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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

We were previously worried about filter bubbles -- that is, people only seeing true news that agreed with their worldviews. This election cycle we seem to have a rise in blatantly false news that agrees with people's worldviews spreading through social media. Everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fueling this problem, but it seems not even Google is immune. A healthy democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a threat to democracy itself.

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This was one of the big features of Blekko, the curated list of sites that was considered 'news' were in the news slashtag, and searching for news only gave you results from those sites.

That is absolutely an editorial bias on the part of a search engine and Blekko was pretty up front about it. Similarly health queries would land on actual medical doctor written web sites rather than "fake" medical information sites.

But this is the thing, we would get complaints that we were "suppressing the truth" because conspiracy theorists and alternate medicine devotees would argue we did not provide results in line with their notion of the truth.

You can't really argue against that point of view, while you can disagree with it, a person's "ground truth" is often unique to them and their social circle. Thus if you want to serve your customer you need to support their desire to see the world through their own lens. But if you don't know who your customer is you can't really predict what their lens should be (that old "don't collect data on me!" principle which Blekko also followed). It makes for an interesting place to be.

That said, since Bing manages to weed out the fake news sites apparently so in that regard they have a higher search quality score than Google on this query. And websites that use their index benefit from that as well.

>A healthy democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a threat to democracy itself.

The concept has been weaponized already:

Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/rus...]

The Challenge of Russia’s Anti-Western Information Warfare[http://www.diplomaatia.ee/en/article/the-challenge-of-russia...]

Although the portrayal of all foreign media with a different narrative than the US media as "weaponized disinformation" could also be an example of information warfare.

Isn't it true that every for every Age -- Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Information Age, etc. -- the age identifies the dominant material used in making weapons at the time?

Don't forget the Atomic Age.

Absolutely and US media is doing it for a long time. Afghan fighters were (see Rambo) great freedom fighters i.e Mujahideen . A decade later same Mujahideen became top villains of cinema and media.

Same goes for weapons of mass destruction. Media just supported bogus claims of Bush administration to sway public support to invade Iraq.

Latest of all is ISIS - It's very hard to believe that American Military who monitors almost entire world failed to monitor a high risk area for such a long time that 30,000 strong army was able to train and arm itself to such an extent that they were able to defeat trained armies.

Not that I disagree that Soviets and Russians run propoganda machines.

But the atlantic article itself reads like a propoganda.

There are ethnic russians who speak russian living as the majority group in a region called novorussia less than 150 years ago. None of that is false. Why not conduct a plebiscite there? These people will shit on India for kashmir or Israel for Palestine, but will turn a blind eye towards other areas. Propoganda it is too.

That's interesting. The Atlantic says:

Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space.

Then they link a yandex search for, what the context suggests, should be contemporary Novorossiya maps produced by Russian propaganda. But they seem to match this map, uploaded to Wikipedia five years before the Crimean invasion:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RussianEmpireMap1800...

And it does look like southeastern Ukraine indeed. So?

> There are ethnic russians who speak russian living as the majority group in a region called novorussia less than 150 years ago. None of that is false. Why not conduct a plebiscite there? These people will shit on India for kashmir or Israel for Palestine, but will turn a blind eye towards other areas. Propoganda it is too.

I can speak about Kashmir and why plebiscite will not be a fair thing to do. Kashmiris now consists of Muslim majority as a result of systematic culling. This was not the case in 1970. With external support, an Ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus was carried out for decade and Media kept silent. In fact Indian Government itself was the culprit. In its policy of minority appeasement, they completely ignored mass culling of Hindu population.

I am Indian too, but Pandits were like 5%?

A bigger issue is the radicalization of the 95%.

I thought it was weird that people would create fake news, but I just realized that it's all about getting clicks/ad views.

If Facebook/Google instituted a policy of denying ad payouts to fake news (assuming that could be reliably determined) then the problem would correct itself. Of course, content creators would argue that it's "entertainment" and that "no one really believes it" but that's another issue. :)

F/G don't have a monopoly on ad sponsorship — partly because they refuse to sponsor some kinds of unethical content.

That's assuming that fake news sites only use Google/Facebook to monetize their sites.

Couldn't you monetise fake news that's visible enough to make Google/Facebook do that by charging whoever benefits politically from it? Assuming you can convince them you can do it over and over maybe they'd pay you to keep going or stop?

>>I thought it was weird that people would create fake news

Story time...

The very first class I took in college was called Information Fluency, back in 2002. Among other things, it taught HTML and CSS (which I already knew) and then the professor did something really interesting for the capstone project, which was to have everyone create a fake website containing some big news and host it on its own domain (which weren't so easy to get back then). The more real-looking you made it, the higher your score. So you quickly learned to pay attention to little things such as copyright notices in footers, professional-looking logos, professional-sounding domain names, static pages for stuff like "organization history" and whatnot.

