Maybe older people share disproportionately more news content? I tried to look at the study to find out what kind of links they even included in the evaluation, but the link in TFA only goes to the publication's home page.
Edit': as I thought, their dataset includes all kinds of links, but they do the same analysis for sharing hard news and don't find significant age effects. It's table S14 in the supplementary material http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2019/01/07/5.1....
And they are more likely to vote than young people. We really have to work to make elderly people more digitally literate and young people more involved in politics, I reckon it will require the removal of multiple barriers (like, oh I don't know, not having the election on a weekday that makes no difference for retired people but all the difference in the world to minimum wage employees living pay check to pay check? And make it harder for ISPs to screw over rural people?).
Young people have always been less interested in politics. Just because you/we don't like how the elderly are voting, we don't have to make this a bigger issue than it is.
I hope you're referring to the civil rights movement, and not to those who elected Nixon so we could have a Drug War and stay in Vietnam for another seven years.
Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.
Allison Mack, some other prominent actors, and several members of the Bronfman family are going down for running a sex ring. Some of the circumstances are crazy.
It would seem like fake news at first glance surely. It's downright bizarre.
I certainly would have written it off as 'National Enquirer' were it not out of super credible institutions.
Sometimes it's hard to tell what is 'truth' and the major 'credible' news agencies simply don't cover a lot of things.
Or consider that horrible Jeffrey Epstein. Not a politician, but he hosted politicians on his island of victimized children. Now we've learned that federal prosecutors colluded with his defense team to fool the courts into letting him off with a few months in a part-time minimum-security resort prison. It was fortunate for him that he had cultivated friendships with those in power! It was unfortunate for the little girls, how he cultivated those friendships...
Oh I don't doubt the depravity of some human beings. The stuff that's public knowledge about the lollita express alone is horrific, basically putting it a few rungs short of 100 days of sodom.
The problem is that accusations of pedophilia and molestation are emotional warheads so we get nutcases trying to shoot up pizzerias because of a rumor that makes absolutely zero sense because it is physically impossible. There's a reason we have gag orders in high profile trials and why we sometimes sequester juries: every time the public gets involved in such an emotional issue, justice is at risk of getting perverted.
People like Epstein must be brought to justice and everyone who covered for them like Dershowitz and Acosta must feel the full force of the law and society they betrayed, but we have to do so deliberately. Otherwise, they'll just get away and continue to hurt people while qanon and Breitbart continue to radicalize a vulnerable segment of the population using easily disprovable lies.
It's mighty hard to prove that a building has never contained a basement. It could be constructed in secret, used, and then filled in. You'd need to dig it up like an archaeologist would, examining layers of soil for signs of disturbance.
More realistically though, the pizzeria was a codeword for the real location. Plenty of evidence for pizza-related codewords is in the Podesta emails. It's really creepy. Normal people don't rent specific numbers of slices of pizza for specific numbers of hours. It is widely thought that the number of slices is actually the age of the victim. Pizza-related codewords are known to be used by criminals involved in that sort of thing; some have been caught. Podesta also has some disturbing artwork in his home that features children.
Details and priors matter here. He seems to have been involved in the "procuring" middleman role, as was Berlusconi (who largely got away with it until one of the girls was underage).
"Male French or Italian politician involved in sexual misconduct" is well within the range of plausible news; the whole pizzagate thing relied on all sorts of alleged implausible details.
Then there's the UK's "Dolphin Square" controversy, which largely went silent after Lord Ashcroft started threatening people with libel lawsuits and in any case is now buried under Brexit news. I've filed that firmly in the "Don't Know, and maybe impossible to know" category. The public inquiry rumbles on and will no doubt not report until all the accused are safely dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child...
Of course of course. Context matters. Reality matters!
My point is it's a mess out there, and most people don't have insight into how the world really works, so I usually don't go blaming retirees for passing along false information of the Tabloid kind. It is what it is.
Facebook is not new, it's just now we have digitized banal gossip. I guess the difference now is we can measure it.
Pizza gate is an extreme. But also, yes, news has changed dramatucally over the last couple of decades and older generations maybe don't consume as defensively as younger generations. Over time this can make ridiculous things sound plausible.
I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique
I don't think it's that ridiculous things can sound plausible. No, they sound ridiculous. I think it's when the fake news looks like something someone is inclined to believe anyway. In my little bubble, I'm always chiding young, progressive friends for uncritically sharing memes with fake quotes etc that happen to reinforce their political biases.
Until they all die off? Go read about the pizzagate incident. The guy who fired a rifle inside that restaurant was 28 years old. Alex Jones, the lying asshole who runs infowars, is in his mid-40s. The alt-right is full of men in their 20s-40s.
The problem in this particular case isn't old people. If you want to point at one broad demographic, it's men, largely under the age of 50.
They might be, but is it paid time off? If it's not, then many people may choose to work instead. Especially shift workers being paid on an hourly basis rather than salary.
The states that don't offer time off controls a very large portion of the electoral college votes, unfortunately. The ones that offer paid time off are at a real disadvantage because of the electoral college, too.
Many states do but the time they're required to provide is pretty short and not long enough in some areas (2-4 hours mostly 2-3) and even where there are provisions like that employers can refuse to provide the time.
> Though many states allow employees to have up to three hours off during the time the polls are open (the number of hours varies by state), nearly all of the states allow employers to refuse time off to vote.
Another option that solves the problem, at least for 9-to-5-ers is holding elections on Sundays. It's done that way in my country and it seems to be convenient enough. There's still a national holiday, but only for schoolchildren as the polling stations are in schools and it takes time to remove the election materials.
It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.
I grew up with the Internet. I was reading wacky conspiracy theories in my teens. It made me more skeptical of virtually anything I see in print since I learned how easy it is to create a BS narrative and fit details into it. I also learned what propaganda is, how it works, and how prevalent it is.
Older generations grew up with a one-way opaque screen preaching to them. Obviously not everything on that screen was true, but when it was called "news" it was held to some standard and so was probably more likely to be true than not. They also had no way of delving deeper, no way of querying or seeking out an alternative opinion or discussing it with other members of the audience.
That generation grew up trusting things on screens.
On the other other hand, I’ve seen a lot of people thinking they can determine the truth by weighing various commentators against each other and deciding which seems more likely, which I’ve just found Isaac Asimov used in Foundation (1951!) to characterise attitudes of decline.
Not sure I’ve noticed a pattern, age or otherwise, with such attitudes.
I think I agree, but you are probably over stating how many of them grew up with television.
Now, the same points generally hold with radio, as well.
I was just saying that propaganda is not new. Of course, I don't know that this research is claiming these folks are the most misinformed. So, I could be taking it in a pointless direction, as well.
Older generations didn't trust things on screens. They cursed at things on screens.
They could and did seek alternative opinions, though often it cost more. Subscribing to newsletters has long been an option. For example, the John Birch Society's TheNewAmerican was created in 1985 as the merger of two older newsletters that date to 1956 and 1965. It's now available at https://www.thenewamerican.com/ but you can still get the print version delivered to your house twice a month.
This is in stark contrast to the evidence of the article.
That some folks from older generations did this, I can accept. But you will need more data than this to counter the facts presented in the article, no?
It's something like that. The study picked conservative news sites, then showed that various groups were more or less likely to spread that news. The most obvious finding in the study is that conservatives were more likely to spread this news, but it was also found that old people were more likely to spread it. The article focused on the old people.
The audience for the Fox News channel skew older heavily and Rupert Murdoch made no secret Fox News was created solely for the purpose of airing a right wing narrative, all facts aside. The article says a bland both sides do it objectivity worthy of NPR then states a 4:1 ratio in GOP/Democratic favouring stories, signficantly almost all of them were to the benefit of Donald Trump in the runup/immediately after the 2016 election.
> It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful,
No, they grew up in a time when media distortion was less likely to be revealed because the major media was narrower and it's ideological biases more consistent, and voices outside the major media had major barriers to reaching any substantial audience.
I agree. Younger people are more likely to have experienced more fake news being revealed as falsified information in many forms, including fake social media accounts, photoshopped images and modified videos. I feel that this induces greater skepticism and awareness of fake news.
It's both. There was spin, but there also weren't dedicated propaganda outlets (e.g., Fox News).
You are right, though -- it took a lot of work to get content to a large audience. That reduced the number of malicious agents who could and the speed with which they could successfully gain broad influence.
While I agree that journalism is in crisis, this isn't the first time. While Hearst was famous for yellow journalism, his papers weren't the only ones, and often the emotional sensationalism was intended to support a particular candidate (or denounce their opponent).
Good point, and thank you. I still think there’s a difference between tabloid journalism and a propaganda platform in scope. On the other hand, it showcases the barrier to entry that used to exist.
Hmmm.
Time magazine, the morning newspapers and CBS/ABC/NBC evening news was much more middle of the road than today's Drudge/Huffpost, CNN/Fox and google/reddit (and HN) type ideological bubbles. More straight news.
Back farther in the past, the many competing newspapers were very partisan. Perhaps we're just back to that situation.
> Hmmm. Time magazine, the morning newspapers and CBS/ABC/NBC evening news was much more middle of the road than today's Drudge/Huffpost, CNN/Fox and google/reddit (and HN) type ideological bubbles. More straight news.
I remember when CNN launched. News all day was a novelty; no other TV network was like it. I was a kid, but it did seem to me to be much more conservative (in the sense of not overtly sensational) and "straight" news at the time.
I guess today's CNN and their much more pronounced left-wing orientation is just a response to the right-leaning stuff from Fox? Or it just seems more left-wing now in comparison.
I think it is partly a reflection of increasing polarization in society.
That, and even if journalists are actively attempting to avoid bias the faster news cycle simply leaves them less time for polish. Thus, more and more stories are the equivalent of first or second drafts.
Neutral and unbiased certainly don't describe CNN.
As the OP said, a decade ago you could make that claim. They were much more "news". Now their rating have been in the toilet for years, so they've gone to extremes to gain viewership.
I honestly find CNN to be fairly in the middle. Sure it's a little left leaning- but it's minimal.
If it looks very "left leaning" now that's because of the reality of how terrible Trump is for the world. But they still give him credit when credit is due. They aren't taking democrats sides all the time by any means. They don't tack up headlines right away that aren't substantiated. There is a minimal of sensationalized headlines. They will clearly have links to opinion pieces which lean way right.
What I actually like to do is if I see something that is supposed to be "big news" on reddit or such, I'll go to cnn. Lots of times, I would see nothing for hours about this "massive breaking news". And sometimes I will see it right away. It's a pretty good barometer to see how important something really is.
Anyway, I don't actually watch cnn much but from their website and clips I see, I think it's pretty fair. Especially compared to something like foxnews which is ludicrously biased.
Media distortion and truthfulness are not the same thing.
People and media will always have a viewpoint that distorts their objectivity. That is just fact of live and not necessarily bad thing as long as it's honest belief.
Media used to be more reliable and truthful in the past with the normal distortions that people had. Mainstream media is still like this. Their problem is the lack of money and time that lowers their ability to do original reporting and check facts. They are the victims of dishonest influencing, not the originators. Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.
Today the distortions are the same but there is significant increase in intentional influencing with data and arguments that those who propagate them don't believe. Using the same talking point to argue for and against issues is good example of this.
Shady figures like Christopher Blair just sit in their homes and push out (non-mainstream viewpoints) disinformation they know is false.
In addition, a huge difference between traditional media, and modern "fake news" is accountability.
As biased as they can be, traditional articles always come with an author name, and published or run under the responsibility of the media themselves.
They can, and often do, give a specific story a slant which supports their point of view or agenda, but they really cannot outright lie, since they would be called out or even be subject to legal action:
Seriously? Pretty much all major networks have been caught making stuff up. CNN has been caught giving debate questions ahead of time to their pet candidate.
CNN fired Donna Brazile as a contributor after that.
CNN's statement:
>"On October 14th, CNN accepted Donna Brazile's resignation as a CNN contributor. (Her deal had previously been suspended in July when she became the interim head of the DNC.) CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate. We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
When mainstream media catches individual journos making stuff up they get fired as it should be. Brazile was not even a journalist or employee. She was running the campaign.
With Brazile, yes, they "accepted her resignation" - not even fired. With other journos, they only fired them after they were caught making stuff up by outsiders. With yet another group, talking heads at CNN make stuff up on a regular basis, but yet they are there because they are "opinion" talking heads. Not just CNN - same with all the other news orgs.
Given Donna Brazile's past and her obvious partisanship, she should have never been allowed to work at CNN to begin with. If they want to be perceived as neutral and fair, that is. That's like hiring Eric Trump to do commentary, while his dad is running for office.
>>Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.>>
To me, it's ideas like this that perpetuate the problem. It clings to the idea that journalists and journalism - at least that which is sold via mainstream media channels - are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity. They aren't. It is much healthier in my opinion to understand that news is not special within its medium. It's entertainment like everything on every other channel. It's somewhat less fictional obviously, but the entertainment motive is what lies behind it.
