Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News | Hacker News Reader

Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

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I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources.

I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true.

However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments."

I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times.

Her response:

"That's comforting."

I was shocked.

And yet, that is the reality we now live in. Many, many people are acting, and thinking, exactly like her.

Note that when confronted about false stories (which were sourced from white aupremacist propaganda) he retweeted, the President-elect, while still a candidate, responded fairly similarly, so, yeah, it's definitely an attitude that is becoming quite normalized.

It's that combined with the echo chamber effect of their algorithms. I've watched a diverse group of smart and average people across political spectrum this election. Most of them consistently shared unsubstantiated claims or biased media. As expected, their media was always presenting evidence for their side and agsinst the other. Corporate media always did that for maximizing ratings and ad impressions.

However, there's a difference. People often had these discussions face to face with other views visible or at least some consequences for bullshitting. Now, the like-minded naturally group together with Facebook making the others (esp moderates) largely disappear from the feed. Showing them what they wanted to see with convenience of scrolling past opposing beliefs reinforced the echo chambers and false beliefs. That few counterpoints are displayed reinforces it further by creating illusion of false consensus for their side. All the resulting upvotes and shares reinforce the algorithm's effect.

I speculate such things are why the divide seemed so much stronger in this election than before. They need to bump into each other more for the necessary conversations to occur. The tech increases isolation instead. The effects will only get worse over time.

It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments as they're doing nothing to reinforce the polarization, anger, and frustration we find so vital to drive engagement, page views, clicks, and time on site.

"The effects will only get worse over time."

I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. My imagination (and knowledge of history) are too limited. Anyone have some good examples? Or know of projects that are working on similar topics?

"It would be really nice if you wouldn't consistently post such balanced comments"

Lol. Believe me, a few people on social media agreed and I can't see their stuff any more. ;)

"I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. "

Similarly having a hard time. This particular one got reversed temporarily each time new mediums were invented. Then, the people using such tactics mastered them for the new mediums. Helps when the start rolling in money then use it to ensure the dominance. The social media has more potential to counter this than ever if they just adjust the algorithm to bridge the groups a certain percentage of time. They can mostly create a comfortable experience for the ad revenue but should make sure articles citing at least half-ass sources float into opposing feeds while letting bullshit stuff Snopes counters fall lower. That simple change, applied to everyone, might have a significant effect on the situation at least for moderates or rational people likely to effect change.

Just wondering, was this sentence intentionally written in an extremely complicated way? It took me a while to figure out what it was saying.

6 commas in one sentence is indeed a lot. I'm still unsure what it means.

No, that's pretty typical of my writing that isn't edited down.

Usually, even for HN comments, I'm a little better at editing before anyone else sees it, though.

It's not just on Facebook. I have a close family member who was genuinely excited by Assange insinuating Clinton's camp murdered a DNC staffer (without offering any proof to that effect), simply because it would lower her chances of winning.

Just from a cultural perspective, I feel like worldwide we are again celebrating that "my team at all costs!" mentality that was so prominent during the 1980s.

This is not to say that the opinion landscape in other decades didn't have problems; but they were somewhat different in nature.

I was a bit young in the 1980s -- do you mean the capitalism vs. communism divide, or something else?

I don't really go on Facebook. Can you give an example of the type of fake news story you're talking about?

Here's a classic example, though the original website is down, so I linked to the Facebook Debug tool:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%...

Did you notice that you are replying to a person with no facebook account to a link that requires a facebook login to view? Maybe that's unavoidable, given the topic, but it's not visible without logging in.

Is there a way to take maybe a screenshot for people who don't use facebook?

https://s13.postimg.org/f09sy4vgn/Screen_Shot_2016_11_16_at_...

Thank you. Wow, politics do lie, but Trump took it to a new level. Seems like this will be a new standard from now on.

Buzzfeed, of all places, actually has a great article on this: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-...

My site, Newslines, addresses the fake news problem in a simple way. Our objective over the next few years is to create a news search engine by summarising all of the world's news into timelines. All of the news our crowdsourced team summarises goes through an editorial check before it is posted to the site, so it is extremely difficult to put fake news on the site.

During the summarization process we also strip out all the commentary and bias, resulting in what we hope will be an unbiased news archive of the topic. We have had good results so far, for example, our newsline of "Mattress Girl" [1] is the most unbiased account of her case on the web, despite being curated made from exceptionally biased sources. If you like what we are doing please join us.

[1]http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/

Had the same thing happen where I pointed out something was false to an acquaintance who shares frequently and he said "well we each play our part, thankfully there are people like you" or something to that affect.

The idea that it was my job to screen the bullshit...

I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed.

>I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed.

Same. Now its just a messaging platform now, its great

Ever tried messenger.com ?

Yes. Rarely ever visit facebook.com . Unfollowed everyone before they released messenger.com but now use that primarily. The only other benefit of FB now is party invitations.

I've had similar experiences on Facebook. Facts don't matter. Even when linking to proof that something is fake news, the fake news doesn't get removed or addressed.

This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...

This has me deeply, deeply concerned. The election is one thing, but what happens if/when elected officials start screwing with something like Social Security, resulting in a generation of people who had their tax dollars deferred, but saw no benefit when they retired? In a post-fact world, I'm not convinced that the people will take action against such a thing.

The fact that "post-fact world" is even a thing is frightening.

The fact that "post-truth" was picked as the word of the year for 2016 is very frightening.

Citation?

Edited to add: /s

sure: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/po...

and

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

Thanks :) My comment was actually a (poor) attempt at humor. I didn't think it would work if I added /s. Didn't work anyway :)

Hah... I figured it might have been but then again this is the internet so....

Don't worry, it's just "Truthiness" all over again.

Is the world so radically different in this regard now? I'm not disagreeing outright, but I still think that lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time. Remember the chain e-mails that were oh so popular prior to social networks? And before that, before electronics, there must have been a lot of bullshit that was spread in the written word on paper and before that by word of mouth. The fake news business is largely the same old thing in new wrapping IMO.

With communication enabling faster communication with greater reach, there might be more noise, but is it worse in terms of percentage of communication?

> lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time

Yeah, but they were never shrugged off. Even the worst charlatans insisted they speak the truth; they didn't just go "meh, maybe it's not true after all, what is truth anyway".

The feedback loop is much tighter now. The more outrageous a story is, the more people click it, and the more money that story makes. You can immediately measure the effect (the Macedonian teenagers quickly zoomed in to the more gullible Trump supporters, because they made more money).

In the past news sources had a reputation to protect, so crazy stories were confined to tabloids and some radio shows. Now all these stories just pop up in peoples streams, without anything to distinguish them from stories from reliable sources.

Couple that with the fact that, even with trustworthy sources, you can paint an inaccurate picture just by editing which stories you present (which Facebook is incentivised to do and actually does), and I think the problem is much worse now.

The yellow journalism feedback loop of the late 19th century was pretty tight.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

I've already long assumed that my social security benefits will not be there.

I envy your optimism.

Me too. I resent the taxes I pay because of that.

if/when elected officials start screwing with something like Social Security

Buckle up!

http://paulryan.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=9969

Saves Medicare for current and future generations, with no disruptions for those in and near retirement.

For younger workers, when they become eligible, Medicare will provide a premium-support payment and a list of guaranteed coverage options – including a traditional fee-for-service option – from which recipients can choose a plan that best suits their needs.

So under Paul Ryan's plan we will pay Medicare tax all our life for an option to buy Obamacare when we retire?

I'm sure they'll at least rebrand it.

I'm thinking TRyancare.

I posted a related story here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975066

It is a reflection of real world behavior. Before Facebook, people spread similarly wild rumors via word of mouth.

And now at scale. Illustrates the old saying "quantity has a quality all its own".

Were they PAID at scale to do so in the past though?

That's the frightening part. The financial incentives in the system are all screwed up. These kids are doing it purely for the easy dollars; they don't even care about the politics at all.

It's like schoolyard taunts, except the kids are getting paid for who can come up with the most viral rumour. Something seems deeply, deeply broken about this at a systemic level that's different than say, people spreading misinformation to others they know by word-of-mouth.

Paid for media is also not a new phenomenon.

The only difference is that you need to pay lots of untrained people to lie on Facebook, while you needed to pay just a couple of highly trained people to lie on a newspaper.

These people are in dissonance and don't understand they need to do the work to get out of it because it's too damn easy to get the work for free off the Internet.

Those who know better, do better.

For people in China where Facebook is not accessible, however, the same things happen in WeChat, especially in its Moments timeline which more or less resembles the one from Facebook. Fake `news', rumors, (unreliable) hints for health/food and click-baits are just more than popular.

WeChat did provide a process to flag inappropriate articles, but people around the age of my parents just won't stop forwarding.

I keep thinking China is right to block Facebook, but you're right they have their own implementation of the problem anyway.

The flag can only stop a small amount of them. The real problem is that people unaware that they are reading fake news and share them to more and more people. This is doing a lot of harm.

Sounds like a problem with your friends, not Facebook.

Not at all, unless he has 16.000 friends.

I've been "unfriended" more than once for doing this -- people don't like being called out for spreading fake news, especially when the fake news supports their own personal worldview.

You assume people ever cared about facts. People are more emotional than they are rational when it comes to things that are outside of their control. While someone might be perfectly rational and logical in their life (e.g. they pay their taxes, they go to work, they make smart choices in their day to day lives), when it comes to things that are outside of our control (politics, economy, death, etc).

We have always been pretty irrational and easy to manipulate.

Feelings don't care about your facts. It's actually amazing that a breed of primates made it this far when you consider how irrational we really are with regard to so many things: who we cede power to, how we judge truth and falsity, etc.

We didn't get this far despite our irrationality, we got this far because of it.

Interesting. Care to elaborate?

We're here, so there was some advantage to our irrationality. Hating outsiders helps our children survive for example.

I'd argue a lot of our best inventions required a certain amount of irrationality to create.

I think you may be begging the question. You might be right that we're here because of our irrationality, but using your conclusion as its own argument isn't very convincing.

No, all you can infer from the fact that we're still here is that it's possible to succeed while being irrational. It tells you nothing about whether we succeeded despite or because of it.

It's come down to "the end justifies the means". And I'm not sure there's a way to stop it given the core buttons being pushed: confirming bias, bringing audiences to companies, giving people attention.

Facebook could probably give people a public rating based on the accuracy of the information they shared, and shame the worst offenders, but neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established.

I don't like the idea that you can play a straight bat but be overrun by hustlers.

> neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established.

I'm on the fence about that one. On the flip-side:

1. If they don't police it, then Facebook as a whole gets a reputation for disinformation. (When I look at Facebook, I personally ignore most shared articles because they're mostly crap, and I don't want to look at them. I only care about the personal goings-on of friends, and the signal-to-noise gets worse over time.)