The best part though? As extra credit, the teacher sent everyone a list of ten links, which were either the fake websites created by other students, or real websites. If you were able to correctly distinguish the fake ones from the real ones, you earned the extra credit! So your overall score was a function of how well you fooled others, and how likely you yourself were to be fooled. :)

I got the highest score in that class. Mine was a website belonging to some fake space agency called Interstellar Space Sciences, and it was reporting on its front page that scientists had found trace of alien life on Mars. The story had fake citations from real people working at real organizations, as well as high-quality photos of what looked like the Martian landscape (actually Death Valley in California that I applied a reddish color filter to) and diagrams of organic molecules. I also had a "Contact Us" page where I listed my phone number, which several people actually called! For a period of three weeks I just answered all calls with, "Good afternoon, Interstellar Space Sciences, how may I direct your call?" and everyone fell for it, including some of my actual friends...

Anyway, I think my experiences in that class turned me into a super skeptic, and from then on I started to take all incoming information with a grain of salt, especially if it is reported in the news.

Nobody thought of checking company registration records, press releases or how long the domain had been active? I mean, I get the main point and I know in practice very few people will go to those lengths for a random site, but given you were given a list known to contain false sites... well, checking for incorporation documents, street address registration and legal contact sounds time effective.

> If Facebook/Google instituted a policy of denying ad payouts to fake news (assuming that could be reliably determined) then the problem would correct itself.

Only in some cases: consider how much money is spent on political advertising, and then all of the second-order work funding think-tanks, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. to promote a particular viewpoint. I wouldn't classify Reason as a fake news source but they're an example of what that might look like. Here are their IRS filings from 2015 showing ~90% of their operating income coming from donations:

https://www.reason.org/files/2015-reason_990.pdf

What happens if one or two of their major donors decides this isn't the most effective way to support their viewpoint and they'd get more return at the polls by setting up a less ethical site?

How many Google Ads could you buy for $9M/year, and how quickly would that translate into organic page-rank? Now consider that Presidential campaign spending has been in the billion-plus range for awhile and ask how many activist donors would be totally comfortable dropping tens of millions for a couple of years to run a fake site if they thought it'd be more effective than a few more TV ads.

This is always going to be a problem unless critical thinking becomes a skill that everyone accepts as fundamental as reading and math.

If the propaganda is good enough, I don't think any amount of critical thinking will save you.

(For example, critical thinking has helped me to date — I believe — because it's not worth going after me as you only need 50% of the population to win an election. Just as it isn't worth trying to write a Nigerian scam email that's good enough to get me because there is plenty of lower-hanging fruit.)

Thats a pretty good point. As far as I know critical thinking is our only "weapon" against propaganda, so I hope you are wrong.

> As far as I know critical thinking is our only "weapon" against propaganda, so I hope you are wrong.

Speaking up and attempting to educate people if they are buying the propaganda is another "weapon".

Of course it isn't always effective but if enough people challenge someone hopefully they may reconsider.

Critical thinking is already part of literacy.

Looks like we're about as good at it as we are with advanced math.

Advanced math?

Literacy does not imply discernment.

Reading and writing is basic literacy.

Accurate analysis of content is still a part of literacy. How you do that without discernment, I have no idea.

I think we are talking about different levels of critical thinking. There is simple reading comprehension as in "I understand the argument you are making" but then there is also a higher version as in "I understand the argument you are making and have weighted it with this criteria"

Might just be different levels of ambition.

I think people understanding arguments would be a nice step forward.

ahh ok, gotcha... we are in complete agreement.

EDIT: (I am a perfect example) :D

I see it like this. Literacy is reading what is printed on the page. Discernment is reading what is not printed.

Well a hell of a lot of academics who claim to be critical thinkers didn't critically think about their own bias in this election.

Critical thinking is not a shield against your own bias.

>Critical thinking is not a shield against your own bias.

You are correct, it is not, but at least it acknowledges that biases are there. Most people don't even know what personal biases are to begin with.

But it isn't and this election proved exactly the opposite of what you claim.

<But it isn't

Re-read the comment you responded to. I agreed with you. What is it that you think I am claiming? My only claim (admittedly that I am aware of) is that fake news would have a harder time having impact in a climate where people practiced more critical thinking than they do currently.

My claim is that fake news aren't important in shaping peoples opinions. People are not going to change their views based on news.

shaping opinion != changing views.

fake news helps in reinforcing views already held, which matters.

Matters to what?

Democracy

(Not speaking for GP... Just a reminder that that is the context of what we are talking about)

In what way?

Are you not following this thread? We are talking about critical thinking wrt democracy. We got on this tangent because the first comment paraphrased the Jefferson quote: "If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."

I am following the thread, and you aren't answering the question.

If the news said this person murders puppies for fun, most people would close their mind to the possibility of voting for them.

I am assuming we are having this discussion on a more elevated level that obvious absurdities.

But even if you want to go down that road that I am pretty sure that there would be plenty of self correction happening unless you decided to stay isolated from the rest of the world right after you read that. Thats obviously not whats happening at all.