I would suggest instead that Fox News was the first major mainstream media source that dropped the pretensions and openly did what "news" has been doing since Walter Kronkite but with an equal and opposite bias. And to that extent, it has had a beneficial effect on society: we now know to watch carefully what a given journalist decides to report on and what they don't and we work harder to extract facts, if there are any, from the pre-determined narratives they are wrapped in. Whether purposely or not, they made news look like a joke. And we are smarter now because of it.
Which is to say that their peers don't correct their lies when not exposed. Which is to say that the number of corrections is proportional to the number of exposures. So Fox is just a pig among pigs in lipstick. I'll buy that, but it doesn't really change my point.
Reputable publications correct their factual errors all the time. Reputable publications also fire people who discredit journalism with their behavior.
> are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity.
My point was that media bias is not same as not being untruthful. Fox News stands alone in the mainstream media in their network level intentionally false reporting.
They are biased (and it is needed to take that into account) but not unturthful., Besides, eveyone makes mistakes. There is something called false equlivance.
Fox isn't the first, nor is it the only one, especially outside of the US. The UK tabloids have operated a lot like that for pretty much their entire existence, peddling misinformation and moral panics like they're going out of fashion. Hell, the Daily Mail even had a song written about it cause of that.
It's also pretty prevalent on the radio, and has a fair few historical precedents from before journalism saw credibility as an important thing to keep in mind (yellow journalism et all).
New York Daily News, Daily Mail or UK tabloids are not considered legitimate journalism. They are yellow trash, tabloid journalism, also known as rag newspapers. They belong to the same category as Infowars.
Also, politics aside, the younger generation has some sophistication about domain names (which are essentially their news sources) in general.
They know a domain that's been around vs. one like justice-freedom-eagle.usa that looks like a default wordpress template with stock clip art.
They may get their news from aggregators and live in their respective bubbles, but they're more likely to see through a shady looking site with headlines like "Pope endorses Trump" or "Hillary leads Trump away in handcuffs." As much as the respective sides want to believe those things.
> the younger generation has some sophistication about domain names (which are essentially their news sources) in general.
Is that really true though? A lot of the younger folks on my Facebook share stuff from things like "natural-truth-health.net" or "gmo-truth-toxic.tk" or "naturalnews.com".
It makes sense that fewer people who grew up with the internet would be fooled. But there will still be people of every age who lack the sophistication.
Do you have a link to the source used to classify some news as fake and other news as real in this paper? How do we know liberal cohorts sources are any more reliable? Eg vox and cnn has a similar type of tilt as breutbart and fox.
Without validating that the definition does not preclude the conclusion I don’t see how we can trust it’s conclusikn.
>Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics. Here, we mainly use measures constructed by reference to the list by Silverman (7), but in the Supplementary Materials, we show that the main results hold when alternate lists are used, such as that used by peer-reviewed studies (2).
It's domain level, not article. You can follow the links in the paper to see how those groups come up with these lists.
soundwave106 replied in another message with the sources. Buzzfeed seems to be the primary source of the classifications, a far-left organization, so the conclusion is with all likelihood predetermined by politically motivated definitions of fake news.
These are the classification sources according to soundwave106:
A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media [1]
B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar to buzzfeed suggesting an ideological tilt.
There is some additional methodology in the study link.
The claim of the study is that they can investigate prevalence of fake news sharing of different groups, so the concerns is more expansive than that and puts the scientific validity of their conclusions on dubious grounds.
There are four questions that need to be answered:
1) are the classifications complete over the data set in the study, not an arbitrary different data set
2) is the populations studied representative of the populuation in general
3) are the classifications unbiased
4) are the classification structure sufficiently granular to represent uncertainty
On #1 they did their study on a three-month segments beginning 9 months from election day, while the study by YouGov is over a different set of voluntary users in a different time period.
On #2 the population was chosen by voluntary particiation and I don't see any mention of them doing necessary statistical analysis to make sure it is representative of the general population.
On #3 and #4 buzzfeed said they collected the classifications by searching for fake news of interest to people of their ideological tilt. Some of which is admittedly not fake news, such as hillarys mishandling of government emails:
-- BuzzFeed News used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo, which enables users to search for content by keyword, URL, time range, and social share counts. BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo using keywords such as "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump," as well as combinations such as "Trump and election" or "Clinton and emails" to see the top stories about these topics according to Facebook engagement. We also searched for known viral lies such as "Soros and voting machine."
and
-- Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump's interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American "refugees" fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.
I am sure many other problems could be found if I looked more, but just one of these would put a nail in the coffin of their conclusion and together they just put it on dubious grounds.
no mainstream media is really reliable/truthful... you have to watch news from both sides to give you a clue of what the truth is... of course it depends on the subject... they won't lie/distort the truth about 1+1=2 for example.
It makes sense that people who discovered the Internet through Facebook and Twitter at a later age would be more susceptible to memes.
I have been wondering if this will get better or worse. Once all Internet users have been using it since a very early age, will they be more skeptical and responsible? Or will they be more easily influenced?
I have been wondering what an elementary school course in memetics and evolutionary psychology should look like. Kids need memetic inoculation, not just to protect from fake news, but all kinds of automated marketing.
You don't need knowledge of evo-psych or "memetics" (whatever that means) to distinguish most sketchy sites from reputable ones. It may be tricky to distinguish more carefully-assembled fake news sites, but most of these bogus websites/Facebook groups are easy to pick out via stylistic cues alone.
I think it’s unwise to rely on the incompetence of fake news websites.
Compare two UK newspapers, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. They are both well-known and have popular domains which have been around for ages. Considering only their contradictions on the topic of Brexit, one of them must be about as dangerously out of touch with reality as it is possible to be. Which one?
I know which one I believe, but I am not a lawyer, a trade negotiator, or a politician.
If you can't tell the difference between The Daily Mail and The Guardian based on stylistic cues, I don't know what to tell you.
It is true that stylistic cues won't tell you everything. The rest, unfortunately, is a lot harder to teach. Avoiding the obviously-shoddy sites is sufficient as a start; the rest is really going to be dependent on particular knowledge in areas like science, history, etc.
EDIT: Kinda surprised at the downvotes I'm getting here. Have you _looked_ at the Daily Mail frontpage?
Don't look at the founding date, that's completely irrelevant. Look at the Daily Mail homepage. Does it look like a news site, or does it look like a tabloid?
>Does it look like a news site, or does it look like a tabloid?
I think you've just demonstrated why many people believe fake news. A lot of them are set up to look like regular news sites.
Fake news sites have been around for a lot longer than people think. I remember quite a few years ago reading an article about an event where some minority Christians were being mistreated in some non-Christian country. It looked like any other news article. The incident in question was reported in multiple news sites.
Then one person (or a team?) exposed it all. The event never happened. It was not obvious, and he/they had to do a lot of sleuthing to find out who owned the sites - a Christian advocacy group. All the other sites reporting on the incident were likewise (perhaps all under the same company - can't remember).
Years before 2016.
The only thing that may have clued me into it being fake news was that I hadn't heard of the news site. But then again, most people have not heard of most news sites.
Don't look at style or appearances. Really. Don't.
Oh, and as bad as The Daily Mail is, it is full of accurate (albeit misleading) material - compared to a typical tabloid in the US. I can easily dismiss nonsense I see on tabloids in the grocery store. With The Daily Mail, I have to work to find out if it is true or not.
> I think you've just demonstrated why many people believe fake news. A lot of them are set up to look like regular news sites.
You're reading my argument backwards. I'm not saying you should trust any website that looks reputable. I'm saying you should _distrust_ any site that looks _disreputable_. That's the first step, and it's a huge improvement over trusting everything (which is what most people who buy these fake news sites do).
The Guardian are known for some excellent investigative journalism bad sadly even they can't seem to resist the temptation to put up a poorly researched opinion piece / rant or two occasionally to pander to their left-wing readership. That said, the Daily Mail is a gutter tabloid and among the worst of the worst.
I'd lean more towards the Guardian but I don't think I'd trust either outright.
I'd agree not all of the Guardian's opinion pieces are trustworthy. This is true of a lot of news sources. I'd consider the ability to distinguish opinion pieces from factual reporting as one of the easy-to-learn stylistic differences to check, but I can see how that's unclear.
I find evolutionary and psychology and memetics to be powerful models for understanding my own cognitive biases and limiting their influence. Stylistic cues are not sufficient to determine if something is intended to manipulate me.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I am intrigued that you would discredit such a model without knowing what it means.
What's wrong about the viagra spam? Did it actually scam people out of anything? I thought these were the actual e-shops selling actual (generic and probably of dubious quality) stuff, just did it in an overly pushy way because of oversaturated market.
And since they are the ones with the least experience with the internet and the smaller capacity to adapt/learn/sort a lot of info, the whole thing make sense.
Some oldsters have been using the internet since before there was a world wide web so they may have more experience than youngsters. Some of them have been sharing memes on AOL since before some HN readers were born.
So far as cognitive capacity, I don't know. I've seen young people refuse to learn from other people's mistakes, take deadly risks, etc.
When it comes to the epistemology of these people the right way to think about it is the emotional gain they get out of the whole thing. That has nothing to do with the internet. Listen to the Rush Limbaugh show this afternoon and you'll realize that anyone who gets a kick out of that will be vulnerable to a particular strain of "false news".
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have been degrading the American political environment since Bill Clinton got elected, but it was only in 2016 that it became a monster that the Republican establishment could not control in the US. (And the center-right elsewhere)
My aunt Lucy in a nursing home has a phone and thinks that Facebook is the bee's knees -- she can keep up with what her family is up to.
I get many "This email was sent with an iPhone" messages from oldsters. Nothing gets talked about in breathless tones in the New York Times (e.g. Apple products) unless it appeals to the 50+ set. Note how "fall detection" is a selling point of the new iWatch.
If you'd been around long enough you'd notice that selling things to oldsters based on recapturing their youth or vicariously enjoying the youth of youngsters has been a big business for a long time. It had a lot to do with how baby boomers were celebrated in the 1960s (e.g. hippies did not read the New York Times, but oldsters did) Eventually boomers became the target audience and the breathless talk was about millennials.
Gen X got skipped mercifully because there were too few of us to move the needle.
Instagram is just an example. Make them them film a video and share it. Order a Uber or a delivroo. Drive with waze. Book their train/plan ticket. Search for an amazon product.
The first time my dad used the Internet to look at used car ads on Craigslist, I found him trying to fight off a cascading series of popups (this was in the mid-2000s) that launched when he clicked the "You are our 1 millionth customer" ads.
Older people who are new to the Internet may simply think it's regulated like TV and Radio commercials are. Couple that with how easy it is to target these demographics using an FB/Twitter advertiser account, and how they make up big chunks of the voting bloc, and you have a recipe for disaster.
This reminds me of when my father-in-law got a fullscreen pop-up claiming to have seized his computer unless he paid $20. While I was looking at it to figure out how to close the window, he said, "I've already paid them twice now!!!"
It's a failure to understand how any of it actually works. There was a comment higher up how many older people have memorized steps to complete tasks, but have no understanding of underlying concepts. Despite 2 decades of effort on my part, my father has paper notebooks full of step by step instructions how to do things with his computer, but not a shred of understanding of any of the underlying concepts. Also, he was shocked to learn that the internet runs on money and advertising. He can do about 5 common tasks on it, and he has strict instructions never to enter any personal or financial information into any computer.
Study says that damage to the prefrontal cortex in older adults can increase susceptibility to fraud and scams, which may be related to why older people share more fake news.
You can search for J. Rogan with Robert Sapolsky podcast where doc said that either prefrontal or orbitofrontal cortex finishes developing at ~25 years old, so brain can learn about environment and extrapolate accumulated experience later throughout life. I think age bias is not appropriate, because youngsters could consume propaganda with memes, feeds and games as well, just through the different medium. What matters here is anxiety level and/or IQ.
Admittedly, there is definitely a precedent for youngsters who fall for fake news. I am reminded that a number of under-65s thought they could charge their iPhone in a household microwave, even though you would think that common sense would dictate otherwise.
Like other commenters, this study jives with my experience with older relatives. I mean 'forwards from grandma' has been a thing forever, right?
'Bill Gates will give a nickel every time this is read' (remember email chains?), 'naked women get shared, but this heroic child won't get a single like', 'Like and Share if you stand with politician X', etc etc.
Combine this with the targeted scamming of elderly from various Nigerian princes and jailed grandchildren, and there does seem to be a much greater degree of credulity with our current elderly generation. I think a more interesting study would be to figure out whether it's generational, a function of changing brain physiology as we age, or what.
I wonder if this study includes memes like that or only actual site links external to Facebook.
I have similar experiences with older loved ones I'm friend with on Facebook and it's rare they send links. But I think the rampant meme-sharing of misinformation/disinformation is much more prevalent.
I'm really really loathe to say this ... but in today's climate, "memes are news". I have 100% had the contents of memes thrown at me in a political discussion. I happen to be online a lot, so in many cases, I've seen the meme scroll by and it's easy both to realize what it is (fake propaganda), and easy to debunk ... but to those folks, it's as real as if delivered by Walter Cronkite's lips.