2. If you take someone who doesn't care about truth, they're not going to introspectively seek-out a metric which might report "You're misinformed and stupid!" BUT If you're self-righteous about the truth, then you might want some objective metrics which say, "Look I don't spread misinformation or live in an echo chamber! But Cheryl does! Look, Cheryl, I'm smarter than you!" That might provide some basis for a viral dynamic.

True on the latter. A bit like the verified tick on Twitter being a desirable thing. Social networks could open additional features for someone with a better record.

Remember on your first point though that it might not be a factor for the majority of people. Can also reach people through ad networks, or social networks, etc.

There was a paper published about how being presented with disconfirming evidence causes people to double down on their belief in a lie if it has an emotional connection with them.

It would be good to see if that study can be replicated.

"In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."

http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07...

I'm aware of the studies - I remember reading of them at the time - and find them fairly convincing.

It's just that since that time we've become more aware of the "replication crisis" in science generally, and it'd be nice to see independent researchers confirm Nyhan's findings.

Anecdotally, it's replicated by several individuals I've run into (it seems to be the exceptional person that can process incoming data that conflicts with their worldview) and pretty much every other commenter has had similar experiences on this thread. Not scientific, of course...but...

I think it would depend on who is doing it, and how condescending they are.

We don't really have an independent press anymore, and blog-sphere can be trivially gamed by interested and powerful actors. Have we as a civilization ever witnessed such a pervasive disinformation culture?

I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not.

So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us.

(Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.)

[1]: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushn...

That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.

>>So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it.

I think a lot of people develop acceptance of fake news from their camp because they just assume the other camp is doing it as well and see it as leveling the playing field.

When I put on my rose-colored glasses and look back at the past (1950s??) it seems that lying was very much looked down upon. Not so much any more. Seems like it's 'anything goes that you can get away with'. Is this because we're not teaching ethics in school? Decline in churches? Apathy from feeling helpless?

No, just lying about different things. Back then you were absolutely supposed to lie about things like having sex before marriage, where your teenage daughter went for six months just after she started dating that guy and putting on weight, how much you love being a housewife, the attraction you have for your own sex, your interest in non-gender-conforming behaviour, what your creepy uncle did when he babysat you...

I agree with you that humans are prone to lie, and that cultures have developed protocols around that, but we can distinguish here on both degrees and categories of lies. If your daughter became pregnant in school in the 50s, something terribly had gone off socially acceptable script. (It is irrelevant how we view that script today.) All of your examples are specimens of social remedies to deal with these social hot potatoes. But adopting domestic propaganda as a norm is another thing.

Or take the somewhat analogous history of torture in USA. Of course that shit has been going on in this country (and elsewhere) from day one, but it is one thing for individuals or units or even communities to lose it, or do it out of sight, and another thing entirely for the state to officially adopt it as a tool of state craft.

Not quite so.

Those lies were as much in support of the system as they were ways to deal with it. The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.

> The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.

(Their neighbor should have lied too.)

I tend to view societies as non-linear and catastrophic systems. The system above was trying to maintain a social order and it wasn't attempting a 100% conformity to rule x. There is a threshold of violating rule x that would destabilize the social order and the governing social rules are optimized to keep violations well below that threshold. By lying about a violation event, both the fact of the violation is leaked (because the lies are transparent), and, a family unit is protected from suffering the consequences of publicly breaking rule x. But if a family of daughters repeatedly had presented daughters with cases of 'eating disorder', then you can be certain that family would be subject to social scrutiny.

Every culture develops a variant of this mechanism. For some it is a first class device (e.g. Ta'arof in Iranian culture) and for others it is an implicit device.

The key issue is always "where is that threshold" and not that these mechanisms exist. They exist for a reason, since as every school child knows:

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the king's horses and all the king's men
    Couldn't put Humpty together again.

[p.s. to be clear, imo, the contemporary lies we're discussing have crossed those thresholds and are destabilizing and we can possibly trace the seminal event to Watergate and Deepthroat and acceptance of anonymous sources.

Here is a very interesting example of a key leader discussing transparency in the press. It is interesting in the sense that it both addresses this issue and is itself the source of a fairly prevalent disinformation.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speech...

(The disinfo bit is where an edited version of above audio is promoted as Kennedy warning us about the NWO and Illuminati. /G)]

Perhaps the penalty for lying has gone down? Much broader reach, so you can potentially dupe a lot more people, and you can either hide your true identity or you're so removed from the individuals you duped that they can't effectively affect your real reputation. There's gotta be stuff out there on reputation that looks into this.

Your own clarity of view has gone up.

Issues of going to magazines for current-events aside, I do not understand what your underlying argument is when you say:

   how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it

If we step away from the context of what happened, are you stating that anything a politician denies must not be true? If you'd like, I'm happy to go into the context of this as well.

> are you stating that anything a politician denies must not be true?

No. Simply that the barrier to featured publication of rumors on national press is supposed to be somewhat more demanding than 4chan et al.

I think reputable organizations risk their integrity each time they quote an unnamed source - this is the basis of the public's acceptance of unnamed sourced.

I imagine NBC has a process for using unnamed sources; I know the NYT has one and has written about it in the past.

Thus, I recognize your frustration but do not see the link between 4Chan and a well-known news organization. You might raise the issue of the Vanity Fair reporter's lawsuit, to which I would suggest not reading VF if you no longer believe in their integrity.

I am using a standard line "It's fake. In general you should consider anything you see on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp or the Internet to be false by default."

Engaging in refuting online garbage constantly is a painful waste of time, and keeping silent or blocking it just allows it to fester.

I'm hoping that this makes a difference, and I've used a trivial and non-threatening example of fakery (fake supermoon pics) to plant the idea that nothing online can be trusted, within my social circles.

I should add to the Urban Dictionary 'Is that a Facebook joke? - said in response to any sub-par attempt at humour.'

This is my standard line for those that spend too long on Facebook and believe that nothing in the mainstream media should be read under any circumstances whatsoever lest the propaganda lead to brainwashing.

My snarky response to someone's effort at being funny by repeating some drivel they read on one of their friend's pages is a bit miserable but it condenses everything I feel about how Facebook is a waste of time and quite dangerous for one's personality makeup. There is no need to have the discussion about why I am not on such things, opportunities arise for me to use the 'Is that a Facebook joke?' expression of sentiment.

I have the same experience as you. Most people just don't care and they only care about the topics that they can talk to their friends, without researching for even a bit to prove it.

It's time for startup to develop a Chrome Extension to detect fake news on Facebook.

I've thought the same thing, but the people interested in using such an extension would get their news from places other than Facebook.

Self-selection bias greatly reduces the efficacy of such an extension.

They could get their news from Facebook too, they would just more likely subscribe to more reputable pages and have less hoax-sharing friends.

Then they would claim that reputable sources too are biased against their beliefs and they'll come up with their reputable sources. Paranoia is some people nurse and profit from—unfortunately.

I think it is time for Facebook to develop the "thumb down" button, or some other way to flag fake news.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bs-detector/dlcgke...

It has to be per story without party bias. It's a really hard problem to solve.

So the average people mostly wants to live in a reinforcing bias, and not "truth" ?

Are they changing their mind based on those news? I assume those kind of people don't read news to educate themselves, they use 'news' to confirm the beliefs & thoughts they already have and will likely never change.

Check out the most recent Last Week tonight. Features clips of President Elect Trump making almost identical comments. In March he claimed a man who rushed the stage at one of his rallies had ties to ISIS. When confronted with the fact that the source he'd linked to was a hoax, his response was, "What do I know about it? All I know is it was on the internet." [1]

Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly: Bill: "You tweeted out that whites killed by blacks - these are statistics you picked up from somewhere - at a rate of 81%. That's totally wrong; whites killed by blacks at a rate of 15%."

Trump: "Hey Bill. Am I going to check every statistic? I've got millions of people... you know what? Fine. But this came out of radio shows and everything else."

Anyway, worth watching the whole show. It's funny, in a painful way.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s

This extreme partisanship is one of the reasons I'm wary of John Oliver. For example, Politifact, despite its biases or subjectivity, has documented examples of practically every major politian making untrue statements. Including the current POTUS.

We need a systemic approach to dealing with lies and untruths of the people who weild power. If you make it partisan, the liar/politican will just block you out, and so will their followers.

John Oliver clearly has a political leaning but I don't believe he states anything untrue as fact.

That was not my point. Where exactly did I say he does that? He commits glaring omissions in favour of the people on his side.

I agree with you that reporting selective truths can still be a very strong form of bias. However, Oliver is completely open about the fact that he's entirely biased. It's clearly editorial. (And also clearly a comedy, not a serious news program.) I could still see an argument that the bias is unfair, but in my opinion far more insidious are organizations like Breitbart (and I'm sure some left-leaning ones as well) that use this selective truth-telling to serve their biases while making an effort to appear unbiased.

To be fair to John Oliver, in the episode he points out stuff from both sides, calling out how many fact news articles are left-leaning. He also points out his own show's bias and mentions Politifact in his episode. To be fair also to John Oliver, Bill Oreilly calling out Trump for not checking facts is amazing, and Trump saying he has no time to check facts is even more amazingly scary.

I don't think anyone is unaware of his partisanship. But partisanship is only relevant if it affects reporting, which by your statement would seem like we are of opposite convictions. I believe both the old Daily Show (and likely the new one as well, but I never watch it) and Last Week Tonight work really hard to put everything they report/joke about in a relevant context without leaving anything out, and I have yet to see anything hinting otherwise.

I've seen a lot of critique for Clinton on Last Week Tonight, but even if I hadn't, why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?

But speaking of politifact [1] [2]:

Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies? I find it wholly unsurprising that all politicians lie more than "regular people", but I find it supremely horrifying the amount of Trumps lies that are swallowed whole to the extent that Hillary is the one portrayed as "crooked" when comparing these statistics.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/

[2] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/

> But partisanship is only relevant if it affects reporting,

It does, here.

> which by your statement would seem like we are of opposite convictions.

I have no idea what you mean.

> without leaving anything out, and I have yet to see anything hinting otherwise.

I don't share your belief. Haven't you seen his hit-piece on third-party candidates? You had two big candidates with little or no integrity, and yet, he paints the third party candidates as not even worthy of consideration because they said one or to silly things, or were unaware of some details.

> why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?

Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.

> Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies?

Not even remotely close to what I wrote.

> when comparing these statistics

The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.

> I don't share your belief. Haven't you seen his hit-piece on third-party candidates? You had two big candidates with little or no integrity, and yet, he paints the third party candidates as not even worthy of consideration because they said one or to silly things, or were unaware of some details.

I have. And I happened to agree. This could've been THE year for third party candidates, had they not been complete dullards. There was basically an open door. And I disagree with you about "both" third party candidates only saying one or two things wrong. They were fundamentally inequipped to respond to basic political issues.

> Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.

