According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem | Hacker News Reader

According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem

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78 pointsmirandak4122 comments

It seems kind of predictable that "real news" sites would run stories on how "fake news" is an epidemic.

Maybe this is too much speculation but it seems like deflecting. Fake news sites weren't responsible for "real news'" complete failure to predict a Trump victory. I've seen little reporting on the attitudes of real Trump supporters. It's mostly reporting of noisy flawed polls and simplistic opinion pieces on why Trump is bad/hitler/stupid and dismissals of his supporters as racists.

IMO I don't think fake news is the problem either (though it is a problem, just not a proportionately large one). It has shades of demonizing independent news sources. Personally I can't stand any cable news source, I prefer to watch "Democracy Now!" I prefer The Intercept, Truthdig, and Jacobin to the NYT or WaPo. They don't peddle fake news whatsoever.

Edit: fake news was not responsible for this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxZVgktWQAAXu8g?format=jpg&name=...

It is deflecting, they were so wrong about the election, so rather than take responsibility they have to blame someone else.

Well I would say that the numbers strongly suggest that the Democrats lost the election rather than the Republican winning it. Votes for both parties were substantially down compared to 2012; it's just that the Democrats failed in their turnout and lost ground to the Republicans, especially in "battleground" states.[0]

[0] http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout...

[EDIT] fixed grammar typo

In regards to the predictions, it's important to understand that their role in it was the same as it is with the weather forecast: they're just reporting what people come up with.

Those people, the pollsters and aggregators, were indeed wrong with regards to the winner. It's however important to note that the polls were less than 3% off. It just happened to make quite a difference in the winner-take-all system.

538 was arguably more right than others: their model sensed the uncertainty and gave Trump a 30% chance of winning.

Compared to the NYT/WaPo/WSJ, the self-styled outsiders like The Intercept are incredibly biased, or just bad. It's sometimes hard to see how information flows, but barely any actual news starts at The Incept/Breitbart/HuffPost/etc.

What is The Intercept's bias?

They are harshly critical of unchallenged power, so of Obama, US foreign policy, and Clinton. People perceive that as a bias against Democrats but I'd expect we're about to see some good reporting against the Republicans now.

I don't see being critical of people in power as a bias, unless you're saying that they don't spend enough time being critical of people not in power.

Don't forget HuffPo's models giving HRC an 90% chance a few days before.

Yeah, HuffPo is just one of the leeches feeding of actual journalism. I really enjoyed the little fight they got themselves into the day before the election – their failure is/was to consider the errors in state polls to be independent.

That could have been completely correct... and the card was drawn for one of those 10%. To test that probability empirically, we'd have to have the election at least a couple dozen times, right?

Simultaneously and independently, with exact copies of all registered voters.

>It's however important to note that the polls were less than 3% off

Wisconsin last poll 41% for trump, Wisconsin result 49% (~8% off)

Michigan last poll 42% for trump, Michigan result 48% (~6% off)

North Carolina last poll 45% for trump, North carolina result 51% (~6% off)

Florida last poll 45% for trump, Florida result 49% (~4% off)

Source: http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2016/Pres/Maps/Nov09.html

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2016/Pres/Maps/Nov08.html

You can't excuse the pollsters. That's an epic fuck up.

You're doing a bit of cherry-picking but I guess it's only fair, since reality conspired to do it similarly. Not sure how far off the polls were in aggregate.

But my point was mostly that the media doesn't have much to do with the polling. And secondly, I think it's important to distinguish between ideological bias and just simply mistakes. There are many pollsters from all over the political spectrum and I'm convinced that they made a best effort to be accurate, and that it has just become difficult to do accurate polling. Or that the polling may have even given a very accurate picture of reality, but that volatility has just increased dramatically.

I just picked the states which actually decided the election. For all I know it was 8% off in Oregon too but that wouldn't have mattered.

It did appear that there was a systemic bias against Trump in the polls, whether intentional or not.

My original point said nothing on the media's involvement with polling, outside of simply reporting it. As for the pollsters, whether it was ideological bias or simply mistake is also irrelevant to my original point.

My claim is that the "real news" committed the journalistic equivalent of manslaughter. Whether or not they intended to mislead the public doesn't negate the fact that the public was misled. Blaming "fake news" doesn't justify their own role in misleading the public. There is no court of journalism, but the consequences regardless will be that people will trust the traditional news sources less.

Don't you have to account for their margin of error though?

I don't see them on your link. But usually when a poll says 45% there's a spread in both directions indicating the level uncertainty in their data.

So for example a pollster could find that 45% of people prefer X over Y with a +/-5 point margin of error. Meaning it could be 50% prefer X over Y or 40% given our model

Frequently I've seen something like 2-3% margin of error either way. So with your numbers Florida for example could only be off 1% given the margin of error. I dunno what the margin of error was though.