The last election really turned me off of social media. The amount of absolutely false memes and screenshots being shared by both sides was way too much. I recently saw some of the ads and memes being churned out by the Russian propaganda machine. I was not so surprised some of the stuff they created was the same crap people I knew were sharing as truth by intelligent yet older people.
Where is the primary source of this, where can I go to see popular memes?
I read HN, Reddit and sometimes /., and I guess due to my settings I miss a lot of stuff. I'm not on FB, IG or snap, is that why I'm missing these memes?
Mainly facebook, twitter, and some of the seedier areas of reddit (AFAIK, depends on who you follow) ... it's also quite concerning how many of these memes and conspiracies seem to originate in 4chan; a literal hive of scum and villainy (and trolls, foremost). I never would have imagined I'd see the day when I would see prominent personalities and politicians literally tweeting screenshots of 4chan threads
Reddit is a good place and they even have subreddits about Russian botnets posting comments. If I look on Facebook it’s mostly other people sharing them not me and I don’t know where they get them.
Some of this stuff is just political garbage in meme style. Basically a pic with block letters.
In my experience (and this is explicitly anecdotal) ... it seems like liberal memes tend to either satirize a politician's actions or repeat opinion-based editorial info, while conservative memes are more often explicitly fake ... yes, satirical/op-ed memes obviously exist there, but I see more obviously false and easily-debunked conservative memes.
For the conservative, those op-ed memes can tend to be interpreted as the oft-quoted "fake news", which is where I'm guessing the "both sides" sentiment comes from.
Again, that's just entirely my anecdotal experience.
I'll also throw in to the mix - creating news 'back then' required someone to gather it, someone to write it up, a printing press or studio, distribution, whatever - people and effort and time and money.
I don't think a lot of the older people I've spoken to realise quite how easy it is to put something on the Internet. Therefore anything that appears, and has the feel of something 'official' must have come from a credible place with the same time and effort involved. If that makes sense?
Makes complete sense. I don't think folks that pre-date the computer age (with some exceptions) have a intuitive grasp of what the 90s would call cyberspace, and how that differs from meatspace construction.
I suspect it’s at least partly that the elderly didn’t grow up with Internet, never really understood its culture, didn’t hang out on 4chan, Reddit, etc, and never developed a highly attuned BS/scam detector like more of the younger generations did.
Many of these folks don’t even really understand how the Windows UI motif works, they’ve just memorized enough procedures to get stuff done on it.
I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting with viral information. They were always just a little too clever and effective while trying to look colloquial and organic, and I always suspected it was some PR outfit somewhere cranking them out, but could never divine a reason for the non-political ones. But maybe it was psyops testing and learning techniques in a long game just coming to light now.
> I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting with viral information. They were always just a little too clever and effective while trying to look colloquial and organic, and I always suspected it was some PR outfit somewhere cranking them out, but could never divine a reason for the non-political ones. But maybe it was psyops testing and learning techniques in a long game just coming to light now.
How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony!
We know they have industrial scale operations to post propaganda now. [1] Obviously this had to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure many intelligence agencies have been researching how information spread on the internet ever since it was created.
The US has been running its own industrial propaganda machine since at least the end of WWII. Carl Bernstein and other journalists uncovered a number of "influencer" and cutout operations in the late 70s which placed CIA-sourced stories in the supposedly respectable and independent mainstream media.
The line between honest journalism, state propaganda, and fake news has always been a very porous one.
In fact there are different propaganda modalities for different demographics. Rather like advertising - if you think a message is transparent, clumsy, and ridiculous, that doesn't mean you're clever enough to be immune to manipulation, it means you're not the target audience for it.
>How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony!
Are you saying you think all those email forwards during that time period were all organic and none were the result of PR/propaganda/psyops operations?
I'm honestly not sure which is the null hypothesis here, and thus who owns the burden of proof.
The thing that bothered me about 4chan was that everyone pretended to be silly and insensitive but were competent people that would run the country in a few years
I always had every problem accurately solved with b from people that were lawyers and doctors or were rising up the ranks in those fields
I'm sure you remember this quote then: "a community who gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be surrounded by idiots who think they are in good company"
This explains SO much of not just 4chan sub-groups, but a lot of internet groups, and I honestly don't think older generations can't think like this. Ironic humor doesn't occur to them; they take it all at face value. Unfortunately ideas spread on 4chan and elsewhere stop becoming memes and start becoming someones reality.
There's no better example of this than Facebook. A graveyard of dead, crappy, overused memes, and younger generations are not using Facebook anymore, it's older generations now.
Exactly right, except one of my grandmas only sends me articles from Snopes. It's kind of like reverse fake news. The only online contact I get from her is articles debunking fake news, but, never any actual real news.
If it was me receiving these things from my grandma- I would be so happy and proud.
Perhaps you could call her today and tell her you love her and thank her for her contribution towards your life
I think with the internet age and online banking it is much easier to exploit people who are still in control of their finances but starting to enter dementia/Alzheimer's. These people can loose a lot of money to scammers so the scammers spend a lot of time trying to find them. Especially now that you can do it from a computer overseas and will never be prosecuted. The strange misspellings, bad grammar, and obviousness of these Nigerian scams letters are done on purpose so that people responding are much more likely to be in this confused state.
The elderly are generally more susceptible to internet fraud. Last summer the New Yorker had this story about how an 85 year old was scammed out of her life savings:
So, what you're saying is, people who have 40 years more experience of life than you have, people who've paid taxes for most of those years, people who sacrificed a better lifestyle so they could change your nappies, etc shouldn't vote because their political opinions don't chime with yours?
You don't know it yet but a lot of what you think you know stems from fake news too.
Really ageism is an area of accepted double standards - denying Alzheimer's patients the right to vote is considered absurd yet even college graduate minors cannot vote despite being proven more capable than average. Or rare absurdities like a minor charged as an adult who managed to get acquitted in spite of the situation's seriousness isn't allowed to vote because of lacking the capacity.
Holding the elders to the same rationale is fair if not just - the situation isn't just for anyone affected but they aren't getting special treatment. To give an absurd example executing people for jaywalking is unjust but doing it to all regardless of station is fair.
I believe in keeping voting sancrosanct mind you but I can see a rhetorical and logical point to it.
Wow. Should we also say that people younger than 30 should not vote because they do not have the life experiences necessary to make rational decisions?
Or maybe children should vote, since they have all the future ahead of them. If there's a reason why education is ignored so much by governments it's because children don't vote
I'm not sure this is fair to all people over 65. It sounds like maybe your relatives are much like mine, and I agree, my relatives shouldn't be voting either.
If we're going to put up a discriminatory barrier to voting, I think it'd be more effective if it was education-based. People with no education make poor voting choices, as we've seen in recent elections.
It's quite frightening to see how popular this education barrier to voting idea is. Another one I've heard is that everyone should make a test before being allowed to vote.
I'm inclined to support educational qualifications for elections supervisors and poll workers, not voters, and while we're there, forcing open source/open inspection ballot counting systems. Isn't it long past time to deal with the ineptitude problem and corrupt canvassing at the source?
Let's just go all the way and narrow it down to landowners. If we're removing suffrage those idiot olds, why stop when we can get rid of it for those pesky poors too?
So under-represented or disadvantaged communities that don't have the resources to meet the education standards don't get to vote? Education requirements can very easily become a proxy for race/class.
> So under-represented or disadvantaged communities that don't have the resources to meet the education standards don't get to vote? Education requirements can very easily become a proxy for race/class.
Easily become a proxy for race/class? They already were used to disenfranchise people:
> From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the United States administered literacy tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with poll taxes, residency and property restrictions and extra-legal activities (violence, intimidation)[2] were all used to deny suffrage to African Americans.
I know people with masters and doctorate level of education in medical and chemistry and other highly technical fields who believe in UFOs, creationism (the 10,000 year old Earth variety), among other things (I even once met a physicist who thought everything about quantum mechanics was bunk and classical mechanics could explain everything). And I'm by no means alone in that. So that may be anecdotal experience, but enough anecdotal experiences among enough people... So I don't think education means what you think it means. That is, it really is about an ideological test, the assumption by certain people being that education, for one reason or another, is selecting specific traits or inculcating certain traits that happen to be the same traits that any given person in such a position, such as yourself, think are somehow common among that group and that should somehow bestow a privilege greater than they do. It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.
>I know people with masters and doctorate level of education in medical and chemistry and other highly technical fields who believe in UFOs, creationism (the 10,000 year old Earth variety), among other things
There should be a registry of doctors who are creationists or believe other nonsense (I'll give the UFOs a pass depending on just how fervent their belief in them is; I mean, can you prove we haven't been visited? The evidence isn't very good but you can't prove a negative. If they believe they've been abducted, however, that's a whole different level. Of course, I also can't disprove their claim but I'd rather err on the side of caution and assume they have mental problems and find another doctor.).
I don't want a doctor giving me medical advice when they don't even believe in basic science.
>It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.
Perhaps, but I think it should be obvious by now that people who decided to vote for Trump have had an extremely detrimental effect on the nation's economy and well-being.
Great, then we can rule out the people with the wrong sort of education as they make poor voting choices, and the people from the wrong sort of colleges, and the wrong sort of courses...
People can be hugely educated and aware on some topics whilst being ignorant, blinkered and bigoted on others. You and me included. Plenty of highly educated people voted for the choice you didn't. Even in those recent "surprise" elections, be that Trump, Brexit or the more recent Brazilian election.
If you want to balance the ageing of society and the electorate, open up voting to the young by way of balance. Which may bring the added advantage of not yet being inculcated in the binary certainty of party tribes.
>If you want to balance the ageing of society and the electorate, open up voting to the young by way of balance.
As I pointed out in another post here, I personally do NOT think the problem is age, despite the thrust of this article. As I said before, the alt-right is not full of geriatric people, it's full of men in their 20s-40s, mostly men with poor education.
As a man in that age group myself, I hate to say it, but I think the country would actually be better off if only women (of all ages), and men over the age of 60 could vote.
I don't necessarily agree or disagree with your line of thought, but removing the right to vote from ANY group is dangerous idea. People always vote in their own best interests, typically for the now/near future. Imagine social security and medicare being ended overnight. Not only would there be a lot of homeless/starving seniors, but, in 20-30 years when the current voters aged out, nobody who was eligible to vote would care enough to help them. This would likely end up as some quasi Logan's Run type scenario.
This is absolutely not a voice in favor of the mentioned programs, just used as an example.
It's always insidiously attractive to deny voting rights to groups of people who, in our own opinion, do not have good character or good judgement. It certainly sounds clever to say we're implementing rules so only the best and the brightest can vote which (we argue) will lead to better decisions and a higher caliber of elected leaders. And in fact such arguments often have carried the day and lead directly to such policies being implemented. In various places and at various times, women, ethnic and religious minorities, felons, unmarried males, landless people, people who could not pass a reading test, and many other small powerless groups have all been denied the right to vote. However, the result has never been "smarter" political decisions and "better" governance, but only ever the political oppression of the disenfranchised group.
It makes more sense to view voting rights as political capital that forces politicians to care about the needs of particular voting blocks then as a ticket to participate in some impartial decision process. The implication of this point of view is this: to get a more equal society, or at least to prevent certain extreme example of inequality, we need to make sure that as many people as possible have the right to vote.
The process of deciding who can and cannot vote is also fraught with moral hazard and the potential for corruption. A literacy test before voting sounds reasonable (if you believe we only want smart educated people voting) but it leads to corrupt situations like this:
This is a rare example of a real slippery slope: once you start the process of identifying small "undesirable" groups to disenfranchise, the process is unlikely to stop in anything short of full blown dictatorship.
Overheard during the 2012 campaign in florida, between some octagenerians:
I’m voting for that Mitt Romney because he’s a nice Protestant boy, not like the others. (Not that it matters, but Obama was the only Protestant in that race, Biden and Ryan are catholic, Romney is like the most famous Mormon).
I've been thinking of building a 'fake news' app to embarrass people like this who share fake news.
The idea is to have a legitimate looking site.
The link would be something like 'thebostonreporter.com' where it looks like a real news URL and the content ALSO looks like a legitimate news site.
The site would create news stories that confirm the bias of people who tend to share fake news.
For example, "Hillary Clinton Convicted of Money Laundering in Boston Court" or something like that...
Then we push it on social media.
Once the links has gone out and has been distributed across social media we flip the content of the link and say, basically:
"You've been the victim of fake news!"
and explain what they did wrong and how to be more critical of links they share.
PART of this is going to have to be to shame them.
Another part is to make it clear that the next link they share MIGHT be another "fake news time bomb" that could revert and embarrass them again - hopefully making them reconsider sharing fake links in the future.
From the article: "Another study found that relatively few people clicked on fake news links — but that their headlines likely traveled much further via the News Feed, making it difficult to quantify their true reach."
Relying on people clicking through to see the content might not work.
This is a very interesting idea. This approach is similar to one the SEC did with ICOs to combat all the scam and fraud happening.