If it was true, yes. Where we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald. That seems to be the horrifying root to this entire election.

> The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.

Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think. [1]

[1] http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/15-023_e044cf...

> had they not been complete dullards

Even if they were dullards, I'd prefer them to people who have shown tendencies to destroy countries. I think I saw this joke on 4chan: if Gary Johnson does not know where Aleppo is, that's one less place for him to bomb.

> Wehre we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald.

Well, one of them is an egomaniac, talks garbage, has misbehaved with people, and has run shady charities and a university. The other one has received millions of dollars from banks and foreign powers, and has demonstrated that she will say exactly what her audience wants to hear. Not only has she threatened to up the ante against Syria, she has shown she can deliver, in Libya. I think the worst-case difference we are looking at here is a history of misdemeanor and fraud vs a history of fraud and felony. I prefer (peaceful) dullards to these.

> Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think.

Depends of the topic, I guess. Politifact is biased, and my recommenation for using both resources is the same.

While I agree that exposing untruths (and reporting facts) is important, I welcome obvious partisanship. I believe that all journalists and news organisations have biases, but feel they ought to conceal them. Having an opinion doesn't prevent anyone from telling the truth. All news reporting is selective, even if it is somehow unbiased.

I like multiple-award-winning journalist Clare Sambrook's idea of investigative comment:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/cla...

The show was about Trump, and only about Trump. Why would they bring up anyone else?

And stating that Trump made those statements is true, saying that others also make idiotic statements does not change that.

These are pretty much the defining characteristics of a hit piece. I do not enjoy such things, and I do not recommend such things, for reasons I have already given. Many people think that they are being educated (while being entertained) by such programs. In reality, they develop a very distorted view of politics and of reality. If the media keeps at it, the next two candidates will be no different from Clinton and Trump. Who am I kidding? This is what will happen.

So if you don't go into off topic material, it is a hit piece?

Focus on the topic is also the defining characteristic of a good article.

> So if you don't go into off topic material, it is a hit piece?

That question can't be answered. What do you think the topic of this piece was? The title was "President-Elect Trump". The piece was not about "let's talk about Trump as the future president". Rather, it was about, "things are going to get frighteningly bad under Trump".

Staying on topic and selective blindness are very different things. The latter was on bold display here, and is a defining characteristic of a hit piece.

Politifact is infamous for their bias. Here’s an example of them rating the same exact statement very differently, depending on who made it:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/...

http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/do...

There are numerous studies that also show significant selection bias, that is they cherry-pick statements they fact-check.

Politifact itself makes no attempt to evaluate and correct for their own bias. The newspaper that runs it is liberal leaning, and has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Because of the fact that Politifact tries to appear unbiased, their apparent bias is even more disappointing. Truly neutral fact-checking is something that would be very desirable. Perhaps the only way this will ever happen is by some sort of aggregation of left- and right-leaning “fact-checking.” Sort of like metacritic.

Yes, I have written about this in my later comments.

Those are not the exact same statements at all, they are talking about two (similar sounding) different things.

What different things?

Those are different claims. Bernie specifies that he's talking about youths who only had a high school degree or dropped out. Further, Bernie's campaign replied to Politifact's questions and pointed them to a specific source. Trump made a completely different claim (about all African-American youths), and then ignored Politifact's questions. Trump's claim is wrong, and Bernie's is coming from a slightly weird source but has reasonable support. Further, Trump's campaign refuses to provide support...so of course they're not going to have as favorable a response... they don't even claim to have support for their statement.

The quotation in the article is cherry-picked to make Sanders look good. With little research you can see he’s been repeating this claim non-stop without any such disclaimers.

The following is a direct quote from The Nation interview linked in the very same Politifact article:

> Do you know what real African-American youth unemployment is? It’s over 50 percent.

The fact is both Trump and Sanders were factually wrong. Their usage of the term “unemployment” was at best misleading.

Politifact is however willing to massage Sen. Sander’s statement to make it only “mostly true,” instead of false, which is a clear example of bias.

There are numerous examples of Politifact asserting editorial control in this manner, skewing the results on the Mostly-True–Mostly-False range of the “truthometer.”

And yet while fake news is prevalent on Facebook, I think the big lesson we all should have learned this election cycle is that mainstream media peddles fake news as well. We learned most major media outlets were in the pocket of the HRC campaign from the beginning of the primaries onward. Major media outlets would happily broadcast an empty podium where Trump was waiting to speak for hours during the primaries during primetime while other candidates were giving passionate speeches to a room of cameras which were turned off. News anchors and pundits were essentially stenographers for the HRC campaign team. The news media televised 'debates' in which one candidate was leaked the questions early. On facebook you get fake news from your little bubble of friends, but if you turn on the news on TV or open the New York Times or Washington Post you get fake news as well, news curated by a tiny group of elites who have their own bias -- generally liberal, but first and foremost in favor of continuing the status quo, which is responsible for their positions of respect and power. I'm more likely to get a facebook post from a different viewpoint that I am reading/watching corporate media. I have mainstream liberal and conservative, pro-trump, pro-sanders, pro-johnson, and pro-stein Facebook friends. The media lied constantly this cycle, sometimes blatantly, sometimes not so much, and much more important than the statement of actual facts is curating the facts and subjects you choose to cover -- they shape the zeitgeist. If you run a hundred pieces called "Does Trump support the KKK?" it doesn't really matter that the answer to that question is factually "no". http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...

John Oliver split from doing opinionated, issue-oriented informational pieces with plenty of research to hackish hit pieces near the end of the cycle. Look at what he said about third parties: instead of bringing thoughtful attention to an often-dismissed issue, his sole purpose was to destroy support for third party candidates without regard for fairness, honesty, or truth and it was pretty clear to anyone who'd actually looked at them honestly before watching it.

If you ask any Sanders supporter (or Trump supporter I'd imagine) what they learned this cycle, it's that corporate media is not honest, not objective, and not to be trusted or even given the benefit of the doubt. Even NPR lied through their teeth.

I agree fake news on facebook is bad. But I'm not sure fake news from other sources is better. I don't know what the solution is.

There's a significant difference between slanted news coverage and fake news. You're conflating the two.

Your rude and dismissive tone aside, you are incorrect.

The difference is not significant. Reporting the news /is/ what the news becomes. A slant like the kind I'm discussing is exactly a lie: taking a story, and instead of telling it, saying what you want.

And I'm also talking about explicit lies: the Oliver hit piece on third parties contains some, and if you want to look for explicit lies from MSM they are easy to come by. For example consider the Nevada Democratic primary "chair-throwing" incident, reported as such by every pundit and agency in the media although objective fact is that no chairs were ever thrown. The reports of the incident devoid of context are actually even worse here than misstating the actual fact (why were people angry? crickets), but the lie is still there. Retractions were offered days later in fine print by ombudsmen and ignored by journalists (at the same organizations) presenting the actual story.

Your comment spurred me to look for some stats.

"Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Victim by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Offender, 2015"

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

According to the FBI, in single-victim, single-offender homicides in 2015, 3,167 white people were slain and 500 of those murders were committed by black/African-American people. In the same year, 2,664 black/African-American people were slain and 229 of those murders were committed by white people.

Simple division: 15.8% of whites who were murdered were killed by blacks/African-Americans while only 8.6% of blacks who were murdered were killed by whites. The percentage of whites-killed-by-blacks is about 83.7% higher than vice versa.

So maybe O'Reilly may have garbled his delivery of this factoid?

You're probably right that that's the original source of the messed up "fact", but what Trump originally tweeted was an image, now removed, with these contents according to politifact[1]:

    "Blacks killed by whites -- 2%"

    "Blacks killed by police -- 1%"

    "Whites killed by police -- 3%"

    "Whites killed by whites -- 16%"

    "Whites killed by blacks -- 81%"

    "Blacks killed by blacks -- 97%’

[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/...

Edit: I'm sure there are screenshots of the initial image so you don't have to rely on politifact.. here, this includes the image and a transcript of the O'Reilly interview: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/trump-retweets-bogus-crime-...

post-truth is the OED's word of the year. "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief"

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

If you get angry enough or you feel threatened enough the facts don't matter, all that matters is winning.

America went from a melting pot to a tossed salad to a powder keg.

From "How politics makes us stupid":

Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.

Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart.

…

"Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values."

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...

People will almost always take the shortcut/easiest way out. Facebook for news = the fastest way to get news. Doesn't mean it's going to be accurate, but do people care? Apparently not.

I quit Facebook 1 to 2 years ago. I suppose that's one of the reasons I didn't understand the hatred during the election towards the other side.

I don't have a feed of "He's evil" "She's evil". I saw two bad candidates and I understand where people are coming from with their votes.

I'd like to see most independents / democratic people unite under a real progressive platform next election and stop the extremist cycle of social issues vs fear mongering.

> I'd like to see most independents / democratic people unite under a real progressive platform next election and stop the extremist cycle of social issues vs fear mongering.

There's virtually zero chance of this happening without another party collapsing first.

Hell, even then, independents are harder to herd than cats.

Its impossible to happen under the system as it is established, but you just needed to push for a constitutional amendment and / or state compact like the one to overturn the electoral college to change the voting system to support either proportional (doesn't work when you elect a single seat like the president) or STV (ie runoff voting).

The chance of that happening in the next four years? Really low. About as unlikely as it has been since the Internet established itself as a place to talk about how to fix the voting system. But unlikely doesn't mean you don't try, and don't talk about it where you can.

Changing from electoral college to pop vote also means the nature of campaigning will change.

California, for example, has a huge population of Republicans and now their vote would matter. I don't think Trump did any non military focused rallies there.

I am in Illinois. I didn't vote in 2008 or 2012 because I knew my vote would have no impact. Give me a popular vote and you might have Romney... Be careful what you wish for.

Romney lost 51-47 in the popular vote.

That's not a useful fact, because both candidates would have campaigned differently if the president was chosen by popular vote rather than the electoral college. It's very unlikely that the popular vote would have been the same.

Of those that voted. I think fixxer is saying that there are alot of people that don't vote (about half of the voting population) because they are an X in a Y state so they don't think their vote will change that. But if the electoral college went poof, a lot more of the missing 50% would vote and that could change the expected value of a popular vote.

This isn't so much directed at you, but this seems a great place to note that there are races on the ballot other than president, usually your local elections will have a bigger impact on your day-to-day life than the national ones, and your vote carries orders of magnitude more weight. Pay attention down-ballot!

In my district, the margins on those were even larger than the presidential margins. I still voted, but the outcomes were all very predictable here.

Are you actually saying the difference - in number of votes - for President for your state was smaller than the difference - in number of votes - for every local judge, school board member, etc?

I mean, not impossible, but surprising. Where are you located?

The number of votes was only wider in one or two of them (statewide races). The local races were mostly uncontested (or lightly contested).

Gotcha.

