The fake news meme has been cooked up by the mainstream media to shift blame for Clinton's loss on new media. Nobody cared about fake news on Facebook. Meanwhile the mainstream media lied and manipulated the truth to suit their narrative constantly. These trusted publications took advantage of their reader's trust to lie to them, causing far greater damage than any fake Facebook article. A great example is how the New York Times and the "fact checkers" used a reporter's disability to lie to their readers. As a liberal, Zuckerberg is particularly vulnerable to criticism from the liberal media. He should "do a Trump" and tell them to f off.
NYT admitted they were biased against Trump, spreading fake news and putting Trump in bad light, publishing pro-Clinton stories. They were digging into Trumps family more and completely ignored Clintons family, mostly ignored her bribed and Podesta emails - only because blaming Trump was more trendy.
That is an incredibly biased editorial from a competing newspaper. Not the NYT admitting any of the things you claimed
See, this is kind of what people mean by "fake news". It isn't "Our sources were wrong" as with the Iraqi WMDs and instead "We made up some sources and completely distorted things to push our agenda"
Especially after reading:
"We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team."
This seems like relativism. Regular media isn't perfect, so therefore blatant lies are fine. Is this embracing the "post-truth society"? It no longer matters what is true, only what gets the most likes/shares/upvotes.
I think the point being made is that Facebook, NYT, et al. are not in a position to moralise about journalistic ethics.
I would go further and say that the half-truths being peddled by these outlets are far more dangerous than obvious non-truths peddled by "fake news" outlets, because seeing through their lies is much harder.
If we live in a world where "fake news" has been successfully censored, but the merely partisan outlets remain, the only result is people being lulled into a false sense of security: "It has to be true -- fake news is banned!"
I'd argue it's not worse. I've ran across many people with higher ed degrees sharing fake news, sincerely thinking they have shared a reasonably-researched article.
I'm talking news from a website which says it publishes stories that are not true - but are not humor - on its about page.
When that fake news reinforces their perspective, they simply clicked share because they liked how it sounds. Every time when I've pointed out something was blatantly false, they also sincerely said thank you, including one person admitting they couldn't tell the difference between a reasonably-researched news site and one that is not.
> these outlets are far more dangerous than obvious non-truths peddled by "fake news" outlets
While apparently obvious to us, fake news articles are being shared by more people than factual news. [0][1]
> If we live in a world where "fake news" has been successfully censored
There's a difference between fake news and partisan news: one is flat out lies the other is factually true.
Fake news is more akin to false advertising than censorship is. No one says that banning false advertising is censorship; banning false advertising is keeping people from buying products based on lies.
I'm not sure we can use "number of shares" as a reliable metrics for how many people believe each piece of news. It's perfectly concievable that many people share it as "look at this obviously fake lie". I mean, how many shares do Onion articles get?
It's a reliable metric in describing the possible reach of fake news.
There will be a sizeable portion who believe what they read.
This is straight up fiction being spread masquerading as truth, which should deeply trouble everyone who cares about what is correct and what is not.
Speaking anecdotally, I nor my friends would share news we believed was fake. Would you share the fake source knowing it is fake news or would you share links exposing and explaining a fake news article?
> I mean, how many shares do Onion articles get?
Go take a gander at The Onion's Facebook page and scroll trying to find a fake article that has more than 10,000 shares.
There's a difference between "isn't perfect" and stuff like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donal... The New York Times spend 30 paragraphs trying to tie Trump, Bannon and Breitbart to Nazi-quoting white supremacists through innuendo and insinuation, and then:
"When asked about Mr. Bannon, the conference’s speakers said that they might have shaken his hand on occasion, but that they did not know him well.
Mr. Brimelow said that he had met “Mr. Bannon once, earlier this summer, before he ascended to Olympus.” He said he had told Mr. Bannon that he was doing great work at Breitbart. “He agreed,” Mr. Brimelow recalled to the audience.
As for Mr. Trump, Mr. Brimelow said he had met him about 30 years ago at a “conservative affinity meeting” in Manhattan. But that was it.
“Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people,” Mr. Brimelow said, adding that they had opportunistically seized on two issues that the alt-right cares most about — stopping immigration and fighting political correctness — and used them to mobilize white voters."