So what is the middle ground between these two absurdities? Parent said it does not matter. I am saying it is possible that it does matter.

It doesn't matter _enough_.

You have any sources what so ever that proves that misinformation actually made Trump president?

Forgive me if I am wrong... but didn't his political momentum mainly start with his very public lead role in the "birther movement"?

"Global Warming is a Chinese Hoax"

"Ted Cruiz's father killed JFK"

"Obama and Hillary founded ISIS"

Is it even possible to separate that man from misinformation?

Edit: I have anecdotal "evidence" that some of his voters where swayed by this stuff from conversations I have had with Trump supporters. While that isn't enough to make the claim that misinformation is the sole cause of his election (a claim btw, that I have not seen made on this thread.. you are the one that brought it up), it does show me that its impact was greater than 0.

Impact great than 0 does not mean it's enough.

You forget that people gravitate towards what they believe in already. They aren't sitting there evaluation who to believe in based on the facts out there.

>Impact great than 0 does not mean it's enough.

I agree, but it doesn't discount it either, it simply means greater than 0. Its not enough to draw a conclusion from which is why I haven't. My only claim is that critical thinking would lessen the non-zero impact.

What does this mean? What biases are you talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

EDIT: I had assumed this is what we were talking about, excuse my own biases, lol :D

I am not ThomPete but if I had to guess, it's PC bias that blinded many to the potential of this outcome. Perhaps most glaring of these biases is the idea that all women should demonstrate solidarity for their gender and vote for a woman, even if it means voting against their own best interests and the interests of their communities. I don't see too many people calling that for what it really is: sexism.

If you're talking about the pollsters, which are not necessarily academics (bias much?), it seems like a stretch to say that making a prediction of a complicated future event based on statistical techniques is due to a lack of critical thinking. Their prediction models will have to be adjusted, sure. But all the people that were "proven" right because their intuition happened to match the outcome are using a much worse critical thinking technique.

Also, Clinton won women 54% to 42%.

No, I'm talking about all the columnists who openly refer to that 42% as traitors to their gender.

No, I'm talking about all the columnists who openly refer to that 42% as traitors to their gender.

I did a Google search (ironic, I know) for "Trump traitor gender" and I couldn't find columnists referring to Trump-voting women as traitors to their gender. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I think this illustrates the sort of problem we are faced with

Took me one search.

http://www.chicksontheright.com/feminists-say-white-women-ar...

Thanks, but that's a column that accuses feminists of the same thing that GP did. It isn't a column by a feminist accusing Trump voters of being gender traitors, although it does link to a single blog post on Slate http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_...

Perhaps that blogpost partially satisfies GP's assertion, but this little thread illustrates how difficult it is to fact-check political rhetoric, even in the absence of fake news.

This is silly.

Anyone who followed the election just a little bit saw plenty of that.

Here is another one that didn't take me more than one search either.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/republican-women-su...

If anything it proves exactly what I said.

I do agree that you should be able to back up your assertions with some sources. As GP asserts, we all have our little bubbles of bias that seem incomprehensible to the rest, as we focus and magnify issues that are important to us.

In the interest of going forward instead of just arguing back and forth about sources, I looked for a few. Disclaimer: I am generally anti-feminist in my views. For reproducibility's sake, I used combinations of the following search terms: feminism, white women, trump, internalized misogyny, we need to talk, intersectionality. I also added tl;drs to each link but don't consider them canonical.

I didn't find enough posts outright calling women "gender traitors". I don't believe that is the most common feminist MO - they are more likely to blame "internalized misogyny" and "white women abandoning the sisterhood"(I guess that's close enough?), which are both long-standing narratives among feminism(feminists vs non-feminists, and the internal racial divide).

The rage I found was mostly on Twitter, feeding into my preconceived notion that Twitter is cancerous to actual discussion. Here's a quick twitter dump to illustrate:

> https://twitter.com/BDubBabyGirl/status/797128287206146048

> https://twitter.com/Karnythia/status/796350601449926656

> https://twitter.com/AnasuyaIam/status/796462867868512256

> https://twitter.com/NotYourBlkFrnd/status/796937029414096896

> https://twitter.com/TorraineWalker/status/796363979711021056

> https://twitter.com/MJStarLover/status/796246525647187969?re...

> https://twitter.com/NicCageMatch/status/796443880333811713?r...

> https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/796421710669115392?ref_...

> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nus-womens-officer-har...

-------------------------------------------------------

Past the twitter outrage, the articles I found were a lot more analytical and introspective. Like I said, the most common themes were "white women betraying the sisterhood", and women in general "suffering" from "internalized misogyny":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLWv-hivjt4 - Women voting for trump are "fucking dumb"

http://forward.com/sisterhood/353945/so-um-about-the-white-f... - White women don't believe in feminism, they have "internalized sexism", they take comfort in playing the role of an object

(By the way, that last thing also happened vs Bernie Sanders voters, when Clinton supporter Steinem said women only vote for Bernie to make themselves attractive to "boys")

http://qz.com/835567/election-2016-white-women-voted-for-don... - white women have a history of betraying their sisters, white women choose men over women

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_... - white women sold out the sisterhood (the one you linked)

http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/11/09/dont-blame-whi... - blame internalized misogyny, women just can't help themselves?