Exactly. As long as we are in an electoral system, discussing the popular vote as anything more than a novelty is a waste of time.

Wouldn't Romney in 2012 have been better if it avoided Trump 2016?

Lol. Bill Maher misses W.

> California, for example, has a huge population of Republicans and now their vote would matter.

And at the same time votes from Democrats in California would also matter more. I'd assume a number of people who'd vote Democrat in CA don't vote because they know the Democrats won't lose anyway.

Maybe. My point isn't partisan, but more along the lines of "you don't know how this will play out."

I'm all for a popular vote, but I don't think you're going to see a swing to the left necessarily.

It would drastically reduce the voting power of several red states. Only recently (since 2000) has the EC being different than the popular vote been a problem. Both times it's gone in the republicans favour.

It would definitely be radical change though.

Kind of a small sample size, right? I guess I'm hesitant to change the political dynamic of a nation based on just that.

Why shouldn't everyone's vote count the same?

Look up. I'm for pop vote. I'm just saying to libs thinking the pop vote would have changed things... Maybe. Maybe Not.

There are other good reasons too.

The system isn't fair, voters in low pop states have more power than california.

The system emphasizes swing states above others, as the country is so split right now.

The system is worse for third party candidates (especially if a STV or ranked system was used. This would also please the Bernie or bust folk).

The system is outdated, it was meant to have a group of well informed electors make the decision about who is president. This doesn't makes sense anymore as the electors are pretty much bound to the will of the states popular vote, and people have access to more information. Plus the whole safeguard against someone unqualified idea has been tossed out the window now anyway.

Yup, agreed. As mentioned above, I'm for pop vote. But... Still a big change and the consequences are very complicated.

> The system emphasizes swing states above others

It's hard to imagine a democratic system where swing voters don't hold disproportionate power. Rusted-on supporters will support you whatever may come, and the opponents' rusted-on supporters will never support you, so as a candidate you spend more time, effort, and money appealing to the noncommittal folks in the middle...

Even excellent voting systems like Condorcet don't change this particular equation; a hardcore supporter of you just simply doesn't need as much of your attention in an electioneering frame of mind.

This all being said, that doesn't mean the current systems in the US aren't horribly misrepresentative. Gerrymandering is a particular problem there.

Minor point: Swing voters and swing states are two different beasts. In the later case you can concentrate effort in one area to gain a quantum all-or-nothing jump: generally, all the EC votes in the state. To target swing voters you need to address a much larger geographic area, and only get the incremental advantage of one vote per person.

It doesn't matter which way the partisan advantage would run (and it most likely wouldn't be to the permanent advantage of one side anyway), if it increased turnout then that would be an unalloyed Good Thing.

The electoral college doesn't need to change. The two bigger problems to me are:

* Winner-takes-all means that in any state that is %60/%40, the 40%'s votes don't affect the election at all.

* Congressmen are representing too many people.

If more states worked like Nebraska and Maine, then people in rural counties in California could decide a few seats on the electoral college. And there's an amendment outstanding to change the number of representatives:

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

Ranked choice voting is also interesting, but I think not as important right now.

It's actually more likely to happen than ever:

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

But, ditching the electoral college is only a small part of the solution to the core problems in US politics.

Because very few of them are truly independent.

I don't necessarily disagree, but how does this follow from what I said? I'd argue people are TOO independent to reach a third party consensus.

Independent white men are generally Republican voters, for example. Big difference between being independent and not identifying with a party.

Hence, they are hard to herd because they are actually already decided.

This isn't conjecture. I've seen the base files.

I'm gonna need a massive citation here.

> This isn't conjecture. I've seen the base files.

Until you share, it's conjecture.

DNC base files (back when I worked for that side), but based on how shit their polls were, feel free to question my claim.

The name of the game isn't changing hearts and minds (generally), but turnout. 2016 isnt an outlier. Look at county level returns.

http://themonkeycage.org/2009/12/three_myths_about_political...

Where does that link support the statement that:

> Independent white men are generally Republican voters

It's more because 'independent' is a simple description, not a political manifesto.

I'm in a similar boat as you having quit Facebook several years ago after the revelations about the emotion manipulation experiments they were running. At first I did not understand why people were so polarized about the candidates. Now I'm attributing this mainly to being cut off from Facebook.

EDIT: By polarized I mean intense hatred, coming from both sides

Were you also cut off from all forms of media? Even the most neutral sources had stories about how both candidates were the most disliked in history, protests and violence at rallies, etc. Even if you personally didn't have any strong opinions, anyone who even casually followed the news should have understood the general sentiments of the country.

It is possible to (use FB and) steer clear of news about the candidates while still consuming media (including HN & Reddit) on a daily basis. I successfully did it for the entirety of the run up to the election (including the night of). The most I knew were a few headlines about Hillary's email scandal and that Trump wanted to build a wall.

That said, I happen to live abroad (which doesn't stop local media and locals from trying to talk about it).

I'm not that poster, but I try to stay well informed while avoiding any kind of spam and mass media. I understood the general sentiment of the country, but I didn't understand why we'd regressed so much. Classic media always promoted some amount of fear, but now it's competing against digital media... a world filled with pandering and blatant lies. There's no more journalistic integrity or accountability.

If knowledge is the life-blood of democracy, America is suffering from leukemia...

The polarisation of opinions is a nasty side effect of some filters: people going in the web to be in conflict will click/trust/consume less. They are more aware of potential lies.

Thus the algorithm must provide the best un trollesque experience possible.

For this, it is better to have people feel cumfy with people sharing same believes/opinions. This way the CPC diminishes bringing more ad conversions.

Do the experience on yourself: did you prefer to go to school where diversity was greater than in your actual probable IT job, or do you prefer going to a conference on «your favorite whatever tech» it is. I have used noSQL techs because I thought it was cool after a python conf while I was pretty much dubitative. And I should have kept my doubts they had solid grounds.

Basically, conference and school are the same ; people talking thinking they share something, except school is full of conflict because of diversity whereas conference feels amazing because you feel in communion and you are more receptive. (I loved every conf I attended in the beginning until something itched me (my nosql conversion)).

That is also the secret recipe of churches, sects, successful corporate cultures, modern musical tendency to be based on genre that are caricature of themselves, even meme ... polarisation of the mass in one direction and fervor and a feeling to share something common, making you feel more likely to embrace new paradigms.

What we should fear is not facebook, algorithm or even google: it is our on Nature to feel cumfortable in uniformity and avoid conflicts.

The side effects of the algorithms is just that it turns us people in fanatics because we are not able to deal with diversity anymore. It is the experience we all wish: PEACE, shared progress and experience!

However believe it or not, since we are not always right, we sometimes need to have painfully disagreeing opinions. (real life). But in our bubble of agreement, opponents get marginalized as pisse froid.

And I know the tendency is to fight/blame the trolls, but trolls are not the problem at hand. It is a growing tendency to prefer avoiding conflicts, and I am concerned, only for one reason: it makes crappy software. Regarding politics, I don't really care that a globally skewed system towards the person rich by birth is getting unstable.

They wanted the power, no one was concerned since everyone was thinking it was a great idea: now they have it and I just grab my popcorn and sit.

The world can burn, I will rejoice myself with it but I did not bring the oil nor scratched the match that set it on fire. I am innocent, I was just a troll doing my job of trying to wake up people on the dangers coming...

One day us trolls will be given a medal for trying to save the world. Or maybe, I am still trolling...

Does Snowden really think that the canonical man on the street is here waiting to be advised on this topic?

The people who were influenced the most by fake news are those who probably don't even feel there exists a fake news issue.

That last line is the kicker. People are ignorant to the truth and|or simply refuse to believe it for whatever reason.

Saying "for whatever reason" is giving up on trying to understand what is happening. The reason might be anger, might be disenfranchisement, might even be that "they are stupid". But those things have solutions. Instead of just calling people ignorant and giving up it is much more fruitful to try to find why they disagree and talk to them. I know how frustrating it can be to talk to an "ignorant zealot" (anywhere on the political spectrum), but it is just cheap and sad to give up.

leppr's comment above shows how this really matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972521

r/politics

There are a lot of people just on the verge of being convinced, who consume mainstream media and probably know a little about Snowden and look up to him as an authority figure on the same level as any other "tech/science" personality (Elon Musk, Neil deGrass Tyson, ...), who will be convinced by his position and then influence the more naive/ignorant people around them.

Politics is never black and white.

> The people who were influenced the most by fake news are those who probably don't even feel there exists a fake news issue.

Which points the way towards the question of whether some people ever really want to know the truth about stuff they already decided is important to them, for whatever reason.

Facebook reminds me of a Dave Chappelle sketch, If The Internet Was A Real Place [1]. But instead of a world filled with porn stores and free CDs, Facebook World is where you have used car salesmen peddling ideology and breaking news, libraries filled with mirrors but no books, where humans lack filters for their compulsion to say something – like a Tourette's syndrome for half formed thoughts. Where they’ll yell shit at you like “Your dog’s ears are wow!” and then finish with a racist tirade.

If you want anything positive: happiness, a sense of contentedness, intellectual enlightenment, more time - ditch it. The odd gem shows up there, but even garbage tips and sewers are home to a few wedding rings and gold wristwatches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91YpZe1SmNg

Back in late August when I started my new job, my first purchase with my first paycheck was to get a subscription to Le Devoir, Montreal's independent newspaper. It's amazing how much more informed I feel now: because the content only changes every 24 hours, I have the opportunity to get to the less sexy stories, stories that would be buried on a fast moving website because they don't generate clicks, but which still deal with important local issues.

I highly encourage people to research their local newspapers and support one: you get so much out of something that costs the equivalent of a couple Starbucks coffee pet month.

The economist is another good option. They have decent digital versions, including a daily edition that's just enough news for me.

The Economist carries just as much propaganda as any other political magazine. They're better at hiding it, perhaps.

Your definition of propaganda probably is a little to inclusive. In my experience, the Economist very rarely gets the facts wrong (including by omission of major elements). The "letters to the editor" at the beginning of every issue are also almost always critical of previous issues of the magazine, and they don't have a problem with publishing them.

What the Economist constantly does is give its opinion on the facts, and that opinion usually sums up to how good free-trade and libertarian policies are. I definitely wouldn't count that as propaganda. You could, but then any newspaper with opinion pieces would be propaganda, which is not what is normally meant by "propaganda".

Idd that's called bias, and it would be naive to assume any article ever written doesn't contain some.

What publication would you recommend instead if I'm looking for relatively unbiased, fact-based news?

I honestly think it's impossible to find truly unbiased news sources. That being said, at least most trusted biased sources still root their information in facts and have journalistic integrity. I'm not going to throw out NYT, WP, NPR, Vox, WSJ, National Review, etc. just because they lean in particular directions.