Their entire narrative is basically bullshit, they went ahead with it anyway. and it worked. I've been seeing quotes from the article popping up all over Twitter as proof the next president is linked to Nazis. Once people have read paragraph after paragraph confirming their beliefs, they don't worry about minor details that call the whole thing into question. (This is a favourite trick of right-wing UK tabloid the Daily Mail.)
Not only that, the group that the New York Times is writing about appears to be completely politically irrelevant... except for the coverage that papers like the NYT are giving them. They're pushing white supremacy into the mainstream because it suits their narrative.
I read the article and it seems to mostly reporting the neo nazi types enthusiasm for Trump and Bannon. Do you think that shouldn't be reported? Are any facts incorrect?
I'll give you there have been a lot of headlines in the MSM implying Bannon is anti-semitic while when you look into it appears he is not.
The "fake news" term is itself actually fake news (unless you're liberal). It is synonymous with "we did everything we can to influence the election outcome and yet we lost, now we should regulate the news media industry so only WE can publish our agenda."
i realize there's a partisan bent to the fake news story, but the indisputable fact of the matter is that there are a lot
of sites that straight up fabricate outrageous news to generate clicks that have a lot of circulation on facebook now. the liberal side of the media is beating the drum about it right now, but it's still a true claim.
It's sort of ironic citing BuzzFeed here, as they were long a primary supplier of bullshit news and questionable listicles, before they pivoted into actual journalism.
to be fair, i think there's a pretty big difference between 'bullshit' (ie inconsequential) and fabricated news. i remember when i still used facebook, being intensely annoyed every time i saw news that seemed to have vaguely plausible but clearly fake content -- the sites in question were 'satire', a la the onion, though much less clever. in retrospect, now, it seems predestined that at some point they would drop the pretense altogether, though.
There is a real (and relatively new) phenomenon here that the phrase refers to, and it goes beyond bias and even beyond propaganda. There are businesses whose only agenda is to harvest ad revenue from viral shares. They are working for neither the red team nor the blue team. Their agenda is to tap into the reflex to share, and it makes no difference what achieves that aim. It just so happens that everyone's racist uncle is the easiest vein for them. Google "fake news Macedonia", it's pretty fascinating.
> I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out it was all fake.
There's no need to talk technical about graph nodes and machine learning. It's very simple - the fake news labels are, and will always be biased in favor of the liberal/progressive/Democrat agenda. Objective news is a lie. No one wants to hear it. We want echo chambers that make us feel good. The labels will shift to accommodate this desire.
Indeed we'll keep seeing the mass stream media biased to omit objective news.
Otherwise you would see the US population asking themselves why on earth are their armed forces so deep involved in Syria, just short of military invasion. They get spoon-fed that the country is ruled by a dictator and their population needs to be freed, but so is Saudi Arabia with a far worse regime where people get their heads cut on monthly basis, which are praised as critical ally in the region.
"Fake news" is a way to block the things deemed as dissident from the main stream, effectively blocking the room for logical argument and exposing the facts.
I think there are many people who are interested in truth - whatever it is, without feeling the need to associate their position with any red/blue person (politician).
There was no mention of machine learning (no predictions of any kind) - the idea is to keep track of history of raw data (labelling and it's changes) and report on "reliability score ..." (how many times labelling itself was false).
The thing is it doesn't need to be biased at all. You just keep all data for all sources. There's no "objective truth" per se, there are only true/false labels according to source.
Of course you can create your own "beyond reasonable doubt by xyz" or "government xyz pov" source and assume that this is going to be your objective truth reference. But, just like any other sources, your source will just have reliability rating in context of any other source.
> I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out it was all fake.
That has nothing to do with the kind of 'fake news' being discussed. There's nothing 'fake' about reporting "Government claims WMDs in Iraq" while elaborating on what evidence the government has or claims to have, even if it turns out there were no WMDs.
The fake news is question comes from sites that just make up random crap to get page views, not websites that are making a good faith effort to report on what is real.
The Iraq war was preceded and enabled by a massive propaganda campaign where close to 100% of American outlets went along with the WMD claim and were for an invasion (FAIR.org).