I'm not sure how you determine when to do the flip. You would need a certain amount of people to see the fake news but these things cycle really quickly. If you wait one day, it may be too late as all that user's followers already saw the fake news and have moved on. I wonder if you could do a logarithmic decay for the fake new to shame page where there is an increasing percentage of people who get the "you've been had" page.
You'd also have to be very careful to not run afoul of libel. You'll need lots of "a well-informed source..." and lots of "may" and "might" and "is expected to" language.
A few things: First, you probably don’t have to flip the content. They read the headline and click share. If they click the content they read the first paragraph and skim. Just put a note at the end of the content. Second, I don’t think shaming works. I’ve seen people called out on obvious nonsense. If they’re embarrassed about it, it doesn’t stop them from sharing the next thing. Third, at best they’ll probably just learn they can’t trust your URL.
I’ve got a friend from high school who is constantly sharing nonsense. I’ve also seen him be the victim of a scam. He just doesn’t have the capacity to think about what’s real or not, probably because of a combination of low IQ and high anxiety or paranoia. I can’t imagine any amount of shame helping him. Might make him worse.
He may be a special case or he may not. But I’ve seen plenty of others be blasted for posting obvious nonsense and at best they are embarrassed but go with an “ends justifies the means” defense because the article talks negatively about some great right- or left-wing devil.
Their conclusions don't excite me, and theorising about the reasons doesn't help. I'd like to see a few comparison studies showing the bell curves by:
- age
- IQ
- reading speed
- concentration
- bias
- activism
- non-social-media surfing time
For example, the people I would expect to see rank highly for fake news sharing:
- a person with low reading speed and either a significant bias towards the conclusion or low concentration
- a low-iq non-activist (less likely to have read up on the subject)
- a person who only surfs social media
Of course, between these categories the data will have its own correlations (age + low eyesight, iq + surfing patterns, etc) and so I'd want to see the data both with and without correcting for those correlations too.
I don't know how surprising this data would be - once all the correlations are corrected for, I imagine the graph would look pretty flat.
This article is a perfect example of the incredibly sloppy and biased thinking that happens in media and which is part of the very problem it talks about.
Fake news first and formost is a clickbait scam to get advertising dollars, NOT a political propaganda approach and this tendency to keep using it as if it's an actual political issue is really absurd and itself an example of what is probably more an example of sloppy news.
Furthermore the insinuation that the older generation somehow is more naive than the young generation in political views only adds to the superficial and naval gazing claims.
You're not accounting for internal and external to the US attempts to manipulate our democracy via social media. The IRA created fake accounts to encourage tribalism and partisan thinking. It's not new for Americans or companies as well, there's been manipulating the web with bots and disinformation ourselves for years. To say it's purely clickbait is to ignore a large amount of evidence that it's also politically motivated.
>Fake news first and formost is a clickbait scam to get advertising dollars, NOT a political propaganda approach and this tendency to keep using it as if it's an actual political issue is really absurd and itself an example of what is probably more an example of sloppy news.
That's a pretty bold assertion. Let me make sure I'm getting this right. According to you, there is not a problem of people creating and spreading lies in order to forward their political agendas?
That sounds like an absurd proposition from you. We can see it almost every single day, especially on platforms like facebook.
By all means. Please show me this new problem that didn't exist before and please show how this is actually convincing people to change their minds about a subject matter.
There is nothing what so ever that makes "fake news" worse than your or mine self-delusional idea of what is true ESPECIALLY in politics which has nothing to do with truth but perspective.
The actual problems with social media platforms like FB and Instagram etc are depression not one group of people living in an echo chamber more than others.
Yes "fake news" can spread faster but so can rebuttals and "real news".
My own pet hypothesis for the larger phenomenon discussed here is this: Younger generations had schooling that attempted to make them "college ready" and part of that college readiness was understanding how to find and cite credible sources, alongside understanding what a "primary source" is. Sure, it didn't stick with everyone, but I do think bits-and-pieces of that are imprinted on Millennials.
Along with that you have many younger people doing white collar "knowledge work" which often involves compiling and synthesizing information from multiple sources and drawing a conclusion. This understanding of "how the sausage is made" carries into media literacy when say, examining an editorial for factual accuracy.
Some evidence of what though? What is the actual consequence? This is exactly the problem i have with that articles claims. Not a single attempt at digging in just a rush to make it about Trump. There is zero evidence that them spreading more fake news have any actual measurable effect beyond the fact that they spread more. Thats not how conclusions are made like those the articly tries to make.
The article I linked talks about a study that has nothing to do with Trump. It just happens to show that older Americans have a harder time telling apart opinion from factual statements. It makes no claim towards conservatives vs liberals.
But if you’re talking about the original article: if older Americans are more likely to spread fake news, and older Americans are more likely to be conservative, it stands to reason that most of the fake news being spread would skew conservative. It’s a function of the audience’s age as opposed to their politics.
I’m sure if you zero’d in on fake news spread by people under 40 it would skew left.
Anecdotal evidence: I remember how my 65 years old dad changed from a large-minded, world-traveling retired professor to an avid consumer of fake news in the span of fewer than two years.
Yes, it was a shock, but most of all I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age.
I used to read the national enquirer (UFOs, Bigfoot!) religiously as a kid. I suspect there is something that appeals to people at certain stages in life. Most likely, as you get older/younger you desire stimulation. In mid-life, you're probably over-stimulated.
Maybe rather as in, stay away from mainstream media because the hosts will literally talk to you as if you were a toddler, yell at you really, constantly flash colorful thingies in your face, blast stupid loud jingles, and drag out idiotic news stories over days as if they were soap operas. I cringe when I visit my parents and CNN is on in the middle of the day. I'm convinced that that loud, obnoxious infotainment contributes to their degraded mental faculties.
I think the things you mention are just more characteristic of rolling news in particular than they are of the media in general, which is incredibly varied in form, tone and reliability. Flashy graphics, soap opera style narratives, shouting for drama etc are all dictated by the economic forces which underpin rolling news, in particular having to generate an enormous amount of material as cheaply as possible, and in effect a competition to get viewers addicted. There is fantastic news and analysis elsewhere, a large part of it in mainstream publications.
I'm not exactly sure what @Brakenshire meant, but I suspect they are saying to ignore the 24 hour news channels and stick to the news formats that aren't trying to break news as it happens. For example, Axios has been consistently good. NYT, Washington Post, etc long form stories that are published when the research is done, not when a deadline is up.
Either way, avoid the opinion section and at least stick to news that fact checks against two reliable sources. For example, that would eliminate most programs on Fox News, nearly all of Breitbart, etc.
Well, that's the great conundrum. You consume media no matter where you get it, so not getting it from one place or another is not really gonna help you avoid "fake news".
What you see on blogs is no more reliable than what you see on FOX, which itself is no more reliable than what you see on youtube. It's pretty much all rubbish a lot of the time.
So yeah, you stay away from mainstream media, then you'll likely be consuming "shocking", and just as fake, media from some other source instead. That's just the preponderance of what's out there unfortunately. No avoiding it really.
Thinking about it game theoretically, it's probably smarter just to accept that there is fake media out there, and go ahead and consume media from whatever your favored sources are with that caveat in mind.
ie - It's fine to watch mainstream media. Certainly FOX, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC etc are all no worse than reading or watching anything else. Certainly no worse than anything you see on youtube. But you should "buy" stories like you'd "buy" anything else...
One thing I've noticed about the blogs I read is that they usually provide sources, while even reputable media outlets like the NYT or WSJ will often publish articles about the results of a new study without naming it or linking to it. Having a source or sources is a key differentiator between good news, news that misinterprets or exaggerates the data but is still loosely related to reality, and completely fake news.
>Having a source or sources is a key differentiator between good news, news that misinterprets or exaggerates the data but is still loosely related to reality, and completely fake news...
Depends on the quality of the sources. It's been my experience that, "evidence", and "sources" that blogs and mainstream media cite is oftentimes completely ridiculous. Mainstream media will cite a blog, or a blog will cite a youtube video. "Studies" are cited that are not peer reviewed. Even the "peer reviewed" studies are riddled with errors. Don't even get me started on things like the late unpleasantness involving the Intelligencer, barely science at all, and the NYJM, critical to the cite record.
Nowadays we just have to face the fact that there's a lot of garbage out there. It's just the world we live in now. So consume it, but be aware of what it is you're getting. Most of it is in no way reliable information.
Well, I guess it's better to have some sort of source than no source like many news articles do. Or to have a broken link as a source. Or a reference to a non existent publication like in that other recent Hacker News story.
Having a source only makes a story about 1% more credible, but having a dubious/non existent/fake one is a good indication the story shouldn't be trusted.
"Don't trust mainstream media" doesn't mean you have to turn to even more untrustworthy sources, nor does it mean you can't ever go to mainstream outlets for information. It just means you have to examine what you're told critically and compare it across sources.
I had an epiphany in mid-November 2018. I realized that, despite watching and reading the news on a pretty much daily basis, none of my voting decisions were changing as a result. I examined voting decisions I'd made going back to 2016 and realized none of them were materially changed by watching the news with such regularity and granularity. This isn't to say that I'm set in my ways and never change my viewpoint. Rather, I think it's more a reflection on the fact that political candidates don't tend to change much over short periods of time, so after a certain point watching or reading the news will simply reaffirm what you already know about them rather than introduce fundamentally new information. A politician who had viewpoint X or trait Y yesterday probably still has viewpoint X today or trait Y today; that may not be true in 5 years, but I don't need to be plugged in every single day.
I realized I only really need to "check in" periodically and see if the voting landscape has truly changed. When "checking in," I've found I have far less allegiance to a particular source and am more open to checking several and comparing. When you don't follow a particular source almost religiously and only peek in once a week or once every two weeks, the "circus" nature of the media starts becoming alarmingly apparent. The disparity between the calm of real life and the 24/7 chaos and tragedy of the news becomes impossible to ignore. My voting patterns have not changed as a result of my disengagement, but my anxiety/outrage/uneasiness have all went down significantly. I now view my previous habit of watching the media every day as a downright unhealthy addiction.
>none of my voting decisions were changing as a result. I examined voting decisions I'd made going back to 2016 and realized none of them were materially changed by watching the news...
???
Why would a voting decision change based on what you see on the news? Your senator or representative has little to do with the guy who killed his kids and wife last night.
WATCHING news will only get you the extreme stuff. That's how they keep eyeballs. For instance, we know a lot more about Kashoggi than we know about the prime minister that MBS kidnapped. That's because, as horrible as this may sound, the Kashoggi story had more "sizzle" for lack of a better term. This even though the prime minister being kidnapped actually did more to upset the global order.
Yup Matt Taibbi has a good book calling the news media - Hate Inc. They spend all their time stoking fears and amping peoples anxiety and threat perception, all to maximize engagement - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway
Data journalism and long-form deep investigative journalism is fine, or least less bad. With the caveat that data journalism that illustrates past or current events is fine, but that which tries to draw correlations or make predictions should be taken with a grain of salt.
Short form journalism I ignore, or seek the primary source (like a president’s speech or similar).
I like the distinction you put here, as I've found most "long form" journalism to be focused on superficial details and to try to emphasize innuendo and rumor into emotional plays rather than focusing on facts. As soon as I hit a physical description of one of the people involved that covers more than a sentence (when the article isn't covering a topic involving a physical description), I know the author isn't focused on the parts I care about.
Which is a shame, as there is plenty of investigative journalism that benefits from deeper coverage. Just a lot fewer people doing it. (likely as a consequence of fewer people caring enough to make it financially viable, to properly place blame, but from my end I want the material, not to place blame)
News == current happenings. It really never helps me with seeing the bigger picture. Unless I'm already aware of the big picture in which case News augments my understanding.
Magazines == Get the big picture on a broad range of topics.
Books == Get the full picture on specific topics.
Looking at things this way I have come to realize that most news I used to read doesn't add any empirical value to me. Sure I can show off I know this and that and that happened and how stupid is that and laugh at it. But that's about it. News (cable news) is literally entertainment IMHO.
I don't trust long-form investigative journalism one bit. It relies heavily on anecdata and emotional narrative to manipulate you into a particular view.
We probably have different things in mind. The best example of what I'm talking about is Bloomberg's reporting back in 2011 on the Fed's actions during the financial crisis, including their lawsuit to force the Fed to respond to their FOIA requests:
That was not only hard work, but given that most financial media tends to avoid biting the hand that feeds it, uncommonly gutsy. One of the best examples of investigative journalism I'm aware of.
Are people even plugged into mainstream media, barring talking heads on fox news, cnn, or youtube? Even on reddit, which purpotes to be more informative than a youtube comment section, it is plainly obvious the bulk of the commenters don't read the article beyond the linked headline. There is nothing sinister about repudable publications and their written articles.
It's not surprising. That generation grew up as the conventions in media itself were being developed. Those are my parents and they have a much different view and trust in media than my generation, and my kids have even less trust in media. My dad flipped. My mom hasn't (yet) but I think that's because she's overly skeptical of everything.