If anything, I'd rather have news sources that are widely known to lean a certain side, because then I know their potential bias beforehand, which I can balance it out by reading articles from opposing publications.

Maybe Al Jazeera

The thing i like about Al Jazeera, is if 20 people die in the west and 50 people die in say Sierra Leone, almost all major media outlets (including international ones) will ignore Sierra Leone and plaster the western incident all over the front page. Al Jazeera at least tries to give some fair coverage to what happened in Sierra Leone and give it a spot on the front page (even if nobody clicks it).

that's an interesting definition of propaganda.

It's certainly not an unbiased publication, it's an opinion paper. From their "about us" page:

> The same page describes the Economist as “a Friday viewspaper, where the readers, with higher than average incomes, better than average minds but with less than average time, can test their opinions against ours. We try to tell the world about the world, to persuade the expert and reach the amateur, with an injection of opinion and argument.”

From the same page:

> "What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage."

So you are certainly not going to get "unbiased news reporting". It's a "viewspaper" that takes declared, informed editorial stances. You will get extremely well thought out and researched opinions and analysis.

"Propaganda" is a word usually reserved for intentionally contorting facts to favor a specific political entity. One can have an opinion without spouting propaganda. That's more the MSNBCs, Pravdas, and Fox Newses of the world. If you've ever read an economist article, the difference is obvious.

I don't know if anyone should trust such a Russophobic outlet.

https://medium.com/@dominicbasulto/russophobia-and-the-dark-...

"Russophobic" people are afraid of countries that invade and occupy other countries (bonus points if it's a dictatorship). This is not irrational.

Le Devoir has a reputation of having a left bias doesn't it?

I like the newspaper and I would like to subscribe, I'm just saying I often heard some bias complaints.

It also has a cool founding history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Devoir

You'll see the left bias in the editorial pieces, but in news stories the writing is as neutral as I've seen. In Montreal, the alternatives are the Journal de Montréal (too much gossip, not enough hard information), La Presse (very good, liberal bias), The Gazette (liberal bias). Another important reason that pushed me toward Le Devoir: it's the only paper (not just in Canada, but everywhere I've looked) that has a PDF version; you get facsimile of the paper edition, which is very nice to read with something like zathura.

The real problem did not start with Facebook and other social media being fake. It was the main stream media that started to generate fake news with the support of their local governments. No one can explain better than [ https://chomsky.info/ ].

The other issues is international, before this year US elections, US used these so called social media to "export its kind" of democracy to other part of the world, call it Arab Spring and rest of the events in middle east and recently in Turkey. It was perfectly legitimate to use them as under cover agents of democracy.

History has taught a lesson to American( sensible ones) who were closing their eyes/or unawre of world events specially and how they affected the people around the glob using "Democracy" "Freedom of speech" "human values" while violating the exact same thing at the same time.

Their bigotry has revealed in a strange way, but its too late for lots of people, for Americans and for the rest of the World.

What are the alternatives:

a). Free media the ways it should be, main stream media is polarized itself already and dictated by high in the Govt. offices.

b). Accept that democracy does not work sometimes if its helping hands are already chopped off e.g participation of civil society, feed media etc ..

c). Do not spread democracy for the sake of democracy if its more evil than dictatorship.

The last 12 months I have visited Snopes more times than not in order to disprove some of the articles my Facebook friends choose to share.

It's slightly alarming that people don't think they need to fact check. You know it's bad when the President-elect opens up about his internet fact checking[0].

It sets a dangerous precedent. There are less intelligent people in this world who read deeply into these "articles" and act on them. They choose to take it as fact because it's a website. It's scary.

What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy.

Can we educate the public? We can try, but some people are so far from being able to (or willing to) learn. They'll discard any help, citing propaganda, claiming "xyz source" is trying to influence their thinking; how dare they.

Can you tell this exhausts me?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9IEIP3k_8c

> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy.

News verification seems like the perfect application of NLP, AI, and data mining techniques.

Can it make any money for anyone? Right now it is much more profitable to make fake news and use data mining to manipulate people: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the...

I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. I was just talking to some Swiss journalists last night. You know what Swiss news organizations are using those technologies for? To make their writing more "engaging", i.e. more sensationalist, not for fact-checking.

> I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all.

How so? Deciding whether news is fake or not seems like a textbook application of natural language classification and search.

I haven't read any textbooks on the subject (I don't mean that facetiously) - what would this look like? Because it seems to me that to such an algorithm virality ~ legitimacy.

The only difference between a fake news story and a real news story that you can rely on is that the events in the real news story actually took place. Obviously there is no way to determine that by looking at the text itself.

Yes, at present the fake news may be written more colorfully or poorly. Obviously if you filter on that difference, it will go away.

How do you personally tell if a news story is suspicious? The publication it originated in, the places where it gets syndicated, shared, and re-posted, the style of the writing, and how sensational the content is. Authors that specialize in writing fake news stories will also have an identifiable individual writing style. There are a lot of signals you can use to classify news as fake or real, and that is before going to databases like Snopes.

This is IMO a much easier problem than a lot of the NLP work for sentiment analysis and other marketing stuff that is working or being funded today. The problem is not technical, the problem is that fake news is profitable.

Suspicious, sure, but that's moving the goalposts. And all of these signals exist at present, but as soon as Facebook starts suppressing posts based on machine classification then obviously fake news publishers will adapt and it won't work anymore. The only reliable identifying factor of fake news is that it reports facts that aren't. This obviously cannot be detected by text analysis. People who are suggesting technical solutions just haven't thought past the very first step in the dance.

To speculate, perhaps part of it a lack of respect for the hard work of real journalism, education, and geniune political dialogue, so the fantasy of surfacing all the crap from social media and then extracting the ground truth with a magical algorithm appeals to some people despite being a completely hopeless idea.

What you're actually arguing for is the negative twin of today's filter bubble effect. Algorithms already prioritize things you'll like, but now that the SV elite is shocked (shocked!) by how that worked out, there is a crisis of fake conscience. Obviously the solution is to also filter out the things that you'll think are fake. Or the things that "look fake" to Facebook's algorithm. It's concerning to me that the relatively intelligent folks here could be taking this at all seriously.

> And all of these signals exist at present, but as soon as Facebook starts suppressing posts based on machine classification then obviously fake news publishers will adapt and it won't work anymore. The only reliable identifying factor of fake news is that it reports facts that aren't.

Replace "news" with "email" and your argument remains the same. But spam filtering is working and working well right now with less signals to classify on.

> To speculate, perhaps part of it a lack of respect for the hard work of real journalism, education, and geniune political dialogue, so the fantasy of surfacing all the crap from social media and then extracting the ground truth with a magical algorithm appeals to some people despite being a completely hopeless idea.

Why are you ranting about synthesizing real news from social media? The problem I specifically mentioned was identifying fake news articles.

> What you're actually arguing for is the negative twin of today's filter bubble effect.

If you do not understand the difference between recommendation and classification you should not be arguing right now. It is a subtle and important distinction. Your argument is about as subtle as "computers can't solve it!"

> It's concerning to me that the relatively intelligent folks here could be taking this at all seriously.

In what substantive way is "fake news trying to get you to vote for a particular politician" different from "fake email trying to get you to buy fake pills"?

Indeed, "computers can't solve it". Software cannot replace fact checking.

> In what substantive way is "fake news trying to get you to vote for a particular politician" different from "fake email trying to get you to buy fake pills"?

You don't normally get ham email asking you to buy pills, do you? But you read and share news that has an ideological perspective all the time.

Again, the only reliable distinction between true and false news is whether it actually happened. By definition this is not to be found by looking at the text alone.

Let me give you a concrete example of a hypothetical pair of fake and real news items. You can tell me how your classifier would fare distinguishing them.

Real news item:

Pope calls Trump "not Christian"

Fake news item:

Pope calls Trump "not Christian"

The difference, of course, is that the real news item is published the day after this actually happened and the fake news item can be published at any time, and is easier to write.

Let me give you another example. There have been reports of hate crimes following the election. There have been claims that some of these reports are fabricated.

So I give you two articles:

Article A: Chanting Trump Slogans, Mob Assaults Local Man

Article B: Assault Story "Made Up", Local Man Admits

Now, tell me again about your algorithm.

AI has not advanced to the point where it can go out into the real world and verify whether or not events actually took place.

It is not hard to see some statement about or purportedly by an organization, government office, or celebrity and then call the organization, government office, or celebrity media contact to verify that information. Anonymous sources are protected by journalists and in that case you will have to have a trust metric for the journalist writing the story.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

~ William Casey, CIA Director

Link? Or is this 78.3% of statistics on internet quotes are made up?

The discussion by the source of the quote is worth a read (in the comment thread): https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-...

> Though not explicitly said at that time, it was made clear in other contexts during my two years in the West Wing in the highest level meetings that the pretext for this mentality was the claim that in a Cold War era when communications were essentially instantaneous, the vast majority of "the enemy's" - then the Soviet Union's - "intelligence" was also based on open press and media sources, so the most efficient way to lie to the Soviets was to lie in the U.S. and allied media, which meant the American public believing the lies was considered a kind of 'collateral damage.' (Barbara Honegger)

All Cretans are liars.

My brain hurts.

> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy.

I think you just explained some very popular subreddits, in addition to a lot of the extreme political fake-news issues on facebook.

I don't want ANY news on my facebook.

I wish I could just filter all externally linked posts, posts with > 200 shares or likes.

Facebook is pretty useless for me. I use messenger, because it's ubiquitous, but other than that, it's a hybrid of twitter and 9gag.

No promoted stories, no algorithmic timeline... Just plain old chronology from the people I actually want to follow. Seems like the facebook we want to use is gone, but good luck migrating your social circle.

Not a perfect solution, but if you want that, it may help to "Hide all from [News Site]" for each instance.

Fake news, hoaxes and scams existed long before Facebook. People just use Facebook more, things can spread faster, and all in all it amplifies an existing problem.

Email forwards (and in their newer reincarnation, at least in the Middle East, Whatsapp forwards) spread false news for as long as I remember using the internet. A part time job for me was to respond and debunk these emails when they landed in my inbox. I even put in the time to explain to people how to spot false information (e.g. if the email ends with "forward this to x number of people or else" is 100% a hoax or a scam).

Maybe Facebook -- as our times' Master Switch -- can fix this, and for the first time we'll be happy with centralization.

I used to subconsciously judge email based on the amount of "fw:re:fw:fw:fw" on it. The more fwd:/re: the less I trusted the data. I wonder if this was ever valid signaling, but I also wonder if people trust articles more on FB because, AFAIR, it's hard to tell how many times an article has been re-shared, or "forwarded".

This article is on a "How to make money blogging" website, not exactly a source I'd turn to for trustworthy anything let alone news about not relying on other news...

Anyway, here are some more legitimate sources for the same topic for anyone interested:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/snowden-discusses-facebook...

https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/15/snowden-we-rely-too-much...