Remember polls are best guess statistical models. There is a lot of jitter in human modeling. Not least of which is due to the simple fact that people lie. We lie a lot to fit in versus be honest. and we encourage this feeling in people. There's no realistic way I can see for pollsters to account for that

This bias was consistent across all polls (swing state polls, anyway, didn't look at the others).

I'm not sure if there was actually even a single poll where Trump's support was overestimated.

Polls aren't predictions (some people draw predictions from polls, but those are different from polls.)

They, particularly, don't even in theory sample the universe of "people who are actually going to vote", the sample registered voters or some model of likely voters. Those are known (to anyone who has more than a casual understanding of political polling) sources of nonsampling error when treating polls as a measure of the actual vote, since the universe sampled is different than the universe of interest, and there was particularly a lot of publicly-aired certainty about the utility of backward-looking likely voters models in this election.

I don't think there is a particular problem with the polls so much as with people's (including, unfortunately, many of the people talking about polls in the media) understanding of what polls measure.

To the extent there was an epic fuck up, it was in poll-based predictions that the effects of these type of things are correlated across states, so they gave Trump a near-certainty of winning. (Better predictors, like 538, had Trump an underdog but with a sizable likelihood of winning -- you can't say a 70%/30% chance is wrong given that the result is the one given a 30% chance is the one that materializes.)

Well it's looking like they assumed more people were going to show up, based on their polling, and a good chunk didn't show up. That is, Trump voters showed up approximately as the poll models predicted, while Hillary voters apparently weren't as committed to actually showing up as they were when polled. So the polling fouled up only in terms of capturing a meaningful nuance whether the voter was likely to show up, which is a really hard thing to do.

And the polls didn't ask, and may have a lot of error capturing for, the Q&A along the lines of "if there's another controversy regarding candidate X are you a lot/a little more or less likely to vote?" It's plausible the polls don't capture last minute antipathy.

It's even worse than you state -- those are just percentage points off, not full percentage off.

To restate:

Wisconsin last poll 41% for trump, Wisconsin result 49% (~8 percentage points off, or 20% off)

Michigan last poll 42% for trump, Michigan result 48% (~6 percentage points off, or 14% off)

North Carolina last poll 45% for trump, North carolina result 51% (~6 percentage points off, or 13% off)

Florida last poll 45% for trump, Florida result 49% (~4 percentage points off, or 9% off)

They could have said it was a 95% chance, or that it was a 10% chance of Trump winning and been just as 'right'. The only thing that could be 'wrong' in predicting a probability like that is if they say there is no chance of something, and it happens.

> I've seen little reporting on the attitudes of real Trump supporters. It's mostly reporting of noisy flawed polls and simplistic opinion pieces on why Trump is bad/hitler/stupid and dismissals of his supporters as racists.

I've heard quite a bit on NPR where they have gone to some of the swing states that went for Trump and interviewed assorted Trump voters.

if the "real news" spent half the time they spent explaining why not to vote for the other candidate, explaining the virtues of their candidate ....

edit: should have clicked your picture before commenting

It's neither fake news nor failing media, it's the Internet itself. The Internet has created echo chambers for just about any kind of crackpots and conspiracy theorist you could find. It used to take tremendous efforts to meet fellow ufologists, and the literature was not abundant in libraries either.

Fast forward two decades and you will have a hard time finding some weird worldview that does not yet have a forum and community with ardent followers.

Human culture is to a large extent based on knowledge by testimony, and unfortunately our processing of that is fairly simplistic. The more people in your peer group believe X, the more likely you will believe X, too (as a tendency). That can become a problem when you can choose your peer group as you wish online rather than being forced to get along with the members of your tribe whether you like them or not.

And it's not just the internet itself. It's "optimization" i.e. showing people only the things that generate "engagement". That's what creates echo chambers.

Classic news services make the important interesting, rather than the interesting important. It's way easier to monetize doing the latter.

The article rightly points at readers having embraced their cognitive dissonance in the face of unrelenting media bias but unfairly singles out the alt-right movement -- one can't say that they are wrong in their dogmatic mistrust of the media. We saw non-stop coverage of the election where they talked up Clinton at every fifteen-minute segment, parroting statistics like her 98% guaranteed victory.

Through Wikileaks, we can plainly see that they were very much in bed with the Clinton campaign and frankly anyone with an ounce of sensibility should see that as plain as day.

That said, I would posit that the MSM orgs need to do a lot of soul-searching to restore their credibility lest they continue to drift into irrelevance. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair due to their close adherence to progressive extremist ideology and their objectivity is rightly attacked.

It's not that people are looking for somebody to pick on, but instead the media are agitators rather than reporters of fact. There is a clear desire to steer society rather than simply disseminate information, much like how cable companies have zero interest in operating as communications conduits and instead strive to provide content experiences.

IMO there must be structural reform for the Fourth Estate to be restored to its previous stature -- to wit, mainstream media must be made great again.

>Through Wikileaks, we can plainly see that they were very much in bed with the Clinton campaign and frankly anyone with an ounce of sensibility should see that as plain as day.