You don't get to say a propaganda campaign that ruined a country and killed hundreds of thousands wasn't fake news. It was - complete and utter fabrication on an industrial scale, and it had devastating effects.
Insufficient resolution to Question, scope too broad.
There's several levels to "truth".
What happened.
What an eyewitness/machine reported happened
Whether the witness maliciously lied/mistakenly reported the event
Was all of this reported faithfully
Separately was reporting done to verify the facts.
And do note, we've (coders) created the world where most newspapers have already gone out of business, and they have to in turn compete with everything and everyone for what remains of human attention spans.
So the new question I would append to that list is - does it even matter anymore ?
ProPublica for example tries very hard to do good in depth reporting. There have been reams of leaks with more data than what most people know what to do with.
This has to compete for human attention bandwidth against documents/content designed to press buttons, elicit emotions and thus propagate (generating more page views, and so revenue)
My point is simply that truth is a narrow view on the scope of the problem.
In a year or two this will die down and a new generation of coders will parrot "move fast and break things."
The larger system at play her must be front and center.
Ideally people would have more time to reflect on their own - see more news that causes dissonance - hopefully causing people to check their opinions and beliefs.
And of course the tool to
Achieve this should itself not create a worse problem
You seem to be confused about the difference between real/fake news vs correct/wrong news. The claims by the Bush administration about WMDs were real news. That the claims turned out false is another matter entirely.
Your problem is that you're interpreting it in terms of "is wrong/is right" instead of "deliberately lying/trying to be accurate". Perhaps news publications should've been more skeptical, but they themselves weren't trying to make things up.
The point is that the media did not: they assumed that the administration, CIA, etc. weren't completely making it up and a common assumption at the time was that details and corroborating evidence were being withheld to protect intelligence sources and techniques.
They arguably should have been more skeptical but it's very different from the situation where some place like Breitbart runs a propaganda piece which is easily debunked using public information, like the fake electoral map they printed which flipped entire states to maintain the “coastal elites” narrative they're selling.
The mainstream media has some serious blemishes from that era (Valerie Plame comes to mind) but they have editors, publish corrections, etc. and it's a monstrous exaggeration to try to equate the two.
Except that one of the examples of fake news that the media have leapt on was just some random person making an bad assumption and it going viral: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-ne... The main thing that seems to make something a good example of "fake news" is that it's pro-Trump in some way.
That's because the Trump campaign was literally built on propaganda starting with the claims about Obama's birth certificate which really started getting him supporters. He didn't need to invent the story to take advantage of it as one of the most prominent voices spreading it, and sites like Breitbart or abcnews.com.co profited enormously from people who believed there was a real story that the real news organizations wouldn't cover.
The paid protesters story is a great example: the campaign benefited from and recirculated rumors about that which started on random blogs, conspiracy sites like InfoWars, and outright fakes like abcnews.com.co throughout the election. The guy who tweeted that photo might have been a Republican acting in what he believed was good faith but he was primed to think of that as likely by the prior months of unfounded accusations and as soon as he shared that photo, it was widely circulated by supporters including Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump's campaign manager before becoming CNN's commenter representing the campaign.
No, they supported a narrative that was false by refusing to investigating claims by officials - that's planted fake news, and that news was created at publication. News don't exist if it isn't published, that is its definition.
Officials supplied the false information which served as the raw material the media's fake news was produced with.
I tend to agree with you. I'm looking at the NYT archives right now and finding examples both of uncritical quoting of official sources and straight up assertions about WMDs in Iraq.
This is a famous quote from Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, from an article that includes many hawkish quotes from anonymous sources.
"Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."
Is this fake news? I'd say so. But, I have an even lesser criterion for fake news -- I think the most insidious type of fake news doesn't necessarily tell a single lie, but rather selectively reports the truth.
I am also 100% certain that it's impossible to filter out "fake news", whatever your definition is, without suppressing some true but fringe information.
Plus, is it really a good idea to suppress a meta-discussion about propaganda and false information? Those "fake news" articles and their corresponding beliefs will still exist, even if Facebook manages to filter them out, but proponents of those ideas will either never see critical discussion or they'll just move to other platforms. It seems like a great way to further fracture our already divided society.