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/08/the_mystery_of_republican_wo... - more internalized misogyny (pre-victory)

https://bitchmedia.org/article/white-women-you-need-talk-abo... - "When the conversation started to slowly turn to blaming white women.."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dear-white-women-we-mess... - Fellow white women, I’m done with you.

https://www.bustle.com/articles/194381-white-women-need-to-a... - internalized sexism

http://theslot.jezebel.com/all-along-it-was-you-1788758934 - White women care more about their privilege than their freedom to choose

https://www.bustle.com/articles/194493-white-women-failed-hi... - White women failed other women

https://mic.com/articles/159036/white-men-didn-t-win-the-ele... - the female misogynists who voted for Trump stood on the backs of others

http://reelgirl.com/2016/11/dear-white-women-who-didnt-vote-... - Dear white women, you fucked up

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2016/11/10/trum... - more internalized misogyny, women like patriarchy

https://dailyprogressive.org/2016/11/wtf-white-feminism-many... - Agreement with the Slate article

After conducting the search, I think that our internal narratives are easily reinforced by the bevy of media out there. Now more than ever it's important to be skeptical of "their side is worse", because the explosion of information availability makes it pretty easy to find negative views out in the open, especially ones that can make you very angry and emotional. That's pretty much the death of rational discourse.

Most of the stuff I found was analysis, or calls to action, not naming and shaming. Especially newspapers like the NYTimes, had multiple articles as CTAs to "stop shaming Trump supporters". A bit of a hopeful message going forward.

I think that had a lot to do with a candidate who bragged about committing sexual battery

Not sure what OP is talking about, but here's an example from HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841565

Someone is flagged & dead in this thread for daring to suggest that Meliana Trump might end up as first lady. Another (also flagged/dead) response called them a "poll truther" for that comment.

A lot of people want to blame "bad polling" for this, but they were biased towards Obama turnout numbers, which didn't happen, and ignored the fact that Trump was filling rallies and Hillary wasn't. Or how being viewed as a Trump supporter can be completely unsafe: See also:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/11/14/man...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNegGEoohK4

http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/trump-portland-oregon-protest-...

I know at least one family member was disowned by a friend of 11 years over this election.

An interesting observation about the HN thread that you linked to, is that the most substantive reply, that pointed out that Trump was sitting at a real, 25% chance of winning was not voted down.

A good and fair point.

But neither was the post saying "I have visions of Bill, passed out in a hammock on the White House lawn, surrounded by empties and cheeto packets." voted down, so that would tend to weigh against it being purely a matter of being a comment with no substance.

I'd say that it appears that people believed it was the type of political falsehood we're talking about here. I mean, it did say 'more than likely' so anyone who believed the 98-99% estimates should have considered it laughably false based on the evidence they knew. The other comment made a more specific, factual claim that couldn't be laughed off, though I saw many stories aghast that 538 would break ranks.

I can't find a source, but in part the consistency of the polls reminds me of the stories of how the measurements of some physical constant (g?) drifted over time because everyone felt beholden to the 'consensus' value, which was wrong. I wish I could find that, I think I saw it on HN a long time ago.

Obviously, it's 'safest' to use the same assumptions everyone else did. When 538 broke from the herd, a lot of people questioned them on it. Based on the results, they were at least 30+% more correct than the 99%ers. And I think all of them were operating on assumptions that have been invalidated.

I agree and wish there were more 'viewpoint diversity' in academia, in addition to gender, racial, and cultural diversity. Social sciences should allow for more freedom of thought without fear of being ostracized. There is a reason why academia is a polarizing environment: personal ideologies of social psychologists can influence how the topic is studied. As such, for example, conservatives have little influence in the scholarly disciplines. Less that 10% of professors in these fields identify as conservative [1].

I hope more institutions can look at viewpoint diversity more closely [2].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-social-science... [2] http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/10/welcome-to-heterodoxa...

If by "bias" you mean the systemic blindness against the polling data showing the possibility of a Trump win, I agree with you.

But if you are implying that having a strongly-held political opinion is "bias", then I disagree. The idea that academics, or anyone else should be perfectly neutral (if that's your implication) doesn't really make sense.

What I am saying is that critical thinking in itself as OP seemed to claim isn't a solution. That's all really.

Idk if you write code or not, but if you don't think critical thinking is good in general when dealing with unknowns (such as when making a decision on a democratic vote), then I bet your debug sessions are hilarious to observe.

Because the kind of critical thinking thats required for coding is the same as the one required for discussing politics?

Care to back that idea up?

Critical thinking isn't some magic sauce that once you learn it it allow you to approach everything with that.