Thought they were pro-Trump?

The general argument I've heard that synthesizes both: They gave Trump too much credibility by treating him as an equal while attacking Clinton (were "pro-Trump"), but endorsed Clinton and crowed triumphantly at every step that she had it in the bag (were "pro-Clinton").

We should probably stop making absolute claims about anything regarding this election, as there are so many moving parts it is impossible to conclusively place responsibility at any one group's feet.

Then again, that may have been the point you were making :)

'They' being the media in that sentence.

I believe 'they' in the sentence refers to the media. As in, info from Wikileaks suggests that "[the media] is in bed with the Clinton campaign".

It's more complicated than either one.

>The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair due to their close adherence to progressive extremist ideology and their objectivity is rightly attacked.

[citation needed].

The MSM needs some repair, but I'd say that repair should be moving away from the "both sides do it" and "two sides to every argument" mentality and delivering the truth. On issues like climate change, equal weight does not need to be given to the "it's a hoax" crowd.

Why not? The science is far from settled. In much the same way that the media leans left, so does academia. Academia is not immune from corruption, and dare I say, academia is a worse swamp than Washington.

Oof, I must've offended a couple academics

I think it's because you denied climate change or rather hand-waved it away with "the science is far from settled" ~ as if science is EVER settled.

Humans are undeniably accelerating climate change for the worse. Species are dying off left and right from it. Why is this controversial?

Yes we are in a mass-extinction event, but no that is not because of climate change. Rather it is because we are destroying habitats left and right through deforestation, pollution, etc. Climate change is happening at such a slow glacial pace; I haven't seen any good data to suggest that the Climate is changing fast enough to produce harm.

When 99% of the academics agree on something, you could say the science is more-or-less settled. If you disagree, the onus is on you to come up with the evidence/theory to challenge it. Just claiming that "science is far from settled" doesn't make it so; you might as well claim that the "science is far from settled" on the Earth not being flat.

When 99% of the academics agree on something, you could say the science is more-or-less settled.

Go back 50 years and 100% of doctors thought stress and diet caused stomach ulcers. We now know that's not true.

I'm not using this fact as a knock against climate change. I'm just saying consensus across academics doesn't mean they are right.

If you had said "There is consensus across academics that humans activity is mostly likely the cause of global warming" than I wouldn't disagree.

You are correct that appeal-to-authority arguments are inherently weak but it doesn't change the fact that his hand-wavy "it's not settled!" argument is even weaker.

To take your remark about doctor's a century earlier, germ theory was met with derision[1] :

> [...] Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.

Sometimes prevailing wisdom is discountable but sometimes it's not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Discovery_of_...

I said nothing. I was just saying that if you want to go against scientific consensus, the onus is on you to provide proof! You can't just say "I disagree with them, so they must be wrong". It doesn't work that way.

This is how science works: there's a current understanding of the world; and if you want to change that, you have to come up with the counterexamples or other scientific evidence to back up your claim. You can't just stick your head in the sand and say that since I don't believe these guys, they must be wrong.

On the other hand, I think there are some facts on climate change that are hard to deny. We have actual data points of past weather patterns from various weather stations. We have observed various climate effects (glaciers disappearing, ice fields thinning, etc.).

I think it could be said that it is a fact that the Earth has warmed significantly over the past century. I think the evidence suggests that the trendline is atypical of normal patterns. I wouldn't call the trendline abnormality a fact at this point, but I think the evidence is very strong.

If someone had a conclusion was "the Earth is warming but I'm not sure humans are the cause", I would say that's fine. It recognizes the facts and strong trendlines above. It goes against consensus, but if they had some interesting data to go with their doubt, I would hope this analysis would be welcome.

"Global warming is a hoax!" type statements on the other hand tends to be completely dismissive sometimes of even the facts we have.

When any sign of disagreement with the agw cult results in swift, abrupt and pretty much permament death of ones career then it is no wonder that not many people do that.

Ive had a few chances to personally speak with some scientists and they were not 99% sure what is happening

It's sad to see that climate-deniers are still pushing their agenda when the facts so plainly speak for themselves.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science is rarely settled. That is what makes it science, evidence is provided and notions are challenged -- indisputable axioms are very rare. Nevertheless we can still point to the results of rigorous studies and accept that their weight is enough to arrive at a reasonable assumption that global warming is real and it's not going away.

Yeah, well, the General Theory of Relativity doesn't predict the motions of galaxies very well (without dark matter), and is not compatible with quantum mechanics. But try getting GPS to work without it.

You think 2016 wasn't hot? (surprise answer, it really freaking was, and it's getting worse: http://www.nasa-usa.de/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-c...)

The incompatibility of QFT and GR is a theoretical incompatibility. Practically, however, GR is perfectly compatible with quantum mechanics right to the limit of strong gravity, which can only find inside black hole event horizons (and in particular at and very near the singularity), and in the very early universe.