To take a more recent example, when Chris Cuomo stated recently on CNN that it's illegal to view the Wikileaks Podesta emails, should something like that be censored if it's posted to Facebook? It's plainly false, and given that Cuomo has a law degree and a family full of politicians, he was almost certainly deliberately lying.
>You don't get to say a propaganda campaign that ruined a country and killed hundreds of thousands wasn't fake news.
You're getting hung up on the term 'fake news'. In this context this term has a specific meaning, different than what you're referring to. 'Fake News' are sites with content that is purposely false (though it could plausibly be true) that is also usually outrage-inducing. At the same time they attempt to pass themselves off as credible news organizations. Their business model involves getting their fake content to go viral, increasing views and their advertising revenue.
This is precisely the problem with attempting to categorize "fake" news - individuals each have their own nuanced definition of both "fake" and "news" that may be entirely contradictory to someone else's definitions. All these efforts (Facebook's solution and third party ones) will do is create even deeper echo chambers.
I think there are two levels: One is if the information is ultimately true. The other is if the information is correctly reported according to the impression a journalist would get (at press conference for example). In other words, is the website deliberately lying? I think this is the problem that FB is trying to address here.
That's hard to tell. Were the reports of hillary's imminent win false? of course they were. Were they deliberately lying? Probably not . Could they have lied less if they had done some actual research? Probably yes. Did it matter that they lied? definitely yes.
And every situation is even more peculiar. This is a futile exercise.
I don't think FB should be required to do this (I don't think they are but who knows what people will demand) nor do I think that Google should be forced to filter these stories out of their search results etc.
Ultimately the responsibility for judging news lies with the consumer of the news.
It may very well be in the interest of FB/Google to apply a filter to serve the users the best possible results...but that's a potentially dangerous path.
I wonder how viable it would be to provide these filters as a service (seems like large scale machine learning). There might even be a market for a "confirmation filter" where I can elect to filter out everything that is conservative/liberal if I so choose (since I hear a lot of people claiming media is biased in favour of the other side anyway).
Spam filter 2.0 (or is it 4.0 theses days?)
There is some repercussion: if you have any sense at all, when someone on your feed consistently keeps sharing this garbage, you stop paying any attention to what they share.
Getting a good accuracy score sounds really hard to do, but if done it would be super valuable. Right now there's no economic incentive for accuracy. All news outlets, old big ones and new small ones, draw in eyeballs to advertise to using drama and controversy, not accuracy.
Can't help but feel that this sudden 'fake news' push seems more like a movement to enforce mainstream media control versus alternative/grassroots in light of the recent U.S. election, rather than any actual concern.
After all, the CNN, Huffington et al. had their own share of misrepresentation and outright lies[1] - but will those be targeted by this new effort?
Serious question, will all celebrity (aka tabloid) news be considered fake news? For example, Pop star Jane Doe in relationship with Actor John Smith? Stuff at the supermarket counters.
While the upper echelons in society are deciding what "fake news" and "real news" is, and thus what you should consume or not, I would like everyone to remember this particular quote:
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, and allow very lively debate within that spectrum"
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 21.5 ms ] thread[1]http://newslines.org/blog/lets-talk-about-fake-news/
That is an incredibly biased editorial from a competing newspaper. Not the NYT admitting any of the things you claimed
See, this is kind of what people mean by "fake news". It isn't "Our sources were wrong" as with the Iraqi WMDs and instead "We made up some sources and completely distorted things to push our agenda"
Especially after reading: "We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team."
http://nypost.com/2016/11/11/new-york-times-we-blew-it-on-tr...
I would go further and say that the half-truths being peddled by these outlets are far more dangerous than obvious non-truths peddled by "fake news" outlets, because seeing through their lies is much harder.
If we live in a world where "fake news" has been successfully censored, but the merely partisan outlets remain, the only result is people being lulled into a false sense of security: "It has to be true -- fake news is banned!"
I'm talking news from a website which says it publishes stories that are not true - but are not humor - on its about page.
When that fake news reinforces their perspective, they simply clicked share because they liked how it sounds. Every time when I've pointed out something was blatantly false, they also sincerely said thank you, including one person admitting they couldn't tell the difference between a reasonably-researched news site and one that is not.