This is the problem with any solution that relies on people checking the reliability of news sources: they don't. Even on here.

I'm at the point where if it claims to be "news" and it's not on an immediately identifiable brand domain, I would assume it's fake or some variation of content spam.

Things in the realm of opinion, insight, tutorial, reviews, etc, can get more leeway.

I have a lot of mixed feelings on this one. Of course one shouldn't rely upon Facebook for the news, just as one shouldn't rely upon Fox News. But people are going to anyway.

The problem in this election was that Facebook did exactly what it was designed to do: show people more of what they wanted to see. Unfortunately that creates extreme echo chambers, where blatantly false news ricochets around the site, blindly liked by partisans on each side.

So that leaves open the question of what to do.

On the one hand, Facebook is a massive media company, and I am not comfortable handing them carte blanche to police and control the speech of their users. On the other, Facebook's current policy of "neutrality" creates an environment that favors political isolation and the spread of outright falsehoods.

At the very least, it seems Facebook could do something about purveyors of those falsehoods algorithmically. But even then I have my misgivings about a private corporation, or really anyone, determining the acceptable range of public discourse.

> algorithmically

Perhaps in the near future, the only "journalists" anyone will trust will be algorithms. Of course, any system can be manipulated. But I think we are dealing with such an unprecedented deluge of information, an increase in population (and therefore motives) and connectedness, that it may be time to consider this.

But your comment begs the question: who will be the gatekeepers of these algorithms?

This might not be possible. People who actually swapped feeds with someone who had a different viewpoint decided they did "not like the news" because it didn't validate their very own viewpoint. So the problem isn't how fact checked the news is but more on the voter's views. That might be something very hard to change. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/16/facebook-bia...

The correct answer isn't to "switch feeds". It's to just turn it off.

I'm happier, more productive and a better dad when I'm not being a feed-junkie. Maybe I'm an outlier.

Me too. I turned it off as well. However, like most, people want to log in and get their views validated. It makes them feel great, feel wanted, and belonging to something bigger. I am not sure Facebook wants this problem to go away.

There really are an amazing number of people who simply aren't interested in understanding the world as it is.

I think a big part of it is fundamentally not understanding how the brain works, and that just because your brain presents a convincing reality to you, that it doesn't necessarily coincide with actual reality. People don't understand that intuition can lead you very, very far astray.

So they're building up this concept of the world which seems solid and internally consistent to them, but it's built on sand. And they get annoyed when people start kicking at the sand. Because they're happy in the world that they built. When really what they should be doing is digging out the sand, looking for the bedrock underneath.

How far do you want to take Cartesian dualism? Who are these "other people"? :)

Oh I'm sure I have a lot of unexamined biases. I try to find them as much as I can though. I love to be challenged. Just not on Facebook.

If so, we're outliers together.

Not an outlier at all. I have never used FB for anything really, just tried to promote a silly YT channel with my kids at one time.

This site is starting to get bad as well though. I would love it to be only tech.

Yes, but ignoring the news and political changes is kind of a luxury, it means your life is secure enough that you can afford not to pay much attention to any of that stuff because you feel confident it won't affect you personally.

Except that following the feed gives you terrifying news that may affect you personally and isn't true, because no-one dares question it and it spreads rapidly. For example, I happened to take a note of the two most retweeted claims of Trump-related hate crimes I saw right after the election so I could follow what happened with them later - both turned out to be fake.

Are you sure this is the case? Is your livelihood or security really dependent on daily churn of news?

Here's a thought: what if most news is misinformation?

Yes, and yes. I already assume that to be the case.

Having a Facebook news feed and following news/politics are two different things. OP can quit Facebook and still go read the Washington Post.

That's an interesting question, the question then becomes do people who like A because it conforms to their worldview like A because they where fed A and B because they where fed B or to put it another way have their views been shifted over time by the news they consume.

> People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds - Lord Vetinari (Terry Pratchett - The Truth).

The problem is not the first mover advantage of Facebook, but that people do not understand logical fallacies, that they erroneously believe that most media is impartial, and that they are unaware of confirmation bias.

Logical fallacies should be taught in school: we also start with simple arithmetic before we move to more complex topics. (A course in formal logic seems overkill, it should be an applied course.)

The power Google and Facebook hold to censor and selectively control what people see and hear is terrifying: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/google-and-facebook-ban-fa...

In an important aspect, this is not any different han a library deciding to censor what information they make available. In the past this war has been waged before--As Google will ban news over quality of the information, librarians have banned books over the quality of the information. Once Tom Sawyer is banned, that sets a precedent to ban Catcher in the Rye, then Fahrenheit 451, then Animal Farm.

It's a very slippery slope, and it's absolutely terrifying to me.

I don't want to live in a world where few have absolute power over the many. If someone can control what you hear and see, they can control what you think.

Is Trump's election just a convenient excuse to seize this opportunity?

Thank you Snowden, I also am terrified by this.

Watch Fox News if you want to actually know what is going on in the world. Yes, seriously.

I don't see this as a new problem tbh. It's a function of human nature. We like to think that we are smarter and better than our primitive ancestors but the fact is that we are exactly as dumb or as smart as they were. Only thing that separates us is our knowledge. But we are just as prone to bias, intellectual weakness, selfish dishonesty and irrationality than our dumb ancestors. Most people are followers, we want to be in a group, we want to belong, we want to be led and above else we want to feel good about ourselves. People believe what they want to believe because that is safe, comfortable and easy. The psychology is the same as religion, minus the supernatural. This election showed as much. We are perfectly willing to disregard facts and reason if it suits our narrow benefits or correlates with what we think we know already. It takes great strength of character to put principles and reason above personal comfort and safety and frankly most people lack it. Add to this modern identity politics and you have a recipe for disaster.

Our lives are easy. We think that we are advanced but this can all turn to shit in no time because our base natures are still very much intact. Consider the Nazis and the power of group think and in group bias. Completely normal people can be made quite easily to do savage things. Even in this post WW2 world, the Stanford prison experiment showed as much. We really are fragile beings and we have to be vigilant, now more than ever, because we are under the mistaken belief that we today are somehow better, more evolved or new. When it comes down to it then we are nothing but animals, driven by our instincts and all the science, culture and philosophy flies out the window. I think the Jedi and the Sith are a great metaphor for this. We need self control and vigilance to not fall to the dark side, which is often tempting and the path of least resistance and no matter hour high you have risen, you can always fall.

I can't remember where I saw this quote last year but it rang terrifyingly true to me:

"The people who used to tell me that Wikipedia is unreliable now get their news from viral facebook posts"

Simple answer: don't use social media.

I don't understand why this is controversial. If you don't approve of the way they do business, don't use their products. I use no social media accounts and my life is plenty-full of engaging, useful discussion.

I don't use social media either, but that doesn't change the fact that a majority of the other voters do. They will not all of a sudden stop using Facebook.

> [..] many people are criticizing social media outlets – namely Facebook – for not doing enough to weed out obviously fake news articles that could have potentially impacted people’s votes. This is a claim that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been quick to dismiss, [..]

I wish Facebook would remove their "trending news" feature. Their algorithm is basically selecting and promoting all the junk it can find, without the slightest vetting. How is it possible that a feature botched like this would: 1) pass the "testing" stage, 2) be ever considered a good idea in the first place.

And on top of that, they claim no responsibilities ? Lol.

The article says this: Snowden’s comments echoed those of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who said that it’s “extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

But he's NOT echoing Zuckerberg's comments - either in spirit or intent. He's pointing out a bigger problem inherent in relying on Facebook as a single source for news.

I can't believe so many people actually use facebook. It's a time suck, a voyeuristic and narcissistic view into people's lives, a government database, etc...

Some time ago, Facebook was all about FarmVille. A fictional cow was sad and you had to help. Over and over again... in your profile, in your news feed, everywhere.

Facebook fixed that problem by moving all game activity to a specialized area.

So that's the solution. Facebook needs to split links from user photos and updates. And move the trending pane to that area as well.

Well all this political talk gives me some ideas.

Is it possible, at this stage, for geographically large countries with very large populations to move forward in a coherent way?

All of the better places to live, as rated by purchasing power, health, education, what have you, are either geographically small and or have a small population.

China, India, Russia, Brazil, USA - all these big places with big pipulations rank poorly in some number of quality of life indicators.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand aren't without their problems but seem to suffer a less severe case of the issues. And then there's those Scandinavian countries which rate highly.

Why this pattern?

The smaller the population, the higher the variance. Large countries are not bad, they are average. The worst countries, like the best, tend to be small.

Good point, thanks.

It might still be useful to copy governance structures from these countries, I suppose.

So, some actual data on how many US adults get news from various sources:

http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-...

38% Never, 18% hardly ever, 26% sometimes, 18% often.

Note that none of this excludes people getting news from non-social sources such as going directly to whatever news sites they like.

It's not clear that this is really much more of an issue than hearing what Bob in marketing thinks of issue X, Y or Z.

> Facebook itself is addressing the controversy by announcing they plan to ban fake news outlets from their ad network, cutting off the revenue source for these sites.

It's funny that the linked article[0], presumably from a "real" news source, very clearly says that Facebook's action will have basically no effect on the issue.

[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-facebook-fake-news-201...

Minus regulation or financial disincentive, Facebook is incentivized to push crap at you that you like.

They clearly make a mint off of this stuff, so good luck affecting change.

One thing's for certain: Facebook AI research is running deep-layered natural-language ANNs right now on a year of election comments and likes. I think well before four years they'll know exactly how to detect bubbles of alternate political reality and also how to break them up. There will be some interesting decisions facing them before the next election.

Do you trust them to break up all the alternate reality bubbles, or just the ones they don't like?

What's truly dangerous here is that one organization has so much control over what news people see.

Is this really different than TV news? Most people stick to one network (Fox news, NBC, CNN, etc) and not only do they not watch the others but believe they are corrupt, fixed, and lying.

The problem is we don't have multiple major news organizations per major area like we used to. Back then there was bias, but it was easier to be called out on it. Now I think many people are fine living in the bubble.

It's different because Facebook has captured nearly every American adult and they have a Google-like (in search) dominance over social. There's no news platform in US history that has ever come even remotely close to being able to claim that. They're just about worth more than every US media company combined, their reach and financial power are already incredible; four years from now they'll be as profitable as Google is today and their reach will likely have expanded further.

I can't see a scenario where Facebook manages to avoid anti-trust action against it in the next four to six years, both in Europe and the US.

I don't trust them one bit when their profitability is driven by clicks, and clicks are driven by bullshit stories.

There's got be some non-political algorithms. Maybe tracking news articles to their sources (text/phrase similarity searching), showing sources, and flagging quality by accuracy of details? A few years of improvement on automatic text summarizing might be able to catch political "telephone" articles that erase and morph crucial details.