In GR terms, strong gravity is where the uncertainty in position of field quanta sources an impossible gravitational field; this is only measurable when the energy-density is non-negligible and that requires enormous quantum numbers. In quantum field theory terms, the (general, not just electromagnetic) charge of a particle and its energy are separate quantities except for the gravitational charge of a particle, which is its energy. Because the gravitational interaction is so weak, this only matters when particle energies are very high (on Feynman diagrams, this means more than one loop of gravitons; while gravitons are massless they do carry momentum, and thus have energy, and thus gravitational charge).

The clocks in GPS satellites all rely on quantum effects, and those effects that run faster further from the Earth than they did closer to the Earth prior to launch. GNSS applications, as well as atomic clocks on spacecraft scattered around the solar system, are ongoing tests of the validity of this prediction of GR.

It is precisely because General Relativity is an effective field theory (in the Kenneth G Wilson sense of effective) in all presently accessible regimes, and has so far survived every test -- direct and indirect -- that it is extremely hard to arrive at an explanation for the effects of gravity pointing the wrong way other than non-luminous, transparent matter rather than a different theory of gravity.

Glenn Greenwald has a great essay on the false notion of "neutrality" in MSM - https://theintercept.com/2016/03/14/the-rise-of-trump-shows-...

(Slight tangent alert)

Sadly, Glenn Greenwald's interactions with Sam Harris have severely tarnished his credibility as a champion of objectivity in my eyes. Harris has a weakness in that he's very good at putting out content that's easy to cherry-pick in an uncharitable way, and this is what Greenwald seems to do every single time.

Lying by omission is still technically truthful, how can you reconcile your proposition with the fact that the MSM clearly downplayed Clinton's shortcomings while highlighting Trump's at every moment?

Maybe Clinton's shortcoming was her choice of E-Mail provider while Trump is, indisputably, a proto-fascist?

I mean, it's now admitted fact the Russian government tried to influence the election with the leaks, other hacks and a myriad other ways that must have had a significant effect.

Can you imagine what Breitbart et al would have written if Obama 2012 had been elected with help from Russia?

Hillary's shortcoming was 40 years of corruption

"but unfairly singles out the alt-right movement "

The left version would be the passive-aggressive, censorship-prone bullies we call Social Justice Warriors (SJW's). You'll rarely see sites call them out despite them often being a minority within a minority acting like they speak for everyone where issues are often more nuanced.

Far as media reporting, corporate media work for advertisers. People hearing what they want to hear and hating who they want to hate keeps their attention. Those outlets will then selectively present information to maintain that feedback loop. Business is booming. Groups actually trying to inform people with the facts or present balanced information to let people decide themselves are rare. Often small.

My old approach was to identify the bias and reliability of various outlets then read them all. These days, I read second-hand info more often as I've found reliable, biased individuals or groups that pre-filter such sites to I can get to the meat of what they're saying. I still follow-up on raw data where it matters. The election cycle this year was the biggest pile of bullshit-producing, echo chambers I've seen in a long time. That Facebook, etc have algorithms preventing opposing sides from seeing each other as often as they would in the past is the reason imho.

You know when you're talking to a Trump supporter when they think that a preference for facts over lies amounts to a "close adherence to progressive extremist ideology". What a load of bullshit.

You know you're talking to a person with "close adherence to progressive extremist ideology" when they assume the facts are on their side and the other side is just lies. Real scientific integrity eh?

My personal backlash against this is from experience. I have been wrong. I will be wrong more in the future. Ignorance is normal. Nobody knows everything.

However, ignorance is not to be embraced. Fact checking is not a liberal agenda. It is a general path to improvement.

Yes, because only progressive extremists believe the facts are on their side. Say that out loud again, it sounds ridiculous.

They have a greater tendency to do so, yes.

Probably stems from the implicit assumption that since academia leans left, that these progressives will have the needed scientific support for their policy proposals.

You know that it was two Republicans who started the bipartisan committee on climate change in the House, right? It's not a liberal issue. It's a reality that is happening NOW

Your generalizations are laughable and are only indicative of the toxic thinking that has characterized this election.

Right now you are only believing your side and think the other side is lies. Do you not realize how dense you are being right now?

Trump can go die in a hole for all I care, the MSM on the other hand glossed over the continuous revelations about the Clinton campaign. Time after time they refused to even cover the rampant corruption in the DNC, from how the Democratic nomination race was one-sided against Sanders, to how Clinton's very close relationship with Wall Street and her handling of Benghazi deeply damaged her credibility.

I do have a preference for facts but what I do not have a preference for is a Fourth Estate that has been infiltrated and manipulated to support an elite cadre intent on pushing a certain agenda.

I don't exactly follow what people would call the mainstream media closely, but what I was exposed to mentioned all of these things (or at least the fact that she was accused of them), while their coverage of Trump that I saw consisted solely of unedited airing of him speaking.

