press. It is interesting in the sense that it both addresses this issue and is itself the source of a fairly prevalent disinformation.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speech...
(The disinfo bit is where an edited version of above audio is promoted as Kennedy warning us about the NWO and Illuminati. /G)]
No. Simply that the barrier to featured publication of rumors on national press is supposed to be somewhat more demanding than 4chan et al.
I imagine NBC has a process for using unnamed sources; I know the NYT has one and has written about it in the past.
Thus, I recognize your frustration but do not see the link between 4Chan and a well-known news organization. You might raise the issue of the Vanity Fair reporter's lawsuit, to which I would suggest not reading VF if you no longer believe in their integrity.
Engaging in refuting online garbage constantly is a painful waste of time, and keeping silent or blocking it just allows it to fester.
I'm hoping that this makes a difference, and I've used a trivial and non-threatening example of fakery (fake supermoon pics) to plant the idea that nothing online can be trusted, within my social circles.
This is my standard line for those that spend too long on Facebook and believe that nothing in the mainstream media should be read under any circumstances whatsoever lest the propaganda lead to brainwashing.
My snarky response to someone's effort at being funny by repeating some drivel they read on one of their friend's pages is a bit miserable but it condenses everything I feel about how Facebook is a waste of time and quite dangerous for one's personality makeup. There is no need to have the discussion about why I am not on such things, opportunities arise for me to use the 'Is that a Facebook joke?' expression of sentiment.
Self-selection bias greatly reduces the efficacy of such an extension.
Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly: Bill: "You tweeted out that whites killed by blacks - these are statistics you picked up from somewhere - at a rate of 81%. That's totally wrong; whites killed by blacks at a rate of 15%."
Trump: "Hey Bill. Am I going to check every statistic? I've got millions of people... you know what? Fine. But this came out of radio shows and everything else."
Anyway, worth watching the whole show. It's funny, in a painful way.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s
We need a systemic approach to dealing with lies and untruths of the people who weild power. If you make it partisan, the liar/politican will just block you out, and so will their followers.
I've seen a lot of critique for Clinton on Last Week Tonight, but even if I hadn't, why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?
But speaking of politifact [1] [2]:
Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies? I find it wholly unsurprising that all politicians lie more than "regular people", but I find it supremely horrifying the amount of Trumps lies that are swallowed whole to the extent that Hillary is the one portrayed as "crooked" when comparing these statistics.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/
[2] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
It does, here.
> which by your statement would seem like we are of opposite convictions.
I have no idea what you mean.
> without leaving anything out, and I have yet to see anything hinting otherwise.
I don't share your belief. Haven't you seen his hit-piece on third-party candidates? You had two big candidates with little or no integrity, and yet, he paints the third party candidates as not even worthy of consideration because they said one or to silly things, or were unaware of some details.
> why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?
Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.
> Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies?
Not even remotely close to what I wrote.
> when comparing these statistics
The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.
I have. And I happened to agree. This could've been THE year for third party candidates, had they not been complete dullards. There was basically an open door. And I disagree with you about "both" third party candidates only saying one or two things wrong. They were fundamentally inequipped to respond to basic political issues.
> Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.
If it was true, yes. Where we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald. That seems to be the horrifying root to this entire election.
> The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.
Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think. [1]
[1] http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/15-023_e044cf...
Even if they were dullards, I'd prefer them to people who have shown tendencies to destroy countries. I think I saw this joke on 4chan: if Gary Johnson does not know where Aleppo is, that's one less place for him to bomb.
> Wehre we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald.
Well, one of them is an egomaniac, talks garbage, has misbehaved with people, and has run shady charities and a university. The other one has received millions of dollars from banks and foreign powers, and has demonstrated that she will say exactly what her audience wants to hear. Not only has she threatened to up the ante against Syria, she has shown she can deliver, in Libya. I think the worst-case difference we are looking at here is a history of misdemeanor and fraud vs a history of fraud and felony. I prefer (peaceful) dullards to these.
> Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think.
Depends of the topic, I guess. Politifact is biased, and my recommenation for using both resources is the same.
I like multiple-award-winning journalist Clare Sambrook's idea of investigative comment:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/cla...
And stating that Trump made those statements is true, saying that others also make idiotic statements does not change that.
Focus on the topic is also the defining characteristic of a good article.
That question can't be answered. What do you think the topic of this piece was? The title was "President-Elect Trump". The piece was not about "let's talk about Trump as the future president". Rather, it was about, "things are going to get frighteningly bad under Trump".
Staying on topic and selective blindness are very different things. The latter was on bold display here, and is a defining characteristic of a hit piece.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/...
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/do...
There are numerous studies that also show significant selection bias, that is they cherry-pick statements they fact-check.
Politifact itself makes no attempt to evaluate and correct for their own bias. The newspaper that runs it is liberal leaning, and has endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Because of the fact that Politifact tries to appear unbiased, their apparent bias is even more disappointing. Truly neutral fact-checking is something that would be very desirable. Perhaps the only way this will ever happen is by some sort of aggregation of left- and right-leaning “fact-checking.” Sort of like metacritic.