That just pushes the problem back, unfortunately. Do you trust the people who designed the algorithm? Even if they were wonderful, apolitical idealists, do you trust the people who maintain the systems after those guys leave the company to stick with it, no matter what? After all, this election is the Most Important One In Our Lifetimes, so surely it's okay to put our thumbs on the scale just a little bit in the name of truth and justice... it's for the sake of the children/gays/whoever, you know... what kind of heartless monster would just stand by when they could make a difference?

Ultimately the only way to really address this problem is to have a diverse variety of competing news sources so at least they aren't all captured in the same way at the same time. There's no way to line this up with Facebook being the One News Source, any more than if it was the government doing it.

I know it might be an unpopular comment, but I feel like we should just rely less on Facebook in general.

I 'quit' Facebook two years ago. I occasionally log back in to see what people are getting out of it- and my outsider observation is that Facebook unintentionally feeds people with borderline personality disorder.

(http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/borderline-per... )

I find it amusing that so many facebook users are identifying Facebook's "fake" news feeds as the source of the election's problems.

If Facebook were to honestly tackle that problem, there won't be much Facebook left.

This is why I just don't bother reading most news articles because even when the news isn't from a fake site you still have many factual errors or context being removed from specific events/quotes/reports/etc that are discussed in any given article. This is an issue larger than just some kid putting up fake news on a site to generate clicks for ad revenue. It's an issue that includes what I would consider established news outlets like the major newspapers and magazines. It's just weird to see how often the news is so bad in terms of fact checking that often I just skip news altogether.

Indeed, instead get your news from the paper of record. You know, the one that joined the administration in selling us all a war that cost trillions of dollars and killed a million people.

(And ABC, CBS, the list goes on of course. Not just NYT.)

Wasn't there the simpsons episode when Homer started spreading fake news on the internet to become famous?

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

I believe

Right. People just need to leave their bubbles, read from a variety of sources, and not rely on their friends for news.

Obviously easier said than done. But personally that's what RSS feeds are great for.

Long ago in 2011, there was a lovely TED talk about the possible bubbles forming. https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...

People don't want to leave their bubbles, for the fear of uncovering uncomfortable truths. For example, I have friends who flat out refused to read any of the WikiLeaks e-mails that could potentially reveal something bad about Hillary, her campaign, the DNC, or any entity on the left.

That's just how some (probably a lot of) people are. When some people encounter something that challenges your pre-existing beliefs, it's easier to just ignore it and stay in your bubble of comfort.

And that mindset, IMO, is not an easy thing to fix.

I'm a liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton, despite basically loathing everything the Clintons stand for, and I read all the wikileaks emails.

That said, the torrent of pure bullshit based on those emails that was floating around on both sides was unbelievable. Either she was as pure as the driven snow or a she-demon, with nothing in between.

After a certain point, it wasn't even worth the effort to argue about it and I just started unfollowing half of my friends and family.

The mail dump was basically a free for all corpus to plug any preconceived narrative up to hamfistedly made up conspiracy you could grep out of this.

The rest is more of the normal mode of operation of any human organization: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe

People don't even seem to care if their news turns out to be fake so long as it confirms their beliefs - the fact that it was believable means there must be some underlying truth to it in their eyes.

>> People don't want to leave their bubbles, for the fear of uncovering uncomfortable truths

That may be the case. But in some cases, people dont want to leave their bubble because eating skittles in someone elses' bubble can mean "looking suspicious" and getting killed for it. That is why I only hang out with my own group and those who understand me, it is too risky out there. And Travon was not the only case, there are hundreds of cases like it which dont get publicized.

> For example, I have friends who flat out refused to read any of the WikiLeaks e-mails that could potentially reveal something bad about Hillary, her campaign, the DNC, or any entity on the left.

That's because of things like the "spirit dinner" bullshit or an email chain discussing drug pricing being reduced to "HILLARY FOUGHT LOWER DRUG PRICES".

When every single email is apparently awful evil shit then it's hard to differentiate things that are actually bad.

Show me some emails that you actually believe should convince someone not to vote for Clinton. Especially over Trump. Keeping in mind that the screwing around in the Primary isn't enough, and that I'm willing to accept a candidate I don't particularly like all that much.

Yeah, he wrote a good book, and then started Upworthy, which IMHO is just a source of facebook clickbait.

Well, that's disappointing...

It's not just a source of Facebook clickbait, it's one of the worst sources on Earth: nothing but empty outrage baiting and virtue signaling. I guess he watched his own talk and decided it would be more lucrative to switch to the Dark Side.

If the problem is that Facebook provides an echo-chamber that exacerbates the influence of one particular viewpoint, wouldn't the solution be for Facebook to begin injecting opposing content directly into the newsfeed?

You can kind of see this with trending topics. If you don't follow a particular topic but suddenly see it trending in your feed, there's a chance you may random walk into clicking it. If Facebook opens up a global/regional/local newsfeed that isn't highly targeted, then you could potentially start seeing more original content.

It's not the Facebook that provides echo chamber, it's the individuals themselves who create it via their friend selections.

And reinforced with advertising algorithms which keeps everyone at FB employed, it is a FB problem as it is now the Fast Food of news...very unhealthy.

It's not just your circle that determines what show up in your feed. The algorithms re-enforce peoples views by putting stories in your feed it thinks you will 'like'. If it thinks you're pro-Trump, you will have more pro-Trump stories even if you have an even mix of Trump/Hillary supporters in your circle. Many times the sensational stories that are most likely to be 'liked' are also the fake ones. There no warning that the story came from an unreliable source.

How much media incompetence is needed to rely on Facebook as serious news source? It's very difficult for me to understand this. And no, I'll gonna continue reading all sorts of stuff posted on Facebook, no matter if Edward Snowden or Hillary Clinton call them "News" or not.

By the way, don't forget to stop relying on Whatsapp, Snapchat and Chatroulette for your News.

Sorry for being so sarcastic but this is just so incredibly stupid. Please make Media (Competence) a subject in all schools world-wide!

>Facebook >news

Well, this is news to me. I never ever realizes some people use facebook for this, lol. Sharing some articles? Yeah. Some funny or family pictures? Sure. News source? Really?

The bigger issue is, many of these same folks are not gonna stop buying into "echo chamber" news and gossip just because FB stops publishing it. Sad as it is, this is what Fox News is to a super lesser extent. This is what shooting the sh-t at the bar with your buddies is.

We don't need less fake news. We need a more educated and engaged public. Now that we have a president-elect that campaigned on gutting public funding, including Dept. of Education, well, we'll see how that goes.

"We need a more educated and engaged public". Well said.

However, the issue here is that pretty much every news outlet straight up shilled for a candidate. CNN, MSNBC, NYT, HuffPo, ABC, CBS for Clinton and Fox News for Trump.

How is a non-computer savvy person (your parents, aunts and uncles) that doesn't know how to research things online supposed to form an independent opinion if these news organizations are their only window into the world?

Alright, but who should people rely on?

From an article posted earlier today on HN: almost all the media is colluding with Clinton/Dems: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ook1v2...

Site is down so giving google cache.

I'm sure there was some back and forth between the media and both campaigns. That's what reporters do, they cultivate their sources. A lot of the allegations in the article seem pretty weak. E.g., the campaign 'planted' stories in the NYT. Could it mean they just had info, and gave it to the NYT?

All this "collusion" also didn't stop e.g. the NYT and WaPo to thoroughly report on Clinton's email server.

NYT started reported on wikileaks emails very late in the revelation process. This already shows dishonesty on some level.

It also coincided with release of emails that didn't actually matter, thus the narrative was - hey she is just human and yes there is some bad, but nothing that terrible.

For example, they didn't report on leaking questions to debate organizers until Donna Brazile got fired. I think people lied on both sides, but I always assumed democrats were better than that. And I used to take my news from New York Times. Now I can't because I know they'll try to present just one side of every issue.

Finally, an example of bias is I am yet to see a single positive news story on Trump from NYT. Like they did a story about him hiring lobbyists. All commenters on the site and the story itself tried to say that he is being hypocritical since he promised that he would get rid of lobbyists. They didn't cite his reasons for that decision that he talked about on the 60-minutes interview.

The story about him firing all lobbyists was instead merged into the "campaign is in disarray" story.

But biggest problem for me is that any tech site I go to, I am constantly bombarded with "Trump is evil" and I never hear his side of the story.

I mean half the time the bias is so bad, I actually think I'm reading the onion (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-steak-well-...)

If you go to Wired, they currently have an article on the front page that starts with:

"Mark Zuckerberg is trying hard to convince voters that Facebook had no nefarious role in this election. But according to President-elect Donald Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale, the social media giant was massively influential—not because it was tipping the scales with fake news, but because it helped generate the bulk of the campaign’s $250 million in online fundraising."

This is a) bias as they're not being impartial and b) it is saying that allowing people to post whatever they want is "nefarious".

Basically, this one-sided approach is what I think drove people to twitter/facebook for news in the first place.

> For example, they didn't report on leaking questions to debate organizers until Donna Brazile got fired.

I imagine this is the email you're referring to: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/38478

Some of the other Wikileaks emails have a cryptographic signature that can be verified. This one doesn't. If they cannot verify the authenticity of that email, I have no problem with them not reporting on it. The source leaking the emails to Wikileaks could have easily doctored some of them.

I think the media that were breathlessly reporting on every single bit of info that could be misconstrued in these mails were the ones that were biased. E.g. the (complete fabricated) satanic cooking rituals in the White House made it to Fox News.

> Finally, an example of bias is I am yet to see a single positive news story on Trump from NYT.

From today's front page, here's a positive story on Trump: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/us/politics/aides-to-donal...

It's a move from Trump I applaud.

You have to distinguish between the opinion pages and factual reporting. As the name itself says, opinion pages are somebody's opinion. I don't have a problem with them saying that they think Trump is not fit to be president. If somebody can make the argument that he would be a good president, I'd be interested to hear it.

> ... and I never hear his side of the story.

Trump and his campaign have been refusing to comment on numerous stories. It's hard to present his side of the story when he does that.

> I actually think I'm reading the onion

You are not alone. But for me that has more to do with his actions, than any reporting. Like https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/79690018395509555... and https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/79703472107522867... only hours apart.

You are right about this story. But honestly this is the first story I've seen there that presents him in a positive light in the past 6 months or so.

In fact, I assumed they wouldn't report on it at all since it broke yesterday morning or early afternoon and they mentioned firings in the disarray story.

Sure, I know about opinion pages, but sometimes the opinions can cloud people's judgement.

Regarding Fox news - they've been going back and forth. Fox news already ruined their reputation in the past with biased pro establishment republican reporting. I view them as an alternative news source at this point. They don't outright lie, but they bend the truth in such a way that the message becomes whatever their narrative is at the time.

Edit: Regarding professional protesters: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-15/whos-behind-portlan...