I sincerely don't understand the claims that the coverage was biased against Trump. If anything, it seemed to me that they were personally against him but in response to that they overcompensated and skewed the coverage too far in his direction.

The media bent themselves into some really odd shapes to make Trump's continuous string of gaffes appear somehow "normal".

Sanders supporter who voted for Trump because of disdain for the Democrats and party corruption. For example, super delegates flipping states for HRC. Donna Brazile's shenanigans, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Wall Street speeches, Clinton Foundation. Trump(and Bernie) created a consciousness/awakening in the country about the how the political system has been captured by the donor class and corporate interests. Hopefully, the Democratic party will purge itself and return to being the peoples party. If not we need a third party direct democracy organization driven by open source software and forums like HN which hold online debates and crowd source the decisions made by politicians.

> Sanders supporter who voted for Trump

There's an undeniable indicator of an unsound mind right there. The correlation in policy goals between Sanders and Clinton was probably about 0.8, but you went with the guy at 0.1.

The only noticeable commonality between Sanders and Trump is that they're both white males, which I suspect is a significant reason for your absurd trajectory of political preference (whether you'll admit that to yourself or not).

whats the correlation between any policy goal during a campaign and what actually happens? Insiders from both political parties didn't want Trump and didn't want Bernie. Trump has kind of upended both political parties. A good thing.

MSM gave ample coverage to the most important story of all - Comey's political move on emails a week before election. It was pasted in huge headlines across all mainstream media outlets. And that turned out to be a dud at the end, but the damage was done. So not sure what you are expecting.

Much like the US today is a better country than it ever was, "the media" today is better than its critics say. People have a fantasy of how it supposedly was, how objectivity works (or doesn't) in journalism, and how much we still rely on a small handful of traditional publications.

Journalism has always had, and always will, a part to play in shaping public opinion. "Simply disseminating information" is something a phone book may do. Publishing a newspaper starts being subjective when you decide on what to write about.

The ecosystem of hanger-ons garnishing news with left-wing (Mother Jones, HuffPost) or right-wing (breitbart, FOX) slant adds exactly nothing but vitriol.

Wikileaks has shown exactly nothing except that in a million internal e-mails you're bound to find a few embarrassing ones. And that the American right has absolutely no problem that they won an election with the proven and admitted help of the Russian government.

What annoys me is how people treat ideology as the only type of bias. People will accuse a news source of being biased in favor of the left or right and that's it. The reality is that ideology is not even the most interesting or influential type of bias.

For example, news organizations heavily favor sensationalism over stories that are important but boring. News organizations will pander, reporting stories that their audience will enjoy rather than what will educate them. There's a "pre existing narrative" bias, for example Al Gore was a dorky know it all so of course he claimed to invent the internet, regardless of reality.

Maybe the New York Times or CNN slightly favors the right or the left, but give them a story that is sensational and fits the narrative and they won't shut up about it no matter which ideology it harms.

> but unfairly singles out the alt-right movement

Did you miss the part of the article where they pointed out a series of left-leaning false claims?

"No, delayed military absentee ballots would not have swung the election. No, Melania Trump has not filed for divorce, nor was her husband born in Pakistan. No, Mike Pence definitely did not tell Fox News that gay conversion therapy saved his marriage."

It's called cognitive dissonance. :)

I don't see SJWs being regarded as a threat to American democracy but they are agitators and proud-idiots just the same.

>The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair due to their close adherence to progressive extremist ideology and their objectivity is rightly attacked.

The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair because it's funding model was disrupted. No income source = less (real) reporters.

> unfairly singles out the alt-right movement -- one can't say that they are wrong in their dogmatic mistrust of the media

A lot of alt-righters distrust the media because they think it's controlled by Jews. That's a regular theme on alt-right websites.

So yes, you can say they are wrong in their dogmatic mistrust of the media.

It's funny that mainstream news sources were saying Clinton was basically guaranteed to win, they were sure, they had no doubts, then they were proven wrong by what happened.

Everyone for 1 day said "Hey maybe the news doesn't know what they are talking about?"

The next day everyone forgot, and now we get the same news sources that were so wrong, telling us again the problem is "this".

How come they were so wrong and we all knew it, then forgot, then will accept another one of their likely incorrect explanations for why all this happened?

It was great watching NBC, CNN, et al election night.

Every hour or so there'd be a conversation like

A: "What did our polls get so wrong?"

B: "Well regardless, it looks like Trump's path to victory...blah blah"

Not even an ounce of introspection. Still haven't heard any answers.

"Not even an ounce of introspection. Still haven't heard any answers."

Really now. No introspection? No answers? It might help to read the post-election coverage, which was, you know...all introspection. Nonstop. For the last week. To help you out, here's a sample:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-w... http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-perc... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/upshot/presidential-foreca... http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/... http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/11/donald-tru... http://www.nature.com/news/pollsters-struggle-to-explain-fai...