The part I fear most is that healthy dose of skepticism that most people used to have is being turned against those people. If you're not with us, you're against us. Nope, that's a false dichotomy. My father doesn't know what a false dichotomy is. That wasn't something he was taught in grade school or business school. That is something I was taught.
I think the best thing we can do is not argue with the older generation about the subject matter itself, but simply arm them with the tools to find flawed arguments in the subject matter. If you're reading this, and you're not familiar with the concept of logical fallacies, that's a good place to start because fake news is almost always built on logical fallacies that are easy to disassemble once you can spot them:
> The part I fear most is that healthy dose of skepticism that most people used to have is being turned against those people.
That is my fear as well. "Believe nothing," would be the wrong takeaway from all this, but I'm afraid a cynical population of our youth might very well be following that course.
Be skeptical of skepticism too I tell my daughters.
The New Sincerity and Meta-Modernist trends offer a refuge of sorts. The naiveté of modernism (and disastrous effects of grand narratives in the 20th century) led to post-modern deconstruction and questioning of what they considered truths which were too easily accepted.
Unfortunately, that led to cynicism, "analysis paralysis" and other forms of intellectual and (for lack of a better word) spiritual exhaustion.
It's hard to believe in anything that, when you really break it down and analyze it is wrong in so many ways. And that applies to virtually everything, in all honesty. There are no perfect answers.
It's important, though, to believe in something. You're right that we are seeing that cynicism turned from apathy to destruction and hate.
I think a great case study in how to ask questions while still believing in building something positive is the show, The Good Place. The specific episode, "Jeremy Bearimy" deals with how you pick up the pieces from realizing that nothing matters, everything is a mess and humanity is deeply flawed.
This is close to the point I was trying to make about memetics and evolutionary psychology: "Is this post triggering in me some irrational behavior to which humans are commonly susceptible?"
I wonder. I'm in my 30's and while people my age maybe less likely to fall for fake news I know all to many people that will eagerly believe every obviously staged 'viral video' is completely real. I think the percentage of rubes remains the same regardless of age, just who is being targeted with what changes.
There has always been fake news...yellow journalism, whatever; and it was always in just as much abundance. If you study history it becomes abundantly clear that most of man's terrible actions to one another is the result of fake news. Heck - this study is fake news; crafted to deliver exactly what the researchers wanted to find.
They are worse off. News for them is headline deep; no one reads articles from reputable publications for info anymore, they'd rather have a handsome talking face on youtube 'break it down' in 20 minutes what would be a 4 minute nyt article containing the same factual points and none of the wishy-washy 'analysis.'
The more you read about the world, the better things stick in your head, the more connections you make, and the more you know. If you leave the critical thinking to some internet celebrity with no incentive to be credible, you end up being coddled from a lot of the news and get basic facts wrong.
I disagree. One just has to look at Reddit to see that the younger generation is as caught up in all this as any.
I think some people are just wired to think that way and, as we get older, some people switch to thinking that way. As I get older, I get more concerned that whether or not I mentally decline in one way or the other is just random chance and genetics.
Perhaps younger people don't share "fake news" because they simply don't share like that. How many people under 30 are sharing news on Facebook? It doesn't mean they're not down the rabbit hole on /r/the_donald or /r/incels. Perhaps the generational divide is not in the what but the how.
> Yes, it was a shock, but most of all I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age.
I find this incredibly uncomfortable that the OP and you are attributing the spreading of fake news to ageism. No, I don't believe so. Since your evidence is an anecdote, I have many many more anecdotes to disapprove that assessment.
You're no more correct that your anecdotes disprove his claim. Also, he explicitly said "could happen"; it was a concern, not a conclusion. The central question in this discussion is whether or not there is an age correlation, and according to the linked study there is.
We should be probably be careful though about the distinction between "humans aged 65+" and "humans aged 65+ at this moment in history". I.e., it seems likely there'd be cultural effects in this.
The linked article cites a study which found older users to be more vulnerable (at least, they shared more false news stories.) The study controlled for political affiliation (because most of the fake stories were pro conservative.)
While the GP's thoughts may be anecdotal, the study is not. Whether or not that makes you "uncomfortable" is irrelevant. Have you found issues with the study in question?
My dad was similar, but he thought it was all a joke. He thought sites like rense and infowars were today's equivalent of the counterculture political satire from when he was young. He knew there were people on those sites who weren't in on the joke, and people with mental illness, but I think he thought it was maybe 5% or 10%, and it just added to the fun for him. He got reverse-pwned by Poe's Law. Yet still he found it absolutely compelling, more fun than following the real news. Underneath a layer of gallows humor he always seemed really patient with humanity's stupidity, much more so than me, but I think late in his life his patience started to run out and to stave off despair he decided to find some nihilistic fun in it.
I'vs seen this proclivity in a lot of older military guys. Korea and Vietnam vets. They just split their sides laughing at this stuff. Also, at least in the case of my father and uncle, the fact that people believe a lot of this stuff is what makes it all funny. I honestly don't believe they would be at all interested if no one believed it.
I wonder if your dad is ex-military?
Of course, all of that's older enlisted guys, (think vietnam era NCOs), which are the only ones I know. It would be interesting to find out if ex-military older commissioned guys find the same humor in any of what the country's going through. I'd like to think they wouldn't, but who knows?
I'm not ex military but I find Alex Jones legitimately hilarious and I'm astonished people take him seriously. Before I left fb I had an ex-Marine old friend from elementary school on my list and he shared conspiracy memes relentlessly, very much mirroring the stuff Russia used in the 2016 election meddling. He actually believed it. I gave up trying to debunk it and played along.
I don't think mainstream comedy has really nailed the intensity and anger of the conspiracy theory alt-right. Their interpretation always has a certain snideness and lacks the sincerity of the real thing.
A little known comedian named Connor O'Malley had a series of comedy sketches about a fake website called truthhunters.com that I think captures it dangerously well.
He taught college history at a small state school. Definitely equivalent of enlisted; same sense of institutional powerlessness and futility. Officers would be the university administration. He used to circulate ("anonymously") humorous hand-drawn posters and pamphlets about their policies, and they did not appreciate his sense of humor at all.
Boring news is a breath of fresh air once you have lived in the US for a few years. Last time I visited my sister I was amazed how much information the Tagesschau gets across in a few minutes.
Quite a few years ago, someone at The Economist pointed out that you should pay attention to what went on in the US because it would get around to the UK/Europe in about 15 years.
That was true until the Spiegel affair. I laughed hard when I read he described as fact fictional acounts of older American women who would travel the country to watch executions. Ha!
I'm pretty sure /r/the_donald started out as a joke and slowly turned real at some point. I still don't quite understand what happened. It would make an interesting investigation.
/r/T_D was such a strange mix of Russian bots, trolls, true believing incels, and meme spitting grandpas that I'm sure it could be studied for years by social scientists.
There's a lesson here about social media: if you tolerate people pretending to be Nazis "as a joke", then you will soon become overrun with actual Nazis.
I can confirm. I was on 4chan a lot as a teenager (some ten years ago, now), and the Nazism was generally more a joke about how nasty and intolerant the board was. There were even 'raids' (essentially cyber-bullying) on racists.
I can only guess that things must have gone downhill when the site was taken over by Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has some pretty right-wing political views. That said, there's also a kind of natural affinity in the humiliated-outsider-mentality that 4chan had that fits with Nazism in a way that I feel has become more and more clear in recent years.
4chan hasn't really changed much, /pol/ (where most of the right-wing memery and conspiracy posts are) was always awful; it was created years ago to keep those kinds of posts away from other boards.
I love the Kurt Vonnegut quote "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." I think people who decide to like a thing "ironically" generally progress to liking it unironically without realizing it. Some continue to claim it's ironic, but when all their actions (including voting) are fully consistent with someone that likes the thing unironically, you have to wonder if the word "ironic" still has any meaning.
Pretty sure most news agencies consider anything remotely conservative fake news now. I rarely ever see corrections or retractions from ANY of the big outlets. It's largely become infotainment, and everyone drinks from the fire hose of their own perspective. It's no wonder there is so little tolerance of any other perspective.
This will likely lead to another push for controlling the internet/media a la net neutrality, because we all know people can't be left to do their own research, use any amount of discernment, or have an alternative viewpoint.
This makes no sense, but is a common talking point. How is net neutrality "another push for controlling the internet/media"? If anything, it's the pure opposite, ensuring that all views can be accessed equally.
The old "net neutrality" did nothing directly for end users. It did not ensure anything for all views. Before it was even terminated, mass censorship (privately by the internet giants) had already started.
Instead, it benefited the likes of Netflix at the expense of the telecom industry. It also put the internet in a legal classification that would allow more government control of speech, though this had not yet been much of an issue in practice.
None of the above seems to have made much of a difference to end users.
It would be great to have a new sort of net neutrality, focused on end users. A nice thing about the end of the old one is that a new one could replace it, giving people what they mistakenly thought they had.
This is definitely where my mom has gone. She thinks Alex Jones is very funny, but then ends up buying the books of conspiracy theorists and interjecting paranoid right talking points into everyday conversations.
Given that it happens so commonly around retirement, I think this is a function of not wanting to struggle or achieve anything anymore, and therefore succumbing fully to a convenient view, one which gives you a thing to worry about apart from your age and declining health, something participatory without being difficult. "Never mind my hip! What about those DEMOCRATS!!!"
Of the people I know who have fallen into this right wing vortex, regardless of age, all of them are retired. But it’s not everyone who’s retired! I know retirees who travel, stay engaged with hobbies, etc who did not end up in the vortex. It’s the ones who just sit there in retirement, immersing themselves in this stuff all day long, doing nothing else, that are getting sucked in.
I’m getting up there in age and I’m worried about this myself. My criteria for retirement is not just that I have enough money to stop working, but that I also have enough to travel or do a hobby and stay mentally engaged with something.
>I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age
The Internet was such a monumental shift in how society and civilization as a whole functions, and in such a small amount of time, that unless you grew up with it, it should be expected that whole swaths of demographics have no idea how to successfully navigate it (especially when there's next to zero centralized resources on its many pitfalls).
I remember a boss not so long ago, similar age. Started having a rant about a woman that was emailing him, flirting with him. I realised it was some kind of phishing thing. He just took it at face value.
He wasn't naïve, and had all his faculties, so it really stuck out.
Maybe its like country bumpkins without street smarts, maybe they just havent learned the defenses needed?
I know a guy that is half that age and did a similar process. Not from professor though but from someone who does random jobs. So having consumed all this fake stuff - which at the time seemed at best stupid and boring - he is now active in alt right like movements. One prequesite for this was probably also some degree of isolation.
If it helps, I'm over 65 and while I've seen it to an extent in other people my age, it hasn't happened to most of my friends and most importantly, as far as I can tell it hasn't happened to me.
Your father notwithstanding, I think education and awareness have a lot to do with who gets sucked into the fake news vortex and who doesn't. On the other hand, I've seen some of my friends whom I thought would know better post some real dingers at times.
Those are ones that get me. Older but educated, intelligent people pushing this nonsense. Back in 2014, I got into with an older friend who was posting stuff from the gateway pundit. Tried to convince her it was an unreliable source but she continually doubled down. Lost cause. She was extremely right wing and it confirmed her biases. That was enough.
There is some actual biology behind this. Many of the natal symptoms of aging promote "fake news" and what are generally considered "right wing" views. As one ages one's memory begins to slip. More recent memories slip first. So in the hard drive of one's mind, the past seems better and more reliable than the present. The nurse who visits once a week is a perpetual stranger not to be trusted. And if she speaks a strange language...
It could be beginning dementia / Alzheimer's. At least that is the case for my father. Similarly to believing fake news, also lost his humour, he just doesn't get jokes any more, he takes them at face value.
I hope this is not the case for your dad and I'm sorry if I scared you, but you could consider having him checked.
What's the use in getting it checked? It's not like early cancer detection in which an early diagnosis might have some effect on the outcome of the disease. (?)
Just to insert a single bit of anecdata here.
In my wife's case the treatments to help with a dementia type disease involved medications that did improve her condition for a very short time followed by a very sharp decline. The physicians warned us about this and in one of her lucid moments she stated she wished to undergo this therapy regardless of the outcome being that what was happening to her was so mindbendingly terrible that even a few more more days of a "shared reality" was preferred to her ultimate condition.
I guess my single point of reference here is that there are trade offs to this kind of therapy and family and PoAs need to carefully consider any type of treatment
That thought is precisely what the people who created this article wanted you to have. They asked themselves “how can we get as many people as possible to call for banning the elderly from voting?” and worked backwards from there. Ironically if you couldn’t see this unassisted then you’re the one who should be banned from voting.
There are multiple levels of trolling happening in these situations. Many read Infowars as satire like the Onion, and they get off pretending to believe its true just to mess with people. It’s the whole flat earth thing.
“I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.”
—Dorothy Sayers
That’s twice this thread I’ve seen this Vonnegut quote as a thought-terminating cliche, which is two times too many. If you want to have a deeper discussion on the effects of irony on a community, by all means let’s do so. What we should not do is reduce the entire thing down to a pithy mess of fake profundity based on the fame of its speaker, that would be shouted down as the unsubstantiated conclusion it is, if any one of us said it.