You still need experience and to build up an intuition about where and how to apply it in a given situation.

I don't know about "magic sauce", but I do my best to apply it to everything I can....

Critical thinking is about as generalized as you can get. The definition google spits out is:

"the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment."

Im curious... when would you not try to apply critical thinking when making a decision?

You are missing the point.

Yep. If you elaborate perhaps I will get exactly what it is you are trying to say. Are you trying to say "Critical thinking is hard and easy to mess up?" If so, then sure, I can see that. I just wish it was more of a thing in our culture...something that regular people regularly talked about.

What I am saying is that critical thinking doesn't have a lower boundary. It will always be subject to the premise we base something on.

A voter who doesn't have a job because of ex. globalization isn't going to apply the same critical thinking of a voter who is doing well and is benefitting from globalization.

We are all trapped by our frames of reference, no amount of critical thinking is going to change that and just because you know of critical thinking you aren't going to make better decisions.

Furthermore there are plenty of people who understand and apply critical thinking. What is really missing is constructive thinking but thats another thing all together.

True critical thinking involves the frequent re-examination of one's starting premises in the light of new input. Every time I gain some new insight or information, I become that much more likely to question my basic assumptions about, well, anything. It is a great error, upon finding a demonstrably correct solution to a problem, to assume that its correctness is everlasting. If it later turns out that the conclusion was correctly reasoned from incomplete information, it is all too easy to reject new and contradictory information because it would invalidate the conclusion, even though the conclusion in question was drawn without access to the new information.

Which is why access to a competent education is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.

In my opinion, we aren't there yet since there are huge disparities between education quality across the public school system. One solution (IMO) is to standardize funding; today school districts rely on local funding which can result in tremendous funding disparities (and by extension, disparities in education quality).

Huh? How is education going to save you from that? Everyone, all the educated critical thinkers were wrong on Trump. Spectacularly wrong.

While I agree in general, critical thinking alone is inadequate if there isn't enough information or information pathways are constricted such that they deliver only biased viewpoints.

Critical thinking won't save you from a subtle, deceptive piece of propaganda.

Pretending that propaganda and information warfare only affect dumb people is dangerous thinking.

Critical thinking is orthogonal to intelligence, imo. Which is why I think it should be taught with the same importance as reading and math. Perhaps it is a tautology, but as far as I know its the ONLY thing that could save you from a clever piece of false propaganda.

This has nothing to do with the election cycle, this has been going on for the better part of 10 years if not longer.

This is also not limited to the US, crappy fake and editorialized news that are as fact checked as a teenager's first date story is everywhere.

Yeah it just happened to happen after America's first Big Lie got into office ...

It just happened to get a whole bunch of press coverage after he won the election. That's not quite the same thing.

Well, everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fuelling this problem amongst people whose views they disagree with, anyway. Much fewer people are willing to admit the same problem exists on their own side. In fact, you could probably tell most people's political positions based on which fake news they complain about.

I really worry about the spread of false information. I see more and more people telling me things IRL that (I think) they get on misinformation websites or Facebook posts. Many people (specially older ones) are not used to check the information that is presented to them.

Funny, I would qualify as old but I'm of exactly the opposite opinion. Young people are not used to paying for content (newspapers, anyone?) and do not realize free content cannot pay for high quality journalism and thus only provides superficial information.

Edit: words

I think what the parent poster implied was that older people who aren't very technologically savvy, as in the kind who would define Facebook as "the internet", don't appreciate how easy it is to publish materials online and so they give any old bullshit that shows up in their feed more credit than it deserves. I believe this might be because they understand publishing on mediums like television and newspapers is hard and requires capital, so they assume that must be true of the internet also. This is in contrast to a younger audience that is more technologically savvy and understands how easy it is to publish and propagate information.

But it's dangerous to generalize. I know a lot of older people who are incredibly technologically savvy and younger people who only care about the narcissistic and quick-consumption facets of technology.

I have found personally that those who are worst at believing and forwarding misinformation online are in their late 40s and 50s-young enough to use technology, but old enough to have not learned how to deal with a deluge of information.

This doesn't apply to all older people, of course. But on aggregate, I would agree with you.

18th-Century news pamphlets were the primary way of getting news and were often full of scurrilous, false information and nakedly partisan. So I'm not sure I can see this as some sort of new and unprecedented problem.

I think like with a lot of technology it isn't the novelty, but the scale. Operating a printing press and physically distributing false items is much harder than posting a tweet and letting it go viral.

Yeah, but verifying information is also much easier than ever.

Good thing that democracy has been so well-served in the past by an honest and reliable traditional media!

To expand on this a little more, I think traditional media is also quite often deceptive or wrong.

The example that really opened my eyes was the reporting in the NYT running up to the Iraq war, during which they falsely reported Saddam Hussain had large stockpiles of WMDs.

Right, which is the story everyone cites when it comes to mainstream media failure. I think it's telling that this example is over a decade old now.