If you're willing to go so far as to download a podcast, you could try any of: NPR Politics, On the Media, FiveThirtyEight Politics and Left Right and Center, all of whom have done at least one in-depth story on the polling miss in the last week.

I was talking about the mainstream TV news outlets that handled most(?) of the election night coverage.

These often have their own polls their responsible for.

It's great saner minds have looked into it; I meant to point out the dearth of follow-up by big-name news stations.

I'm not sure why people are holding 'failure to predict a Trump win' against the news. It's not the news' job to tell us what is going to happen, but to tell us accurately what has happened.

True, it is not their job to predict the future... But if they go about doing that, then they are responsible. No one is forcing news organizations to publish polls, they do it by choice.

But that is hardly the point, most of the media told us for months that Trump wasn't a real candidate, then he wouldn't win and that Clinton was the only real candidate and you had choose her. They published tons of positive articles about her and tones of negative about him.

In a general sense this tarnishes their credibility, either they lied or they didn't know what they were talking about for the last 6 months.

Being wrong about who would win isn't so much of the problem, its more about being totally clueless about what was going on and what people actually thought about the situation.... They failed at their job of telling everyone what had happened.

They were not the ones predicting anything. Polls were doing that. They were just reporting what the polls said.

Judging by what you say I would have never heard anything bad about Clinton. No one ever brought up her emails. We didn't hear anything about a new investigation. /s

Oddly enough we never really did hear in the news that Trump had two court cases coming up after the election. I literally never heard that mentioned on GMA. I heard about the Clinton-Comey investigation every morning.

If you keep repeating something that isn't true, people stop listening to what you say... It doesn't mater if you made up the story or someone told it to you, the spreader takes the responsibility when it comes to reputation.

> In a general sense this tarnishes their credibility, either they lied or they didn't know what they were talking about for the last 6 months.

I think we have very different understandings of what the news is about. Maybe you're comparing more editorial aspects, while I'm concentrating on reportage of facts? So, 'not a real candidate, not able to win, clinton is only real candidate, have to choose her' are all opinion. Whereas Trump says he wants to build a wall, Trump boasts about being able to sexually assault women, Trumps campaign has ties to Russia and is being helped by Russia, the polls as they were, Trumps refusal to take standard steps to avoid conflict of interest and to be transparent were and are all facts.

Individuals that appeared saying the things you said were opinion pieces, and they potentially should reevaluate (although quite a few of them are not proved wrong by the simple fact of Trump winning). Individuals saying the things I listed were reporting facts. Just because a lot of facts were particularly unflattering for one of the candidates doesn't mean that reporting was wrong or biased, and all the calls for the MSM to beat itself up for how it was wrong make no sense. The things I listed don't go away just because Trump won.

To be clear, I'm not taking a position on either candidate, they both seemed to be the absolute least likeable option.

The line between 'opinion' and 'fact' is mostly invisible, in fact presenting anything beyond the exact quoted words of a person is speculation and opinion. A story that gives context to a quote by its very nature has a bias or opinion to it.

It is very rare if ever the case that a purely factual, dry presentation of facts is presented in the news. For this reason it seems unreasonable to hold that as the standard of news.

The polls were off by about 2%. Unfortunately, it made a lot of a difference because of the winner-take-all system. These polls, and aggregation models are also not produced by the media themselves, they just report on it as they do for the weather forecast.

Also we didn't "all know it". How would that even work? "I can feel there is a great enthusiasm for Trump, and he will win the election, although he'll get 2 million fewer votes than Clinton"?

What are you complaining about? The news correctly reported the polls. Are journalists supposed to make up their own polls or report their "gut feelings" because trained statisticians with decades of experience with exit polls can sometimes, under unusual circumstances get it wrong?

For the past couple of years we have had these arguments about how hard it is for quality journalism to get paid today. Some argued that people will eventually pay for online newspapers. Others replied that there will always be free news somewhere, and they will find new sites as paywalls go up.

Now we know what happened. There is plenty of free news out there, but with zero fact-checking and often deliberate lies. Meanwhile the established new sources have lost income, and are cutting corners.

You would think that people would eventually congregate to trusted brands, like buying Coca-Cola because you know it wont poison you. But, news brands can be held responsible for their faults, while social media people can pump out a constant stream of lies and never answer to anyone.

Aww, crap.

We (DARPA, BNN, et al) built this resilient network which interprets firewalls as outages and routes around them. We build this cheap-to-publish network where anybody can get a broad audience.

And now we have to deal with cybercriminals and cyberbullshitters. Good networks have interesting consequences.

What if some misbegotten mishmash of Prestel, X.25, MAP/TOP and DECNet had prevailed in the marketplace instead of HTTP/TCP/IP? What if people had to learn to whistle ASN-1 into a modem to get online? Would it have slowed things down?

You win Paul's great new word of the day award:

  CyberBullShitters.

I hope the capitalisation is right.

I'm sure it isn't the only problem, but I'm sure it doesn't help at all either.