I've seen quite a few previously open minded and intellectual people fall into an echo chamber and choose less outlets as they age. They get locked into one or maybe two similar ideological outlets and everything else is wrong.
Same here. My Japanese father who speak English and regularly traveling foreign countries for the job is now became extreme nationalist and far-right fanatics.
I know he didn't have that kind of personality before. It's quite shocking.
It all happened when my father got an iPad and a Facebook account. Now he sits around and consumes the cancerous vomit spewed by "old friends" and predatory "news" outlets. He doesn't understand how any of it works; he has fallen victim, and there's nothing at all that I can do about it. He takes pride in his involvement, even if it's just consumption. It's tearing him away from reality and his family. It's almost as sad, scary, and infuriating as watching someone decline due to mental disease. If anyone has any recommendations, I'm all ears.
I'm not sure but I've noticed similar behaviours in others. I think it is due to the random reward of getting an item when you swipe a few times in the facebook app: people become absorbed in it the same way they become absorbed in gambling terminals, and crucially it is the same mechanism of reward.
It might be worth considering what interventions people make with problem gamblers. I suspect if those interventions would work for people in your situation too.
Also happened to both my parents, especially my dad. My mom can still be reasoned with and I can change or at least open her mind with logical arguments. My dad on the other hand is all in.
436 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 463 ms ] threadEdit: it's here http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586
Edit': as I thought, their dataset includes all kinds of links, but they do the same analysis for sharing hard news and don't find significant age effects. It's table S14 in the supplementary material http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2019/01/07/5.1....
It seems like anything about Viagra would get a laugh.
1968 would like a word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Strauss-Kahn
It would seem like fake news at first glance surely. It's downright bizarre.
I certainly would have written it off as 'National Enquirer' were it not out of super credible institutions.
Sometimes it's hard to tell what is 'truth' and the major 'credible' news agencies simply don't cover a lot of things.
Indeed. And there's a huge war over creditability. It's expensive to maintain and it suits some people to destroy it entirely.
The problem is that accusations of pedophilia and molestation are emotional warheads so we get nutcases trying to shoot up pizzerias because of a rumor that makes absolutely zero sense because it is physically impossible. There's a reason we have gag orders in high profile trials and why we sometimes sequester juries: every time the public gets involved in such an emotional issue, justice is at risk of getting perverted.
People like Epstein must be brought to justice and everyone who covered for them like Dershowitz and Acosta must feel the full force of the law and society they betrayed, but we have to do so deliberately. Otherwise, they'll just get away and continue to hurt people while qanon and Breitbart continue to radicalize a vulnerable segment of the population using easily disprovable lies.
More realistically though, the pizzeria was a codeword for the real location. Plenty of evidence for pizza-related codewords is in the Podesta emails. It's really creepy. Normal people don't rent specific numbers of slices of pizza for specific numbers of hours. It is widely thought that the number of slices is actually the age of the victim. Pizza-related codewords are known to be used by criminals involved in that sort of thing; some have been caught. Podesta also has some disturbing artwork in his home that features children.
"Male French or Italian politician involved in sexual misconduct" is well within the range of plausible news; the whole pizzagate thing relied on all sorts of alleged implausible details.
Then there's the UK's "Dolphin Square" controversy, which largely went silent after Lord Ashcroft started threatening people with libel lawsuits and in any case is now buried under Brexit news. I've filed that firmly in the "Don't Know, and maybe impossible to know" category. The public inquiry rumbles on and will no doubt not report until all the accused are safely dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child...
My point is it's a mess out there, and most people don't have insight into how the world really works, so I usually don't go blaming retirees for passing along false information of the Tabloid kind. It is what it is.
Facebook is not new, it's just now we have digitized banal gossip. I guess the difference now is we can measure it.
I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique
The problem in this particular case isn't old people. If you want to point at one broad demographic, it's men, largely under the age of 50.
Only 30 states require this (no federal requirement exists), and not all of them required paid time off to vote.
https://www.businessinsider.com/can-i-leave-work-early-to-vo...
> Though many states allow employees to have up to three hours off during the time the polls are open (the number of hours varies by state), nearly all of the states allow employers to refuse time off to vote.
https://aflcio.org/2016/11/5/know-your-rights-state-laws-emp...
I grew up with the Internet. I was reading wacky conspiracy theories in my teens. It made me more skeptical of virtually anything I see in print since I learned how easy it is to create a BS narrative and fit details into it. I also learned what propaganda is, how it works, and how prevalent it is.
Older generations grew up with a one-way opaque screen preaching to them. Obviously not everything on that screen was true, but when it was called "news" it was held to some standard and so was probably more likely to be true than not. They also had no way of delving deeper, no way of querying or seeking out an alternative opinion or discussing it with other members of the audience.
That generation grew up trusting things on screens.
Not sure I’ve noticed a pattern, age or otherwise, with such attitudes.
Now, the same points generally hold with radio, as well.
I was just saying that propaganda is not new. Of course, I don't know that this research is claiming these folks are the most misinformed. So, I could be taking it in a pointless direction, as well.
They could and did seek alternative opinions, though often it cost more. Subscribing to newsletters has long been an option. For example, the John Birch Society's TheNewAmerican was created in 1985 as the merger of two older newsletters that date to 1956 and 1965. It's now available at https://www.thenewamerican.com/ but you can still get the print version delivered to your house twice a month.
That some folks from older generations did this, I can accept. But you will need more data than this to counter the facts presented in the article, no?
A better way to interpret those facts: older people lean conservative.
The research showed that political outlook was a far better way to predict sharing these web sites than age or even party affiliation.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/785618/educational-attai...
No, they grew up in a time when media distortion was less likely to be revealed because the major media was narrower and it's ideological biases more consistent, and voices outside the major media had major barriers to reaching any substantial audience.
You are right, though -- it took a lot of work to get content to a large audience. That reduced the number of malicious agents who could and the speed with which they could successfully gain broad influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst
While I agree that journalism is in crisis, this isn't the first time. While Hearst was famous for yellow journalism, his papers weren't the only ones, and often the emotional sensationalism was intended to support a particular candidate (or denounce their opponent).
Back farther in the past, the many competing newspapers were very partisan. Perhaps we're just back to that situation.
Are you sure? How can you tell?
I guess today's CNN and their much more pronounced left-wing orientation is just a response to the right-leaning stuff from Fox? Or it just seems more left-wing now in comparison.
That, and even if journalists are actively attempting to avoid bias the faster news cycle simply leaves them less time for polish. Thus, more and more stories are the equivalent of first or second drafts.
As the OP said, a decade ago you could make that claim. They were much more "news". Now their rating have been in the toilet for years, so they've gone to extremes to gain viewership.
If it looks very "left leaning" now that's because of the reality of how terrible Trump is for the world. But they still give him credit when credit is due. They aren't taking democrats sides all the time by any means. They don't tack up headlines right away that aren't substantiated. There is a minimal of sensationalized headlines. They will clearly have links to opinion pieces which lean way right.
What I actually like to do is if I see something that is supposed to be "big news" on reddit or such, I'll go to cnn. Lots of times, I would see nothing for hours about this "massive breaking news". And sometimes I will see it right away. It's a pretty good barometer to see how important something really is.
Anyway, I don't actually watch cnn much but from their website and clips I see, I think it's pretty fair. Especially compared to something like foxnews which is ludicrously biased.
People and media will always have a viewpoint that distorts their objectivity. That is just fact of live and not necessarily bad thing as long as it's honest belief. Media used to be more reliable and truthful in the past with the normal distortions that people had. Mainstream media is still like this. Their problem is the lack of money and time that lowers their ability to do original reporting and check facts. They are the victims of dishonest influencing, not the originators. Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.
Today the distortions are the same but there is significant increase in intentional influencing with data and arguments that those who propagate them don't believe. Using the same talking point to argue for and against issues is good example of this.
Shady figures like Christopher Blair just sit in their homes and push out (non-mainstream viewpoints) disinformation they know is false.
In addition, a huge difference between traditional media, and modern "fake news" is accountability.
As biased as they can be, traditional articles always come with an author name, and published or run under the responsibility of the media themselves.
They can, and often do, give a specific story a slant which supports their point of view or agenda, but they really cannot outright lie, since they would be called out or even be subject to legal action:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/23/sicilian-journ...
"Fake News" have no traceable source, no attributable author, no accountability.
Seriously? Pretty much all major networks have been caught making stuff up. CNN has been caught giving debate questions ahead of time to their pet candidate.
CNN's statement:
>"On October 14th, CNN accepted Donna Brazile's resignation as a CNN contributor. (Her deal had previously been suspended in July when she became the interim head of the DNC.) CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate. We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
When mainstream media catches individual journos making stuff up they get fired as it should be. Brazile was not even a journalist or employee. She was running the campaign.
With Brazile, yes, they "accepted her resignation" - not even fired. With other journos, they only fired them after they were caught making stuff up by outsiders. With yet another group, talking heads at CNN make stuff up on a regular basis, but yet they are there because they are "opinion" talking heads. Not just CNN - same with all the other news orgs.
Given Donna Brazile's past and her obvious partisanship, she should have never been allowed to work at CNN to begin with. If they want to be perceived as neutral and fair, that is. That's like hiring Eric Trump to do commentary, while his dad is running for office.
To me, it's ideas like this that perpetuate the problem. It clings to the idea that journalists and journalism - at least that which is sold via mainstream media channels - are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity. They aren't. It is much healthier in my opinion to understand that news is not special within its medium. It's entertainment like everything on every other channel. It's somewhat less fictional obviously, but the entertainment motive is what lies behind it.
I would suggest instead that Fox News was the first major mainstream media source that dropped the pretensions and openly did what "news" has been doing since Walter Kronkite but with an equal and opposite bias. And to that extent, it has had a beneficial effect on society: we now know to watch carefully what a given journalist decides to report on and what they don't and we work harder to extract facts, if there are any, from the pre-determined narratives they are wrapped in. Whether purposely or not, they made news look like a joke. And we are smarter now because of it.
> are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity.
My point was that media bias is not same as not being untruthful. Fox News stands alone in the mainstream media in their network level intentionally false reporting.
That's is absolutely untrue. The reason you think that is because your pre-existing bias disagrees with them.
CNN, HuffingtonPost, Washington Post, etc, etc, etc do the exact same thing, from the other side.
Here's a helpful list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/
Which sites that you read are on there?
I've made a conscious decision to disbelieve any news unless it came from a site on this list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/
I only news sources not on that list for entertainment.
The distinction was subject of my comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
It's also pretty prevalent on the radio, and has a fair few historical precedents from before journalism saw credibility as an important thing to keep in mind (yellow journalism et all).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...
The Mail's website is also the most visited English language news site in the world.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150418010133/http://www.ft.com...
Depressing? Certainly. Puts a damper on the idea that most people got their news from realiable sources before the internet? Yep.
That being said, mainstream media do tend to care about their reputation, same reason the best liars tend to be careful about what/when to lie.
They know a domain that's been around vs. one like justice-freedom-eagle.usa that looks like a default wordpress template with stock clip art.
They may get their news from aggregators and live in their respective bubbles, but they're more likely to see through a shady looking site with headlines like "Pope endorses Trump" or "Hillary leads Trump away in handcuffs." As much as the respective sides want to believe those things.
Is that really true though? A lot of the younger folks on my Facebook share stuff from things like "natural-truth-health.net" or "gmo-truth-toxic.tk" or "naturalnews.com".
Many of the elderly become more gullible as they reach advanced age, which is the same reason con-men target them with scams.
Without validating that the definition does not preclude the conclusion I don’t see how we can trust it’s conclusikn.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full
>Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics. Here, we mainly use measures constructed by reference to the list by Silverman (7), but in the Supplementary Materials, we show that the main results hold when alternate lists are used, such as that used by peer-reviewed studies (2).
It's domain level, not article. You can follow the links in the paper to see how those groups come up with these lists.
These are the classification sources according to soundwave106:
A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media [1]
B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar to buzzfeed suggesting an ideological tilt.
There is some additional methodology in the study link.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/21/le...
There are four questions that need to be answered:
On #1 they did their study on a three-month segments beginning 9 months from election day, while the study by YouGov is over a different set of voluntary users in a different time period.On #2 the population was chosen by voluntary particiation and I don't see any mention of them doing necessary statistical analysis to make sure it is representative of the general population.
On #3 and #4 buzzfeed said they collected the classifications by searching for fake news of interest to people of their ideological tilt. Some of which is admittedly not fake news, such as hillarys mishandling of government emails:
-- BuzzFeed News used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo, which enables users to search for content by keyword, URL, time range, and social share counts. BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo using keywords such as "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump," as well as combinations such as "Trump and election" or "Clinton and emails" to see the top stories about these topics according to Facebook engagement. We also searched for known viral lies such as "Soros and voting machine."
and
-- Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump's interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American "refugees" fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.