While apparently obvious to us, fake news articles are being shared by more people than factual news. [0][1]
> If we live in a world where "fake news" has been successfully censored
There's a difference between fake news and partisan news: one is flat out lies the other is factually true.
Fake news is more akin to false advertising than censorship is. No one says that banning false advertising is censorship; banning false advertising is keeping people from buying products based on lies.
[0]: https://imgur.com/xJ7eDbs
[1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-...
Speaking anecdotally, I nor my friends would share news we believed was fake. Would you share the fake source knowing it is fake news or would you share links exposing and explaining a fake news article?
> I mean, how many shares do Onion articles get?
Go take a gander at The Onion's Facebook page and scroll trying to find a fake article that has more than 10,000 shares.
"When asked about Mr. Bannon, the conference’s speakers said that they might have shaken his hand on occasion, but that they did not know him well.
Mr. Brimelow said that he had met “Mr. Bannon once, earlier this summer, before he ascended to Olympus.” He said he had told Mr. Bannon that he was doing great work at Breitbart. “He agreed,” Mr. Brimelow recalled to the audience.
As for Mr. Trump, Mr. Brimelow said he had met him about 30 years ago at a “conservative affinity meeting” in Manhattan. But that was it.
“Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people,” Mr. Brimelow said, adding that they had opportunistically seized on two issues that the alt-right cares most about — stopping immigration and fighting political correctness — and used them to mobilize white voters."
Their entire narrative is basically bullshit, they went ahead with it anyway. and it worked. I've been seeing quotes from the article popping up all over Twitter as proof the next president is linked to Nazis. Once people have read paragraph after paragraph confirming their beliefs, they don't worry about minor details that call the whole thing into question. (This is a favourite trick of right-wing UK tabloid the Daily Mail.)
Not only that, the group that the New York Times is writing about appears to be completely politically irrelevant... except for the coverage that papers like the NYT are giving them. They're pushing white supremacy into the mainstream because it suits their narrative.
I'll give you there have been a lot of headlines in the MSM implying Bannon is anti-semitic while when you look into it appears he is not.
And crucially nobody cared during the thousands of elections/uprisings around the world in which facebook played a role.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-...
also i may be wrong, but as far as i know buzzfeed isnt known for being especially partisan towards liberal causes
There's no need to talk technical about graph nodes and machine learning. It's very simple - the fake news labels are, and will always be biased in favor of the liberal/progressive/Democrat agenda. Objective news is a lie. No one wants to hear it. We want echo chambers that make us feel good. The labels will shift to accommodate this desire.
Otherwise you would see the US population asking themselves why on earth are their armed forces so deep involved in Syria, just short of military invasion. They get spoon-fed that the country is ruled by a dictator and their population needs to be freed, but so is Saudi Arabia with a far worse regime where people get their heads cut on monthly basis, which are praised as critical ally in the region.
"Fake news" is a way to block the things deemed as dissident from the main stream, effectively blocking the room for logical argument and exposing the facts.
There was no mention of machine learning (no predictions of any kind) - the idea is to keep track of history of raw data (labelling and it's changes) and report on "reliability score ..." (how many times labelling itself was false).
The thing is it doesn't need to be biased at all. You just keep all data for all sources. There's no "objective truth" per se, there are only true/false labels according to source.
Of course you can create your own "beyond reasonable doubt by xyz" or "government xyz pov" source and assume that this is going to be your objective truth reference. But, just like any other sources, your source will just have reliability rating in context of any other source.
That has nothing to do with the kind of 'fake news' being discussed. There's nothing 'fake' about reporting "Government claims WMDs in Iraq" while elaborating on what evidence the government has or claims to have, even if it turns out there were no WMDs.
The fake news is question comes from sites that just make up random crap to get page views, not websites that are making a good faith effort to report on what is real.
You don't get to say a propaganda campaign that ruined a country and killed hundreds of thousands wasn't fake news. It was - complete and utter fabrication on an industrial scale, and it had devastating effects.
There's several levels to "truth".
What happened.
What an eyewitness/machine reported happened
Whether the witness maliciously lied/mistakenly reported the event
Was all of this reported faithfully
Separately was reporting done to verify the facts.