The real problem is people being so willing to discard their bullshit detector when information fits their preconceived ideas, and so willing to break it out for things that don't. Source of the idea matters but it's not by any means going to stop people from sharing the stuff.

If you can figure out how to fix that, then we can fix Democracy.

I'm not sure of that (that democracy can be fixed through perfect information).

I'm not even sure we'd want a world with perfect information. Is the pursuit of art for art's sake valuable. What if the answer is no? Do we repress art?

Having a variety of ideas rests on there not being perfect information and people making personal choices based on imperfect information.

> Is the pursuit of art for art's sake valuable?

That's a subjective question. When it comes to public policy the vast majority of what should be questions (and are often turned into bullet points instead because we don't want to discuss things) are able to be answered, even if we don't like the answers we get. Things like, "Does better education lower jail populations?", or "Do lower taxes stimulate the economy?" and things like that have an answer, somewhere. The real problem is getting people to A: Understand the answer, and B: Be willing to discard previously held notions and move forward with what the data tells them.

I understand, but things can get thorny.

Does keeping a population uneducated lead to happier people?

Or, is there an optimized ratio of educated vs uneducated that leads to better population stability? Yes, ok, do we enforce that?

That said, I lean more towards technocratic solutions [that is solutions and policies driven by data, even if data can shift over time] over gut-feeling or popular solutions.

Again though, you're attaching to metrics that are inherently un-knowable. A population being happy boils down to people being happy, and every person has their own subjective definition of happy, which is then filtered through the lens of self-reporting.

If you goal is to create a happy society, then the people in that society should be allowed the maximum freedom possible to acquire knowledge, perform work, create art, etc. as makes them happy. To define their own profession, if you will, including "professions" that are not market valuable.

Utopia, basically, which I think is actually becoming within reach if we can all manage to not kill each other in the next century or so.

In a sense, yes, it's unknowable, but in a softer sense, it is. You can poll people with doctoral, master's, bachelor's associate's, high school graduates, and people who didn't get past high school, didn't get past elementary and see what the results are and make a determination as to what education level might make people happiest.

"(the democracy can be fixed through perfect information)"

I think what's being advocated is not perfect information, but rather that we find a way to weld the bullshit-detection-switch to "on" in the vast majority of people, so they don't selectively switch it off when viewing information that fits their current mental model of the world.

In theory (assessing it mentally) that sounds like a good pursuit. I'm not sure we can get people who are entrenched to change how they evaluate information/disinformation, however. It's not a right left issue.

People will complain about say Breitbart (that have opinion pieces which are to put it mildly, out of synch with most republicans) but then don't see the same kind of thing coming out of HuffPo or even some NPR programs like CodeSwitch which can also put out opinion pieces which strain logic.

Exactly. Information is not the problem, or at least not the most fundamental one. The problem is that humans have a natural bias towards believing anything that agrees with one's existing worldview, and a natural bias against believing anything contrary to that worldview. In short, the underlying problem really is a function of how our brains work.

Social media may not be the cause, but IMO it's definitely not helping either. In the past, the kinds of political disagreements you see on social media would almost always have happened in person instead (or over the phone at least). I suspect most people find it a lot easier to be a jerk online than in person.

The problem here, is people are willing to brush aside facts that are most easily left to interpretation based on world view, for the larger sake of their cause, where the ends justify the means.

As a very middle of the road moderate (if that's the right word? Maybe it's something else.) type, I clearly see this disregard on both the liberal and conservative side. Much in the same way an agnostic has to sit and watch mommy atheist and daddy religion fight.

Examples:

1. Trump is a racist

Liberal >> Common sense and all evidence point towards him having and continuing to have racist and bigoted behavior. Electing him would empower racists and harm the country.

Conservative >> Common sense and all evidence point towards the biased media fixating on his conservative views of upholding the law (ILLEGAL immigration) and trying to paint him and anyone else with those views as racist. Also, he is a flamboyant TV personality, I am more than willing to overlook his gaffs because at least he says what he thinks. Electing him would help reverse the damage caused over the last 8 years.

Something Else >> Trump is a jerk and probably has lots of personal issues, and may indeed be a racist. While I am sure there is a small minority of people that like his ideas based on a place of hate, it seems there are a lot of people that have an ideological reason to support him based on the changes they want to see made. Electing him seems like a risky move, and may destabilize things.

2. Obama is a Muslim

Liberal >> Obama's officially stated religion is Christianity. Yes, he is friendly towards Muslims, why wouldn't he be. We have a long way to go towards repairing our relationships and reputation at home and abroad as being inclusive and tolerant of ALL lifestyles, beliefs, and religions.

Conservative >> Obama's actions in office show a disregard of his duties to protect Americans at home and abroad from the threat that is radical Islam.