I'm not saying that mainstream media outlets report incorrectly at times - they do - but they are dragged over the coals for it, repeatedly. This new generation of Facebook-only news pages are so numerous that they are never called out loudly and clearly.

It's just the biggest story, not the most recent.

The most recent would be everyone getting the polls wrong by assuming Obama turnouts and ignoring the enthusiasm gap at the rallies. To his credit, Nate Silver realized we were just 'one normal polling error away from electing Trump' only to get attacked for not showing 98-99% odds of Clinton as you can read here:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffington...

There's a reasonable range of disagreement. But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

But again, it's not as if this isn't being called out. Including, as you're saying, by the media itself. And these aren't cases of deliberate deception - they're faulty reporting. Surely that is inevitable every now and then.

The posts seem on the Facebook pages many people forward are knowingly incorrect. And they're not getting called out. It's a whole new ball game.

It's politics. How can you assume that they know they're incorrect? And sure, it's being called out now, but that's only because of the election results.

Anything you do to suppress information will trigger the Streisand Effect. Any censorship of it will be routed around because this is the internet.

The cure for bad speech has always been more speech.

That's because it's a really critical media failure -- we're still grappling today with the consequences of invading Iraq.

A more recent media failure would be the Rolling Stone campus-rape article.

You're right – and it's a good point – that there are a lot of trash "news" sites being passed around on facebook that are obviously completely bogus, and no one ever bothers to debunk them.

But I don't see it as much more of threat to democracy than the sometimes-right, sometimes-pushing-an-agenda mainstream media we've had since forever.

When people rail against facebook (essentially a communication tool) "allowing" these fake news articles to proliferate, what they're essentially saying is people should only be allowed to share with their friends official "truth", as decided by some arbitrary third party.

That, to me, seems much scarier and like more of a threat to democracy.

Much is made of voter anger this election, but what if a larger factor turns out to be social media designed to inflame anger and fear? Inflaming emotions equals clicks equals profit.

Is this phenomenon new? No, but suddenly everybody noticed[1]. Is there any actual data backing the claim that XYZ voters were tricked by a clikbait into which candidate to vote?!

Should Google, Facebook and Twitter turn into clickbait-vetting institutions? No, we should educate citizens instead to make better decisions and I don't mean voting for Hillary makes you an educated voter just because someone said so.

[1] This discussion is borderline ridiculous. Would we have this discussion if Ms Clinton had won the election? I doubt it. The DNC should do some introspection, stop asking how did we lose this election and start asking why did we lose this election, accept in democracies upsets happen and stop this insane witch hunt and get their shit together because we entire world is going to need them.

Unfortunately, I do not have any data, only my own experiences. I have spent much of the past year debunking countless fake news stories posted to Facebook by people I know. Many of them with college degrees.

I was told several times that Snopes is a liberal/democrat operative and has been proven to be wrong in the past. When requested, I was never provided with cases where Snopes was has been wrong. I was also told that PolitiFact.com was started and run by the Clinton campaign.

These "news" articles got even worse with the Podesta emails. It's easy for the blatantly false alt-right sites like InfoWars to make up stories and then these click-farming sites run those stories with even more sensational headlines. This was the case I saw with the "Spirit cooking" and claims that the Clinton camp was really a pedophile ring (using an email chain referencing kids in a swimming pool as "entertainment" as proof. In context, the emailer was someone speaking of bringing their own 3 kids to the party)

I don't know if these people were tricked, or if they were willfully ignorant because these "news" stories mad them feel justified in their preexisting hatred of all things democrat, liberal, and Clinton.

Yes, this, so much. Thank you. It was absolutely "weaponized disinformation," and Stephen Bannon is a homegrown USA adherent of it, and now he's Trump's right hand man in the White House.

People who should know better STILL believe that the reason Clinton lost is that she really is "corrupt." "She is corrupt because of the email leak." The emails I read seemed extremely banal ("Should we be bad and get a latte?"), even inspiring in some cases (Chelsea communicating about the Haiti earthquake response). I never saw anything concrete that made sense to me come out of that, and I spent a good amount of time looking into it, including reading through the text of emails which had been cherry-picked as being supposedly "damning." Getting together with "elite" people is not in and of itself proof of corruption: how could she do her work as First Lady, Secretary of State, and Senator, without that?

Ranting about "corruption" is one of the tricks of demagogues. Just read this Wikipedia article and tell me that is not a spot on description of what we are witnessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue

It is so, so very tragic. People have still not realized what has happened. People are calming down when they should be panicking. The implications of this episode, just for our prospects of surviving Climate Change, are tragic.

The "filter bubble" criticism always implied that at least one of the bubbles was wrong.

Besides, mere facts are not enough; any decent writer can spin the same facts as positive or negative.

Careful.

The implicit solution you're suggesting would curtail the First amendment. That's a bigger threat to democracy than a misinformed populace IMHO. What we really need are annotations that are community driven. A "bs meter" if you will.