The following is a direct quote from The Nation interview linked in the very same Politifact article:
> Do you know what real African-American youth unemployment is? It’s over 50 percent.
The fact is both Trump and Sanders were factually wrong. Their usage of the term “unemployment” was at best misleading.
Politifact is however willing to massage Sen. Sander’s statement to make it only “mostly true,” instead of false, which is a clear example of bias.
There are numerous examples of Politifact asserting editorial control in this manner, skewing the results on the Mostly-True–Mostly-False range of the “truthometer.”
John Oliver split from doing opinionated, issue-oriented informational pieces with plenty of research to hackish hit pieces near the end of the cycle. Look at what he said about third parties: instead of bringing thoughtful attention to an often-dismissed issue, his sole purpose was to destroy support for third party candidates without regard for fairness, honesty, or truth and it was pretty clear to anyone who'd actually looked at them honestly before watching it.
If you ask any Sanders supporter (or Trump supporter I'd imagine) what they learned this cycle, it's that corporate media is not honest, not objective, and not to be trusted or even given the benefit of the doubt. Even NPR lied through their teeth.
I agree fake news on facebook is bad. But I'm not sure fake news from other sources is better. I don't know what the solution is.
The difference is not significant. Reporting the news /is/ what the news becomes. A slant like the kind I'm discussing is exactly a lie: taking a story, and instead of telling it, saying what you want.
And I'm also talking about explicit lies: the Oliver hit piece on third parties contains some, and if you want to look for explicit lies from MSM they are easy to come by. For example consider the Nevada Democratic primary "chair-throwing" incident, reported as such by every pundit and agency in the media although objective fact is that no chairs were ever thrown. The reports of the incident devoid of context are actually even worse here than misstating the actual fact (why were people angry? crickets), but the lie is still there. Retractions were offered days later in fine print by ombudsmen and ignored by journalists (at the same organizations) presenting the actual story.
"Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Victim by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Offender, 2015"
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
According to the FBI, in single-victim, single-offender homicides in 2015, 3,167 white people were slain and 500 of those murders were committed by black/African-American people. In the same year, 2,664 black/African-American people were slain and 229 of those murders were committed by white people.
Simple division: 15.8% of whites who were murdered were killed by blacks/African-Americans while only 8.6% of blacks who were murdered were killed by whites. The percentage of whites-killed-by-blacks is about 83.7% higher than vice versa.
So maybe O'Reilly may have garbled his delivery of this factoid?
Edit: I'm sure there are screenshots of the initial image so you don't have to rely on politifact.. here, this includes the image and a transcript of the O'Reilly interview: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/trump-retweets-bogus-crime-...
[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...
America went from a melting pot to a tossed salad to a powder keg.
Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.
Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart.
…
"Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values."
http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...
The problem in this election was that Facebook did exactly what it was designed to do: show people more of what they wanted to see. Unfortunately that creates extreme echo chambers, where blatantly false news ricochets around the site, blindly liked by partisans on each side.
So that leaves open the question of what to do.
On the one hand, Facebook is a massive media company, and I am not comfortable handing them carte blanche to police and control the speech of their users. On the other, Facebook's current policy of "neutrality" creates an environment that favors political isolation and the spread of outright falsehoods.
At the very least, it seems Facebook could do something about purveyors of those falsehoods algorithmically. But even then I have my misgivings about a private corporation, or really anyone, determining the acceptable range of public discourse.
Perhaps in the near future, the only "journalists" anyone will trust will be algorithms. Of course, any system can be manipulated. But I think we are dealing with such an unprecedented deluge of information, an increase in population (and therefore motives) and connectedness, that it may be time to consider this.
But your comment begs the question: who will be the gatekeepers of these algorithms?
"The people who used to tell me that Wikipedia is unreliable now get their news from viral facebook posts"
Email forwards (and in their newer reincarnation, at least in the Middle East, Whatsapp forwards) spread false news for as long as I remember using the internet. A part time job for me was to respond and debunk these emails when they landed in my inbox. I even put in the time to explain to people how to spot false information (e.g. if the email ends with "forward this to x number of people or else" is 100% a hoax or a scam).
Maybe Facebook -- as our times' Master Switch -- can fix this, and for the first time we'll be happy with centralization.
I mean it was Wikileaks that more or less decided this election, but sure... let's all be worried about Facebook's unchecked power, unaccountable methods and unknown motives.
After all, it's not as if one of the Presidential candidates, now President, implied that the entirety of American media was controlled directly by the DNC, and thus not to be trusted, while praising and legitimizing Wikileaks by name. There's no possibility of a dangerous political or cultural precedent having been set by having half the country believe in nothing other than what Wikileaks publishes.
Facebook is evil, but I don't believe it's the elephant in the room.