Something Else >> Obama is a classy guy, and he is not afraid to mix it up with people no matter what people think. Not sure about things like the Iran deal are the smartest but I very sure he (and some other decently smart people) have our best interest in mind, however, I am not sure if they are making the best decisions. I am unsure that any amount of publicly available facts about national defence, economy, Middle East past and present tensions and issues, and Iran, will make me better able to judge this.

Conclusion:

Just because you have facts, doesn't mean you have an understanding. Wisdom and knowledge are for sure bolstered by each other, but not synonymous. It seems to me both sides have a righteous indignation against the other. It will take compassion and compromise to truly move forward as one human race.

The problem wasn't with the "fake news", whatever that even means. The problem was that the so-called "real news" sites were lying through their teeth non-stop all election.

Care to provide some specifics?

Several studies have been done on the positive or negative connotations of articles[0]. Various studies have been done on which candidate journalists themselves contribute to[1].

That journalists lean left/far left isn't disputable. Whether that colors their reporting on the other hand, might be. The biggest lie that the media can tell while staying in business is 'lying by omission'. It was on display during the recent 60 Minutes interview where Lesley Stahl asked Trump about his supporters attacking anti-trump protestors. That's a fair question by itself, but why if a few isolated incidents evokes their curiousity, why wasn't the media talking about the other 90% of the violence that was perpetrated by anti-Trump protesters? Lying by omission was a constant drumbeat this cycle and they won't be trusted by the average American as a whole for a very long time[2].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/09/2... [1] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/what-media-bias-journalist... [2] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/poll-70-percent-of-america...

> If you can figure out how to fix that, then we can fix Democracy.

This is actually very easy for people to accomplish. Put down the phones and go outside and talk to people.

The number people repeating the wikileaks bullshit that clinton is a devil worshipper is kinda insane. It would be silly to say its not a problem at all.

> the wikileaks bullshit that clinton is a devil worshiper

i would definitely read that fake news.

PUTIN2017!!!

Which leaked email said that? I didn't see it. I saw the one that cut off Tulsi Gabbard's fundraising for endorsing Bernie Sanders. [1]

I saw the emails between the Clinton campaign and DNC coordinating strategy to "elevate" Donald Trump in a "pied piper" strategy. [2]

It is hard to dismiss that the DNC was a campaign arm of the Clinton campaign. Whether you think that is a big deal or not, the emails do not deserve the dismissive tone you have taken.

[1] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3609 [2] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120

Not sure what you meant to link in #2, but it does not mention the word "elevate", "Trump", "pied piper", or even "strategy".

1) Open up that second link again.

2) Click on the Attachments tab instead of the View Email tab.

3) Inspect PDF contents.

4) Eat words.

I will absolutely eat words. My apologies. I didn't even notice those tabs at top.

I consider myself duly and absolutely corrected. :)

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794450623404113920?lang...

which somehow lead to clinton worships satan.

For the record, the relevant Podesta e-mail is [1]. Which interpretation you subscribe to is another thing.

[1] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15893

I doubt it is either, but how is Snopes remotely in a position to make this call? Snopes is a site for researching urban myths not for making complicated sociopolitical analysis.

I'm not sure who would be in such a position, but - to be fair, Snopes has indeed been for many years in the 'business' of observing and understanding how misinformation spreads.

So, to some extent, they do have some authority to theorize that fake news sites do not spread misinformation (because they supposedly know enough how it spreads to know this doesn't look like it).

IMO this is part of the problem. People relying on what they "know" about the world.

You're relying on previous knowledge of Snopes without considering the accuracy of this account on its own. You "know" the brand but failed to vet this message and the messenger, that is the author, and whether they are qualified individually to make an accurate assessment.

Boxing things into categories leaving little wiggle room for exceptions or evolution

"I don't want knowledge. I want certainty." -- David Bowie

They've dove into routinely-circulated Internet politics new items for a while now. Personally I don't care for it. I can't tell if they know they are doing this or not, but they'll take a circulated story, and then out of every permutation of it across the Internet, they will pick the version that is just outside the realm of fact, and then "debunk" that one as "mixed" or "false."

The problem, IMHO, is trust. We can't trust what we read online. We know there is lots of true, useful information online and there is lots of crap. So, how do you figure out which is which? Intuition, gut response, does it make sense. All are tied to our biases.

Basically we have turned "Do I trust this?" into "Do I agree with what this is saying?" I feel this is the core issue behind filter bubbles.

Fake news sites are mocking the problem. They aren't the cause but they aren't helping either.

I wrote a blog post about this yesterday [1]. The mainstream media has manufactured the "fake news" meme to deflect from the vast amount of fake and manipulated news it pushed through the election. I post the example of Trump supposedly mocking a reporter's disability as a good example of the way the New York Times and other media, supported by their "fact-checkers", completely manufactured the news to suit their preferred narrative.

[1] http://newslines.org/blog/lets-talk-about-fake-news/

Of course it's not the problem - it's just like any other bias and propaganda (of which there's plenty in pretty much all media) - but it's a convenient scapegoat.

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