Edit: Corrected populous -> populace

The first amendment forbids the government from restricting speech, not Google

Sure, "Google" as a private entity can curtail freedom of speech on its platform. It becomes less clear when Facebook, Twitter, and Google are effectively public goods.

Except they're pretty clearly private companies, not Public Goods. And as such, they can do basically whatever they want about speech on their platforms.

At which point does a service offered by a private company become a public good? There was such a transitioning point for electric power, for telephone service, etc. Will it occur for social media? And if so, at which point?

Google is a person, in the eyes of the law[1], and search results are it's speech (IIUC).

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislati...

You misread the parent. It was not arguing that the government can't restrict Google's speech. It was arguing that Google can restrict speech on its platform, which is true.

I see.

The government I think could possibly use the commerce clause to impose obligation on a corporation certify its ranking algorithms which could lead to some extremely fun results.

A law that prevents google algorithm to (not)take truthiness into account would probably be constitutional.

The word is 'populace'. Google says they are both composed of identical phonemes, but curiously enough, has a different recording for each.

My bad, sleep deprivation :)

Updated accordingly, thanks for the correction.

how would that work any differently than share flag/report? People share when it confirms their bias, and flag/report when they dislike something.

Let's say identical articles get published in Huffington Post and Breitbart (since most journalism is reposting AP/Reuters/Youtube/Imgur/Twitter with a h/t at the end anyway, its not unbelievable.)

The HP article gets shared by the left-bubble and spreads rapidly. Now if The left-internet catches wind of a controversial Breitbart article, they attack. In left-internet the Breitbart article will perish, the HP, flourish.

Because there are 55 hundred million versions of the same article posted across thousands of sources, there are always variants of each story that exhibit each behavior in each community.

Everyone in a democracy is informed, there is no such thing as uninformed voters per se.

So depending on how you define informed citizenry I don't think you are right. And I believe that way too much importance is being put on the fake news effect. It has nothing to do with why people voted like they did. If anything EVERYONE is living in a filter bubble and have been doing that since the dawn of man.

The voters who voted for Trump or Hillary were informed enough to make a choice because they voted on what they experience in their everyday. Thats the whole idea.

The idea isn't that someone dictates what it means to be informed (i know you didn't say specifically but you seem to imply something along those line)

News fake or not isn't what drive most peoples decisions and I would ask you to ask yourself if you changed your opinion on something that was you found out was fake. My guess is you didn't even when you thought it was right.

When people are informed of and led to believe factually incorrect information, I think it's more than fair to say they're misinformed or uninformed.

What factually correct information are you talking about exactly? Both sides have biases if nothing else about the other side.

The whole idea with a democracy is that no one get to decide what is important to voters and so no one get to decide what they need to be informed about.

Politics about prioritization it's NOT an academic discipline. People who voted for Trump did so because of what they felt was important just like voters for Hillary did on her.

Who are you or I to say what information is the right information to judge based on?

Politics should be about prioritization. But unfortunately, it's often about facts.

For example, the climate change debate should be about how much effort to put into fighting it, whether regulatory or market-based solutions are more appropriate, etc. Instead, the debate is about whether it's even happening at all.

If we can't even agree on basic facts, what hope is there of choosing effective leadership?

Huh? Politics are never about facts not sure where you get that idea about it's about perception, power etc. Not about facts. Thats why it's called the art of the possible.

You prove my very point. Your believe that the priority should be about how we should fight it. Thats your prioritization. You don't even have to be a climate sceptic to come up with another perspective which is. You don't need to worry about that, technology will solve it.

Agreeing on the basic facts has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Because even the basic facts aren't what drives politics decision making.

I said that the climate change debate should be about how much effort to put into fighting it. "Zero" is a perfectly acceptable answer to that question (albeit one I disagree with).

The problem isn't that people are arguing that "zero" is the correct answer to the question. The problem is that we lack a shared basis of facts, to the extent that about half of the electorate will say that the question itself is based on false assumptions.

The problem is that even when it comes to climate it's not even sure people accept that it's an important fact to worry about. Thats what I am trying to say.

There is not right prioritization here. Only the one people make. Thats democracy.

I agree with your second paragraph. There is no right prioritization, only different ones.

But there are right facts. And if the basis of someone's prioritization is "climate change isn't even happening, so of course we shouldn't do anything to fight it" then I think it's reasonable to call that position uninformed.

The problem isn't that some people think it's unimportant. The problem is that many people think it's not even real.

Of course there are right facts, the point is that there are right facts on both sides of the argument.

I.e. you can be as educated liberal as you want that does not mean that the facts you care about are more important than the facts som uneducated trump supporter cares about.

My point is that there aren't right facts on both sides of many of the arguments we currently fight.

How people prioritize issues based on facts is different from whether the facts are true. I agree that you or I can disagree on prioritization of issues. People can also be wrong about which facts they believe. For example, if someone believes that New York City is the capital of the state of New York, they're factually wrong. They're misinformed.