And do note, we've (coders) created the world where most newspapers have already gone out of business, and they have to in turn compete with everything and everyone for what remains of human attention spans.
So the new question I would append to that list is - does it even matter anymore ?
ProPublica for example tries very hard to do good in depth reporting. There have been reams of leaks with more data than what most people know what to do with.
This has to compete for human attention bandwidth against documents/content designed to press buttons, elicit emotions and thus propagate (generating more page views, and so revenue)
My point is simply that truth is a narrow view on the scope of the problem.
In a year or two this will die down and a new generation of coders will parrot "move fast and break things."
The larger system at play her must be front and center.
Ideally people would have more time to reflect on their own - see more news that causes dissonance - hopefully causing people to check their opinions and beliefs.
And of course the tool to Achieve this should itself not create a worse problem
Your problem is that you're interpreting it in terms of "is wrong/is right" instead of "deliberately lying/trying to be accurate". Perhaps news publications should've been more skeptical, but they themselves weren't trying to make things up.
The politicians involved knew that their claims were not backed up by facts.
They arguably should have been more skeptical but it's very different from the situation where some place like Breitbart runs a propaganda piece which is easily debunked using public information, like the fake electoral map they printed which flipped entire states to maintain the “coastal elites” narrative they're selling.
The mainstream media has some serious blemishes from that era (Valerie Plame comes to mind) but they have editors, publish corrections, etc. and it's a monstrous exaggeration to try to equate the two.
The paid protesters story is a great example: the campaign benefited from and recirculated rumors about that which started on random blogs, conspiracy sites like InfoWars, and outright fakes like abcnews.com.co throughout the election. The guy who tweeted that photo might have been a Republican acting in what he believed was good faith but he was primed to think of that as likely by the prior months of unfounded accusations and as soon as he shared that photo, it was widely circulated by supporters including Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump's campaign manager before becoming CNN's commenter representing the campaign.
Officials supplied the false information which served as the raw material the media's fake news was produced with.
This is a famous quote from Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, from an article that includes many hawkish quotes from anonymous sources.
"Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-ir...
Here's a quote from an opinion piece by William Safire:
"Two terrorist-sponsoring nations are racing to acquire nuclear weapons. One is Iraq, whose scientists already have the know-how..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/10/opinion/arafat-s-implausib...
Is this fake news? I'd say so. But, I have an even lesser criterion for fake news -- I think the most insidious type of fake news doesn't necessarily tell a single lie, but rather selectively reports the truth.
I am also 100% certain that it's impossible to filter out "fake news", whatever your definition is, without suppressing some true but fringe information.
Plus, is it really a good idea to suppress a meta-discussion about propaganda and false information? Those "fake news" articles and their corresponding beliefs will still exist, even if Facebook manages to filter them out, but proponents of those ideas will either never see critical discussion or they'll just move to other platforms. It seems like a great way to further fracture our already divided society.
You're getting hung up on the term 'fake news'. In this context this term has a specific meaning, different than what you're referring to. 'Fake News' are sites with content that is purposely false (though it could plausibly be true) that is also usually outrage-inducing. At the same time they attempt to pass themselves off as credible news organizations. Their business model involves getting their fake content to go viral, increasing views and their advertising revenue.
And every situation is even more peculiar. This is a futile exercise.
Therefore, all news is fake based on these absurd criteria.
And now one side wants to make sure that only their fake news can be published.
I wonder how viable it would be to provide these filters as a service (seems like large scale machine learning). There might even be a market for a "confirmation filter" where I can elect to filter out everything that is conservative/liberal if I so choose (since I hear a lot of people claiming media is biased in favour of the other side anyway). Spam filter 2.0 (or is it 4.0 theses days?)
There's no journalism classes or ethics training before clicking those buttons. Should there be?
Over time, that constant drip of misinformation can significantly harden someone's opinion on a topic.
After all, the CNN, Huffington et al. had their own share of misrepresentation and outright lies[1] - but will those be targeted by this new effort?
[1] for example, http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/cnn-caught-rigging-its-meth...
Side note.. what ever happened to bat-boy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_(character)
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, and allow very lively debate within that spectrum"
Looks familiar?
This is Noam Chomsky talking, by the way.