I am sure many other problems could be found if I looked more, but just one of these would put a nail in the coffin of their conclusion and together they just put it on dubious grounds.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...
I have been wondering if this will get better or worse. Once all Internet users have been using it since a very early age, will they be more skeptical and responsible? Or will they be more easily influenced?
I have been wondering what an elementary school course in memetics and evolutionary psychology should look like. Kids need memetic inoculation, not just to protect from fake news, but all kinds of automated marketing.
Compare two UK newspapers, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. They are both well-known and have popular domains which have been around for ages. Considering only their contradictions on the topic of Brexit, one of them must be about as dangerously out of touch with reality as it is possible to be. Which one?
I know which one I believe, but I am not a lawyer, a trade negotiator, or a politician.
It is true that stylistic cues won't tell you everything. The rest, unfortunately, is a lot harder to teach. Avoiding the obviously-shoddy sites is sufficient as a start; the rest is really going to be dependent on particular knowledge in areas like science, history, etc.
EDIT: Kinda surprised at the downvotes I'm getting here. Have you _looked_ at the Daily Mail frontpage?
Then you missed my point. Of course I can tell the difference, but which one is true — the one founded in 1821 or the one founded in 1896?
I think you've just demonstrated why many people believe fake news. A lot of them are set up to look like regular news sites.
Fake news sites have been around for a lot longer than people think. I remember quite a few years ago reading an article about an event where some minority Christians were being mistreated in some non-Christian country. It looked like any other news article. The incident in question was reported in multiple news sites.
Then one person (or a team?) exposed it all. The event never happened. It was not obvious, and he/they had to do a lot of sleuthing to find out who owned the sites - a Christian advocacy group. All the other sites reporting on the incident were likewise (perhaps all under the same company - can't remember).
Years before 2016.
The only thing that may have clued me into it being fake news was that I hadn't heard of the news site. But then again, most people have not heard of most news sites.
Don't look at style or appearances. Really. Don't.
Oh, and as bad as The Daily Mail is, it is full of accurate (albeit misleading) material - compared to a typical tabloid in the US. I can easily dismiss nonsense I see on tabloids in the grocery store. With The Daily Mail, I have to work to find out if it is true or not.
You're reading my argument backwards. I'm not saying you should trust any website that looks reputable. I'm saying you should _distrust_ any site that looks _disreputable_. That's the first step, and it's a huge improvement over trusting everything (which is what most people who buy these fake news sites do).
I'd lean more towards the Guardian but I don't think I'd trust either outright.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I am intrigued that you would discredit such a model without knowing what it means.
I'm curious what the age statistics for people who clicked on Nigerian Prince scams and viagra spam were like before social media.
Older people also vote so they are worth targeting, particularly by right-wing organizations that would like to mobilize them.
So far as cognitive capacity, I don't know. I've seen young people refuse to learn from other people's mistakes, take deadly risks, etc.
When it comes to the epistemology of these people the right way to think about it is the emotional gain they get out of the whole thing. That has nothing to do with the internet. Listen to the Rush Limbaugh show this afternoon and you'll realize that anyone who gets a kick out of that will be vulnerable to a particular strain of "false news".
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have been degrading the American political environment since Bill Clinton got elected, but it was only in 2016 that it became a monster that the Republican establishment could not control in the US. (And the center-right elsewhere)
Would you really try to defend the point of view that the kids wouldn't do much better ?
My aunt Lucy in a nursing home has a phone and thinks that Facebook is the bee's knees -- she can keep up with what her family is up to.
I get many "This email was sent with an iPhone" messages from oldsters. Nothing gets talked about in breathless tones in the New York Times (e.g. Apple products) unless it appeals to the 50+ set. Note how "fall detection" is a selling point of the new iWatch.
If you'd been around long enough you'd notice that selling things to oldsters based on recapturing their youth or vicariously enjoying the youth of youngsters has been a big business for a long time. It had a lot to do with how baby boomers were celebrated in the 1960s (e.g. hippies did not read the New York Times, but oldsters did) Eventually boomers became the target audience and the breathless talk was about millennials.
Gen X got skipped mercifully because there were too few of us to move the needle.
Sure, some 65+ people manage. Some.
Most people under 40 manage, and more.
The first time my dad used the Internet to look at used car ads on Craigslist, I found him trying to fight off a cascading series of popups (this was in the mid-2000s) that launched when he clicked the "You are our 1 millionth customer" ads.
Older people who are new to the Internet may simply think it's regulated like TV and Radio commercials are. Couple that with how easy it is to target these demographics using an FB/Twitter advertiser account, and how they make up big chunks of the voting bloc, and you have a recipe for disaster.
[source] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2768976/Emergency-s...
https://www.livescience.com/8452-anxiety-increase-age.html
(I can't find the original papers)
'Bill Gates will give a nickel every time this is read' (remember email chains?), 'naked women get shared, but this heroic child won't get a single like', 'Like and Share if you stand with politician X', etc etc.
Combine this with the targeted scamming of elderly from various Nigerian princes and jailed grandchildren, and there does seem to be a much greater degree of credulity with our current elderly generation. I think a more interesting study would be to figure out whether it's generational, a function of changing brain physiology as we age, or what.
I have similar experiences with older loved ones I'm friend with on Facebook and it's rare they send links. But I think the rampant meme-sharing of misinformation/disinformation is much more prevalent.
I read HN, Reddit and sometimes /., and I guess due to my settings I miss a lot of stuff. I'm not on FB, IG or snap, is that why I'm missing these memes?
Some of this stuff is just political garbage in meme style. Basically a pic with block letters.
Sure.
For the conservative, those op-ed memes can tend to be interpreted as the oft-quoted "fake news", which is where I'm guessing the "both sides" sentiment comes from.
Again, that's just entirely my anecdotal experience.
Let me tell you that grandma' with email is a relatively new phenomena.
That's not literally forever, but, considering that it's longer than one or two HNers have been alive, it's at least figuratively forever.
I'll also throw in to the mix - creating news 'back then' required someone to gather it, someone to write it up, a printing press or studio, distribution, whatever - people and effort and time and money.
I don't think a lot of the older people I've spoken to realise quite how easy it is to put something on the Internet. Therefore anything that appears, and has the feel of something 'official' must have come from a credible place with the same time and effort involved. If that makes sense?
Many of these folks don’t even really understand how the Windows UI motif works, they’ve just memorized enough procedures to get stuff done on it.
I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting with viral information. They were always just a little too clever and effective while trying to look colloquial and organic, and I always suspected it was some PR outfit somewhere cranking them out, but could never divine a reason for the non-political ones. But maybe it was psyops testing and learning techniques in a long game just coming to light now.
How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony!
We know they have industrial scale operations to post propaganda now. [1] Obviously this had to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure many intelligence agencies have been researching how information spread on the internet ever since it was created.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...
The line between honest journalism, state propaganda, and fake news has always been a very porous one.
In fact there are different propaganda modalities for different demographics. Rather like advertising - if you think a message is transparent, clumsy, and ridiculous, that doesn't mean you're clever enough to be immune to manipulation, it means you're not the target audience for it.
Are you saying you think all those email forwards during that time period were all organic and none were the result of PR/propaganda/psyops operations?
I'm honestly not sure which is the null hypothesis here, and thus who owns the burden of proof.
I always had every problem accurately solved with b from people that were lawyers and doctors or were rising up the ranks in those fields
This explains SO much of not just 4chan sub-groups, but a lot of internet groups, and I honestly don't think older generations can't think like this. Ironic humor doesn't occur to them; they take it all at face value. Unfortunately ideas spread on 4chan and elsewhere stop becoming memes and start becoming someones reality.
There's no better example of this than Facebook. A graveyard of dead, crappy, overused memes, and younger generations are not using Facebook anymore, it's older generations now.
My Mother and Her Scammer https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-mother...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam
You've had almost forty years of voting, you don't really have any future left, and your minds aren't what they used to be. Please stay out of it.
You don't know it yet but a lot of what you think you know stems from fake news too.
Holding the elders to the same rationale is fair if not just - the situation isn't just for anyone affected but they aren't getting special treatment. To give an absurd example executing people for jaywalking is unjust but doing it to all regardless of station is fair.
I believe in keeping voting sancrosanct mind you but I can see a rhetorical and logical point to it.
[0] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/voti...
However, the bit on education I still believe it to be true
"Hey, why is it that socialist ideas are so unpopular with adults who have life experience?"
If we're going to put up a discriminatory barrier to voting, I think it'd be more effective if it was education-based. People with no education make poor voting choices, as we've seen in recent elections.
Easily become a proxy for race/class? They already were used to disenfranchise people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting
> From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the United States administered literacy tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with poll taxes, residency and property restrictions and extra-legal activities (violence, intimidation)[2] were all used to deny suffrage to African Americans.
There should be a registry of doctors who are creationists or believe other nonsense (I'll give the UFOs a pass depending on just how fervent their belief in them is; I mean, can you prove we haven't been visited? The evidence isn't very good but you can't prove a negative. If they believe they've been abducted, however, that's a whole different level. Of course, I also can't disprove their claim but I'd rather err on the side of caution and assume they have mental problems and find another doctor.).
I don't want a doctor giving me medical advice when they don't even believe in basic science.
>It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.
Perhaps, but I think it should be obvious by now that people who decided to vote for Trump have had an extremely detrimental effect on the nation's economy and well-being.
People can be hugely educated and aware on some topics whilst being ignorant, blinkered and bigoted on others. You and me included. Plenty of highly educated people voted for the choice you didn't. Even in those recent "surprise" elections, be that Trump, Brexit or the more recent Brazilian election.
If you want to balance the ageing of society and the electorate, open up voting to the young by way of balance. Which may bring the added advantage of not yet being inculcated in the binary certainty of party tribes.
As I pointed out in another post here, I personally do NOT think the problem is age, despite the thrust of this article. As I said before, the alt-right is not full of geriatric people, it's full of men in their 20s-40s, mostly men with poor education.
As a man in that age group myself, I hate to say it, but I think the country would actually be better off if only women (of all ages), and men over the age of 60 could vote.
This is absolutely not a voice in favor of the mentioned programs, just used as an example.
It makes more sense to view voting rights as political capital that forces politicians to care about the needs of particular voting blocks then as a ticket to participate in some impartial decision process. The implication of this point of view is this: to get a more equal society, or at least to prevent certain extreme example of inequality, we need to make sure that as many people as possible have the right to vote.
The process of deciding who can and cannot vote is also fraught with moral hazard and the potential for corruption. A literacy test before voting sounds reasonable (if you believe we only want smart educated people voting) but it leads to corrupt situations like this:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t...
This is a rare example of a real slippery slope: once you start the process of identifying small "undesirable" groups to disenfranchise, the process is unlikely to stop in anything short of full blown dictatorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
Romney: technically, Mormons are protestant
Biden: he isn't a believable Catholic unless he opposes abortion
Obama: he actually slipped up and said "my Muslim faith" in an interview
The idea is to have a legitimate looking site.
The link would be something like 'thebostonreporter.com' where it looks like a real news URL and the content ALSO looks like a legitimate news site.
The site would create news stories that confirm the bias of people who tend to share fake news.
For example, "Hillary Clinton Convicted of Money Laundering in Boston Court" or something like that...
Then we push it on social media.
Once the links has gone out and has been distributed across social media we flip the content of the link and say, basically:
"You've been the victim of fake news!"
and explain what they did wrong and how to be more critical of links they share.
PART of this is going to have to be to shame them.
Another part is to make it clear that the next link they share MIGHT be another "fake news time bomb" that could revert and embarrass them again - hopefully making them reconsider sharing fake links in the future.
Relying on people clicking through to see the content might not work.
I'm not sure how you determine when to do the flip. You would need a certain amount of people to see the fake news but these things cycle really quickly. If you wait one day, it may be too late as all that user's followers already saw the fake news and have moved on. I wonder if you could do a logarithmic decay for the fake new to shame page where there is an increasing percentage of people who get the "you've been had" page.
You'd also have to be very careful to not run afoul of libel. You'll need lots of "a well-informed source..." and lots of "may" and "might" and "is expected to" language.
I’ve got a friend from high school who is constantly sharing nonsense. I’ve also seen him be the victim of a scam. He just doesn’t have the capacity to think about what’s real or not, probably because of a combination of low IQ and high anxiety or paranoia. I can’t imagine any amount of shame helping him. Might make him worse.
He may be a special case or he may not. But I’ve seen plenty of others be blasted for posting obvious nonsense and at best they are embarrassed but go with an “ends justifies the means” defense because the article talks negatively about some great right- or left-wing devil.
- age
- IQ
- reading speed
- concentration
- bias
- activism
- non-social-media surfing time
For example, the people I would expect to see rank highly for fake news sharing:
- a person with low reading speed and either a significant bias towards the conclusion or low concentration
- a low-iq non-activist (less likely to have read up on the subject)
- a person who only surfs social media
Of course, between these categories the data will have its own correlations (age + low eyesight, iq + surfing patterns, etc) and so I'd want to see the data both with and without correcting for those correlations too.