For a more political fact, Barack Obama either was or was not born in the US. People made political decisions based on whether or not this is true. For the argument I'm making, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. It's that a fact is politically important.

If you're arguing that which facts are true is ultimately relative, I'm not going to chase you down that particular rabbit hole.

Perhaps what I'm saying is obvious and trivial to you, and we're speaking past each other.

Of course there are facts not disagreeing there.

What I disagree with is whether they impact the voters as has been claimed (not necessarily by you) and which I believe is the base of this whole thread here.

The critical thinking only help you based on your premise it doesn't give you the "right" premise IMO.

Great! We agree that there are facts! :) (That's sincere, by the way. Sometimes it seems even that common ground is frustratingly hard to find.)

As for impact on voters: Do you think there were any voters that cast their vote in part on their belief whether or not Obama was born in the US?

Not enough for it to be a meaningful factor.

Keep in mind many of the people who voted in Trump also voted in Obama.

Cool. I think it's fair to say that we agree

1) There are facts.

2) Facts have an impact on voters.

The open question then is

3) The weight voters give these facts varies from voter to voter and fact to fact.

Is that fair? I can certainly agree to that. What do you think?

I am not sure how to interpret what you mean with 2)

I agree that facts impact voters, but thats not really important. Whats important is which facts impact them.

I.e. the facts that a Trump voter cares about vs. the ones that a Hillary voter cares about.

I don't believe people voted based non-facts. They voted on the facts they know to be true and important to them.

I.e. I don't subscribe to some idea of a false consciousness.

I don't have some super secret agenda. 2) is just as it says. And by the rest, "Whats important is which facts impact them. I.e. the facts that a Trump voter cares about vs. the ones that a Hillary voter cares about.", I think you agree with 3).

My reaction is solely on the idea that people can't believe facts that aren't true, that they can't be misinformed, and that the news plays no role in misinforming them.

This goes back to

"Everyone in a democracy is informed, there is no such thing as uninformed voters per se...

News fake or not isn't what drive most peoples decisions "

The news is a source of information/facts for people. Some of those facts may be false, and people may believe facts that aren't true. People who believe facts that aren't true are uninformed/misinformed.

Perhaps a source of misunderstanding is I'm making little distinction between uninformed and misinformed, equating for these purposes misinformed and uninformed of the truth regarding a fact they accept. I do agree that people are subject to confirmation bias, fitting facts to what they believe more often than not. Jonathan Haidt's elephant/rider metaphor seems apt as well. This seems in line with your statements on how facts influence views.

I had to look up false consciousness. While I do think there are misinformation and disinformation campaigns (which is what some campaigning seems to be reduced to, nowadays), I don't subscribe to some purposeful, widespread, institutional, systemic propaganda machine. Some may argue that I'm likely just naïve.

By the way, I'm trying to reach some shared understanding. I'm not arguing for the sake of argument or just trying to argue against whatever you happen to say. I hope that's clear :) I don't think we're actually all that far off in opinion, if at all. Perhaps we're just prioritizing different parts of the equation.

Thanks for sticking with this by the way, and remaining civil. I'm sure you've noticed as well how off the rails a lot of these discussions can go.

Tell me about it :) I am getting down voted like a mofo. Really wish downvotes had to be accompanied by a comment so I could at least understand why.

Anyway yeah I think we are agreeing more than disagreeing.

My original point is just an objection to this idea that if only people were better educated we wouldn't have people voting for Trump. Thats not whats actually said but it's in there between the lines.

The reality is that we all have our different perspectives and are all right about things and wrong about other things.

That you are well educated and have learned critical thinking does not make you a critical thinker and that you are not less likely to be misinformed just because you are better educated and have learned about critical thinking.

In some ways although it might be a stretch I would argue that being aware of critical thinking makes you more likely to venture outside areas that you know about because you believe that your critical thinking is going to save you.

If this election underlined something once again for me it is that being educated and understanding what critical thinking is doesn't make you immune for that misinformation.

> Keep in mind many of the people who voted in Trump also voted in Obama.

Evidence that this meets any reasonable definition of many voters? Even in the states that flipped, the numbers aren't such that mathematically many (or even any) voters need to have switched that direction. There's probably some, but I haven't seen any indictation in any source that suggests substantial numbers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

Nothing in that article makes the case (there's a subhead which assumes it, but all the details talk about counties, not people.) With new voters coming of age, old voters dying, far less than 100% turnout so even of the people who could vote in both elections those who actually do might not be the same, counties can switch without people switching.

So, yeah, I'm sure there are some Obama/Trump voters, but I haven't seen a coherent case that there are a lot, just generous application of the fallacy of division.

Unless you have evidence that somehow those areas changed voters then I don't see what exactly you are questioning. 1/3 of Mexicans voted on Trump, Hillary only got 10% more female voters. Nothing indicates that the voters changed completely from one election to another.

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