I don't know how surprising this data would be - once all the correlations are corrected for, I imagine the graph would look pretty flat.
Fake news first and formost is a clickbait scam to get advertising dollars, NOT a political propaganda approach and this tendency to keep using it as if it's an actual political issue is really absurd and itself an example of what is probably more an example of sloppy news.
Furthermore the insinuation that the older generation somehow is more naive than the young generation in political views only adds to the superficial and naval gazing claims.
That's a pretty bold assertion. Let me make sure I'm getting this right. According to you, there is not a problem of people creating and spreading lies in order to forward their political agendas?
That sounds like an absurd proposition from you. We can see it almost every single day, especially on platforms like facebook.
There is nothing what so ever that makes "fake news" worse than your or mine self-delusional idea of what is true ESPECIALLY in politics which has nothing to do with truth but perspective.
The actual problems with social media platforms like FB and Instagram etc are depression not one group of people living in an echo chamber more than others.
Yes "fake news" can spread faster but so can rebuttals and "real news".
My own pet hypothesis for the larger phenomenon discussed here is this: Younger generations had schooling that attempted to make them "college ready" and part of that college readiness was understanding how to find and cite credible sources, alongside understanding what a "primary source" is. Sure, it didn't stick with everyone, but I do think bits-and-pieces of that are imprinted on Millennials.
Along with that you have many younger people doing white collar "knowledge work" which often involves compiling and synthesizing information from multiple sources and drawing a conclusion. This understanding of "how the sausage is made" carries into media literacy when say, examining an editorial for factual accuracy.
But if you’re talking about the original article: if older Americans are more likely to spread fake news, and older Americans are more likely to be conservative, it stands to reason that most of the fake news being spread would skew conservative. It’s a function of the audience’s age as opposed to their politics.
I’m sure if you zero’d in on fake news spread by people under 40 it would skew left.
When you compare to Fox health and sciences section, their political news looks reasonable. The scaring old people industry must be regulated.
Yes, it was a shock, but most of all I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age.
Just poking fun.
Sarcasm aside, I do agree that journals and other longer period periodicals are more reliable.
I'm not exactly sure what @Brakenshire meant, but I suspect they are saying to ignore the 24 hour news channels and stick to the news formats that aren't trying to break news as it happens. For example, Axios has been consistently good. NYT, Washington Post, etc long form stories that are published when the research is done, not when a deadline is up.
Either way, avoid the opinion section and at least stick to news that fact checks against two reliable sources. For example, that would eliminate most programs on Fox News, nearly all of Breitbart, etc.
What you see on blogs is no more reliable than what you see on FOX, which itself is no more reliable than what you see on youtube. It's pretty much all rubbish a lot of the time.
So yeah, you stay away from mainstream media, then you'll likely be consuming "shocking", and just as fake, media from some other source instead. That's just the preponderance of what's out there unfortunately. No avoiding it really.
Thinking about it game theoretically, it's probably smarter just to accept that there is fake media out there, and go ahead and consume media from whatever your favored sources are with that caveat in mind.
ie - It's fine to watch mainstream media. Certainly FOX, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC etc are all no worse than reading or watching anything else. Certainly no worse than anything you see on youtube. But you should "buy" stories like you'd "buy" anything else...
Caveat Emptor.
Depends on the quality of the sources. It's been my experience that, "evidence", and "sources" that blogs and mainstream media cite is oftentimes completely ridiculous. Mainstream media will cite a blog, or a blog will cite a youtube video. "Studies" are cited that are not peer reviewed. Even the "peer reviewed" studies are riddled with errors. Don't even get me started on things like the late unpleasantness involving the Intelligencer, barely science at all, and the NYJM, critical to the cite record.
Nowadays we just have to face the fact that there's a lot of garbage out there. It's just the world we live in now. So consume it, but be aware of what it is you're getting. Most of it is in no way reliable information.
Having a source only makes a story about 1% more credible, but having a dubious/non existent/fake one is a good indication the story shouldn't be trusted.
I had an epiphany in mid-November 2018. I realized that, despite watching and reading the news on a pretty much daily basis, none of my voting decisions were changing as a result. I examined voting decisions I'd made going back to 2016 and realized none of them were materially changed by watching the news with such regularity and granularity. This isn't to say that I'm set in my ways and never change my viewpoint. Rather, I think it's more a reflection on the fact that political candidates don't tend to change much over short periods of time, so after a certain point watching or reading the news will simply reaffirm what you already know about them rather than introduce fundamentally new information. A politician who had viewpoint X or trait Y yesterday probably still has viewpoint X today or trait Y today; that may not be true in 5 years, but I don't need to be plugged in every single day.
I realized I only really need to "check in" periodically and see if the voting landscape has truly changed. When "checking in," I've found I have far less allegiance to a particular source and am more open to checking several and comparing. When you don't follow a particular source almost religiously and only peek in once a week or once every two weeks, the "circus" nature of the media starts becoming alarmingly apparent. The disparity between the calm of real life and the 24/7 chaos and tragedy of the news becomes impossible to ignore. My voting patterns have not changed as a result of my disengagement, but my anxiety/outrage/uneasiness have all went down significantly. I now view my previous habit of watching the media every day as a downright unhealthy addiction.
???
Why would a voting decision change based on what you see on the news? Your senator or representative has little to do with the guy who killed his kids and wife last night.
WATCHING news will only get you the extreme stuff. That's how they keep eyeballs. For instance, we know a lot more about Kashoggi than we know about the prime minister that MBS kidnapped. That's because, as horrible as this may sound, the Kashoggi story had more "sizzle" for lack of a better term. This even though the prime minister being kidnapped actually did more to upset the global order.
Short form journalism I ignore, or seek the primary source (like a president’s speech or similar).
I like the distinction you put here, as I've found most "long form" journalism to be focused on superficial details and to try to emphasize innuendo and rumor into emotional plays rather than focusing on facts. As soon as I hit a physical description of one of the people involved that covers more than a sentence (when the article isn't covering a topic involving a physical description), I know the author isn't focused on the parts I care about.
Which is a shame, as there is plenty of investigative journalism that benefits from deeper coverage. Just a lot fewer people doing it. (likely as a consequence of fewer people caring enough to make it financially viable, to properly place blame, but from my end I want the material, not to place blame)
Magazines == Get the big picture on a broad range of topics.
Books == Get the full picture on specific topics.
Looking at things this way I have come to realize that most news I used to read doesn't add any empirical value to me. Sure I can show off I know this and that and that happened and how stupid is that and laugh at it. But that's about it. News (cable news) is literally entertainment IMHO.
No. You'll get a well informed point of view but it's still just a single persons point of view.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-12-23/fed-s-onc...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/world?pid=20601087&sid=afi7TJ...
That was not only hard work, but given that most financial media tends to avoid biting the hand that feeds it, uncommonly gutsy. One of the best examples of investigative journalism I'm aware of.
/s
The part I fear most is that healthy dose of skepticism that most people used to have is being turned against those people. If you're not with us, you're against us. Nope, that's a false dichotomy. My father doesn't know what a false dichotomy is. That wasn't something he was taught in grade school or business school. That is something I was taught.
I think the best thing we can do is not argue with the older generation about the subject matter itself, but simply arm them with the tools to find flawed arguments in the subject matter. If you're reading this, and you're not familiar with the concept of logical fallacies, that's a good place to start because fake news is almost always built on logical fallacies that are easy to disassemble once you can spot them:
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/15-logical-fallacies-kno...
Once everyone has the tools to debate effectively, then we can have civilized discussions about the actual subject matter itself.
That is my fear as well. "Believe nothing," would be the wrong takeaway from all this, but I'm afraid a cynical population of our youth might very well be following that course.
Be skeptical of skepticism too I tell my daughters.
Unfortunately, that led to cynicism, "analysis paralysis" and other forms of intellectual and (for lack of a better word) spiritual exhaustion.
It's hard to believe in anything that, when you really break it down and analyze it is wrong in so many ways. And that applies to virtually everything, in all honesty. There are no perfect answers.
It's important, though, to believe in something. You're right that we are seeing that cynicism turned from apathy to destruction and hate.
I think a great case study in how to ask questions while still believing in building something positive is the show, The Good Place. The specific episode, "Jeremy Bearimy" deals with how you pick up the pieces from realizing that nothing matters, everything is a mess and humanity is deeply flawed.
The more you read about the world, the better things stick in your head, the more connections you make, and the more you know. If you leave the critical thinking to some internet celebrity with no incentive to be credible, you end up being coddled from a lot of the news and get basic facts wrong.
I think some people are just wired to think that way and, as we get older, some people switch to thinking that way. As I get older, I get more concerned that whether or not I mentally decline in one way or the other is just random chance and genetics.
The study refutes that statement. I'm not saying we're invincible, I'm just saying we're less susceptible.
Anyways, afa mental decline with age goes, some of it is random, some of it is genetics, some of it is lifestyle that is 100% in your control.
I find this incredibly uncomfortable that the OP and you are attributing the spreading of fake news to ageism. No, I don't believe so. Since your evidence is an anecdote, I have many many more anecdotes to disapprove that assessment.
While the GP's thoughts may be anecdotal, the study is not. Whether or not that makes you "uncomfortable" is irrelevant. Have you found issues with the study in question?
I wonder if your dad is ex-military?
Of course, all of that's older enlisted guys, (think vietnam era NCOs), which are the only ones I know. It would be interesting to find out if ex-military older commissioned guys find the same humor in any of what the country's going through. I'd like to think they wouldn't, but who knows?
A little known comedian named Connor O'Malley had a series of comedy sketches about a fake website called truthhunters.com that I think captures it dangerously well.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=truth+hunters+c...
I've recently added DW.com to my regular news scan, joining the BBC and the trad USA outlets (AP, Reuters, NPR).
How unfortunate that this generation's social scientists are interested only in grinding and swinging the axe in one political direction. ;-)
There's a lesson here about social media: if you tolerate people pretending to be Nazis "as a joke", then you will soon become overrun with actual Nazis.
I can only guess that things must have gone downhill when the site was taken over by Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has some pretty right-wing political views. That said, there's also a kind of natural affinity in the humiliated-outsider-mentality that 4chan had that fits with Nazism in a way that I feel has become more and more clear in recent years.
This is perhaps the most ironic thing.
This will likely lead to another push for controlling the internet/media a la net neutrality, because we all know people can't be left to do their own research, use any amount of discernment, or have an alternative viewpoint.
Bring forth the gulags, the people need jobs...
Instead, it benefited the likes of Netflix at the expense of the telecom industry. It also put the internet in a legal classification that would allow more government control of speech, though this had not yet been much of an issue in practice.
None of the above seems to have made much of a difference to end users.
It would be great to have a new sort of net neutrality, focused on end users. A nice thing about the end of the old one is that a new one could replace it, giving people what they mistakenly thought they had.
Given that it happens so commonly around retirement, I think this is a function of not wanting to struggle or achieve anything anymore, and therefore succumbing fully to a convenient view, one which gives you a thing to worry about apart from your age and declining health, something participatory without being difficult. "Never mind my hip! What about those DEMOCRATS!!!"
I’m getting up there in age and I’m worried about this myself. My criteria for retirement is not just that I have enough money to stop working, but that I also have enough to travel or do a hobby and stay mentally engaged with something.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/
"Our research suggests that the cognitive process supported by the vmPFC may play a role in older adults’ susceptibility to scams."
The Internet was such a monumental shift in how society and civilization as a whole functions, and in such a small amount of time, that unless you grew up with it, it should be expected that whole swaths of demographics have no idea how to successfully navigate it (especially when there's next to zero centralized resources on its many pitfalls).
Maybe its like country bumpkins without street smarts, maybe they just havent learned the defenses needed?
https://ledger.humanetech.com - to see the cumulative damage, engagement maximizing social networks/news media are doing.
I would like to see a study using the same subjects but check to see if they can tell what is a Google search result and what is an ad.
Your father notwithstanding, I think education and awareness have a lot to do with who gets sucked into the fake news vortex and who doesn't. On the other hand, I've seen some of my friends whom I thought would know better post some real dingers at times.
I hope this is not the case for your dad and I'm sorry if I scared you, but you could consider having him checked.
Fear seems to come on as people see people their age dying of various diseases, etc. Mortality is staring them in the face.
And though it starts with the fear, everything that panders to fear follows....
I wonder: could an aging population endanger democracy by not being able to distinguish truth from falsehood?
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
If someone’s hobby is pretending to be an asshole or stupid... they might actually just be an asshole or stupid.
—Dorothy Sayers
That’s twice this thread I’ve seen this Vonnegut quote as a thought-terminating cliche, which is two times too many. If you want to have a deeper discussion on the effects of irony on a community, by all means let’s do so. What we should not do is reduce the entire thing down to a pithy mess of fake profundity based on the fame of its speaker, that would be shouted down as the unsubstantiated conclusion it is, if any one of us said it.
I know he didn't have that kind of personality before. It's quite shocking.
And yes. I'm worrying to become like him one day.
It might be worth considering what interventions people make with problem gamblers. I suspect if those interventions would work for people in your situation too.