This is not a great source, but you can check that indeed they are from out of state. Some of the protesters who are organizing with megaphones were previously on Dem payrolls. There were also pictures of some of the same protesters in multiple cities all over the country.

Moveon organizes some of the protests: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/13/moveonorg-ra...

craigslist ads advertising pay for protesters (this one is not very good source, but I can't find a better one right now and can't find any archive links): http://truthfeed.com/breaking-bitter-soros-hiring-team-of-fu...

Snopes article on the protesters claims that it's unproven: http://www.snopes.com/craigslist-ad-trump-rally/

Wikileaks previously showed that DNC campaign posted craigslist ads (not for protests but for fake story): https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/12803

Regarding arguments pro-trump, Peter Thiel gave a fairly convincing speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4

I am still suspicious but at the same time hopeful of Trump. I think he is the only one who can change certain things. Otherwise, economic condition for many people would get worse partly because of outsourcing and partly because of tech advances. UBI is not ready yet. When the economy is poor, this has historically led to radicalization of various groups. We already see traces of it in US. I think it makes sense to appeal to these groups and fix some of their problems.

Maybe there should be something like the hacker-news reputation, only derived by the validated truth of the sources you quote and forward. And it should be mandatory on all things you post. And people should have the option to hide "unreliable" narrators - and gain the loss of a falsifieer, by disproving somebody else s story.

Man, I'm going to miss Gwen Ifill.

Do people really rely on facebook for news? I mean, I do not use any FB app other than the webapp that too in a private window with a different user agent. FB spooked me once by suggesting to me a person with whom I interacted totally via github (and probably gmail)

So basically not much different than reading the national enquirer while standing in line at the grocery store, garbage in garbage out. All about greed and ads. People should be marching the streets, setting cars on fire, "not my facebook" over this.. )

I have to point out again that the media is making money by manipulating the masses. If you not pay for it, you are the product. Your time, attention, data, money and also your vote. FB is not better or worse than any other media company. Only more efficient.

Fake news exist before the emerge of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. It's like spam but harder to locate. I don't think Facebook can attach this issue properly since they have the ability to stop this from the very beginning.

Here we are again, take every top tech article and put the word Snowden in front of it.

Seems like most commenters here didn't read the article. Snowden isn't suggesting you leave facebook because of free flow of fake news.

Quite the opposite, he's saying facebook controls the flow of news too much.

I hope now people see the rationale for this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11403730

The first comment nailed it.

I have a different take on this (sort of). I think it's enormously empowering that anyone in the world can be a "publisher" and reach millions of people with stories through the internet.

The next phase of this evolution, I think, will be to ensure that we train humanity how to deal with this. I think it could be as simple as working hard to improve everyone's ability to (a) build an argument about something, and (b) to critique someone else's argument about something.

Once we (the majority of the general public) know how arguments are constructed and what is required to "prove" or "disprove" them, we'll be a far healthier world.

And that's why I visit hackernews more than facebook.

Why is social media getting all the flak? What about all the fake news on Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, Fox News, et al?

All of the organizations you listed employ fact checkers who are responsible for checking articles for accuracy and facts. Sure, they make mistakes from time to time, they're human. Disagreeing with the slant of an article doesn't mean it's fake news.

How far can "slant" go before the news is "fake"? "Fake" isn't exactly a scientific definition. It's not like paragraphs of text have a binary value of "true" or "false".

Have you seen this?

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/washington-post...

In fact, "fake" news from these big outlets is even more insidious, because they have agendas from their powerful owners (Bezos in this case), a huge audience, and they have people's (like you) trust, because they supposedly employee fact checkers.

In my mind fake news and biased news are two different concepts. All news should be taken with skepticism, because every bit of it from every news outlet is subject to potential bias. I'm aware that many news outlets published biased news against Sanders (and Trump and Clinton), and I'm aware that Bezos owns media outlets that may be biased. But organizations that employ fact checkers don't make up news stories out of thin air.

So making a political candidate seem like he said and meant things that he didn't isn't "fake"? I'm afraid your definition of what is fake and what is not is arbitrary and vague. And no, you don't get an "A" for effort with supposed fact checkers - all that matters is the final product.

Is anyone on HN relying on Facebook for news?

Do people outside of typical HN users know who is/take advice from Snowden?

This seems a bubble of pointlessness.

I miss the myspace days when we just modified our profiles and chatted with each other. There was no "news feed." Facebook was unbearable before the election, I stopped logging in more than once a week just to check on family. I don't care what anyone's opinion of the day is on the political issue of the day.

After Brexit and Trump, I realize how much of an echo chamber my Facebook account is.

I'm posting this on Facebook

Newspeak, Thoughtcrime, Facebook, Saveyourself, Createtime, Deleteaccount.

More generally, stop reyling on any single platform for your news.

This is a similar warning to "Don't eat the yellow snow". It makes very good sense but probably many will not pay attention until they actually get burned.

Snowden comment too much about what people doing or thinking,does he has nothing to do in he's own life?

Do not blame Facebook because you lose in election.The MSM is far more worse than FB.Use your brain.

ignorance is power, apparently.

I know it's off-topic to comment on the quality of a submission, but this is the first time I've been truly shocked by a #1 HN story. Normally when there is some discussion about relevance to HN, I can at least say "this is not really for me, but there's no problem with it being here". This is so mundane and obvious that I suspect non-normal voting. If you found this story interesting - why?

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Well this ends up being on topic since the content touches on "fake news". Perhaps this site should be classified as such by whatever voodoo standard Facebook implements.

While it is obvious, maybe we can discuss how to kill this phenomen (or facebook entirely) ? Or just how to make it better ?

I have a response to this.

Though you may not be supprized by it, how many people in your life would be shocked by it.

Have you shared your thoughts on this matter with them? Have you changed any minds?

Where you are shocked, I'm glad. While you and I may have the knowledge, many/most people still thinks Facebook is a good source of information. It is good that more visible voices are saying otherwise, so debate and questioning happens.

Like it or not, tech now has a huge, huge place in society. A tweak in Facebook's algorithm could easily decide an election (I'm not saying it has, but it definitely could).

For many people on HN, their work has the potential to have social implications in a way that was never the case twenty years ago. I for one am glad to see stories like this posted to HN, as I think engineers that make things like the algorithms that decide news feeds have very valuable input.

Right, sure. I'm absolutely not surprised that people want to talk about the role of Facebook in society, or fake news, or the algorithms used. And much of that has been covered recently in other front-page articles. Some of them have been interesting to me, some haven't, I definitely won't complain if there are more of them.

However, this particular article doesn't provide any interesting commentary on Facebook algorithms, its role in society or fake news. It's borderline content-free and I find that puzzling. Snowden says we should be wary of getting our news from a single source. Did this add something to any of the subjects you mention?

Facebook sponsored a hackathon to solve this issue and a team of college students found a somewhat trivial answer in just 36 hours. That's pretty cool.. and related to the topic of this news article... Its worth discussing I guess? But the article itself is pretty paltry.

http://www.businessinsider.com/students-solve-facebooks-fake...

Snowden is an American hero. Anything he has to say is interesting to me.

I really think this problem is way overblown. Most people follow many different news sources. I personally don't even rely on Facebook for news at all.

I think you vastly overestimate the general populations ability to actively inform themselves.

I think you underestimate it. There's a really common bias where people assume everyone else is an idiot/bad driver/etc except themselves.

The amount of baseless unfactchecked political/social memes that are posted on my wall on a daily basis say otherwise.

Fair enough.

I mean it was Wikileaks that more or less decided this election, but sure... let's all be worried about Facebook's unchecked power, unaccountable methods and unknown motives.

After all, it's not as if one of the Presidential candidates, now President, implied that the entirety of American media was controlled directly by the DNC, and thus not to be trusted, while praising and legitimizing Wikileaks by name. There's no possibility of a dangerous political or cultural precedent having been set by having half the country believe in nothing other than what Wikileaks publishes.

Facebook is evil, but I don't believe it's the elephant in the room.

I am more than a little disappointed in Snowden for falling for this gambit. Blaming the "fake news on the internet" for the loss to Trump is just the Left's way to divert attention to their own failures to report fairly or even try to understand his popularity without dismissing or smearing everyone as racists, homo-phobes and misogynists. This latest post-election narrative is a ploy, and if it gains any traction, it will allow the Left to avoid the mea culpa's and soul-searching that they need in order reclaim their shredded credibility.

Far more importantly, especially for the denizens of HN, is that this call to regulate and control the news on the internet cannot be used to institute government controls, licensing, "pressure" or threats, etc. as a solution. Private companies cannot practice censorship so Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Breitbart, etc. are all free to establish their own policies on what to carry on their properties. This is far far different from the government becoming the arbiter of what is "fake" or not or what is politically or socially acceptable or not and then using the power of the state to silence you with threats, fines, jail or even death (in some countries) if you anger the gang in power. Keep a close eye on any FCC proposals because now that they have regulatory control over the internet[1] the legal authority is already in place to censor the internet. If they start floating regulations or even "suggestions" that claim we have to vet the "news" for the "public-good" look out[2]. You have been warned.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/technology/net-neutrality-...

[2] "The Property Status of Airwaves" by Ayn Rand "Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in radio and television" [i.e. via the FCC]. In "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html

"Blaming the "fake news on the internet" for the loss to Trump is just the Left's way to divert attention to their own failures to report fairly or even try to understand his popularity without dismissing or smearing everyone as racists, homo-phobes and misogynists."

Uh as for Trump being misogynist, the fact he's okay with groping women without consent that's pretty much a classic case of it if I ever heard it. As for racism, you'll have to admit him declining to rent his properties to African Americans comes with racial bias either or not you like it (this doesn't make him literally KKK/Hitler/Red-Skull but it still makes him a jerk). And as for homophobia, it's misdirected at the man himself but his VP is clearly a homophobe that should've been ejected from the ticket if he was serious about supporting LGBT rights (and he would oppose FADA and support the Equal Rights Amendment). So, he has much to answer for on that front.

As for the rest of your statement, Snowden pointing out the issue of the lack of veracity in online news is a huge problem. Overtly fake news is just the tip of the iceberg since many "factual" news outlets have sloppy or no fact checking of articles and often depend on clickbaity headlines to generate views for ad revenue. Oddly enough, this comes part and parcel with the business model these outlets have chosen to operate under rather finding one which could alleviate the need to become Fox News on steroids.

"Private companies cannot practice censorship so Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Breitbart, etc. are all free to establish their own policies on what to carry on their properties."

This is patently false. Private censorship by definition is still censorship. It just legal censorship.

"Keep a close eye on any FCC proposals because now that they have regulatory control over the internet[1] the legal authority is already in place to censor the internet. If they start floating regulations or even "suggestions" that claim we have to vet the "news" for the "public-good" look out[2]. You have been warned."

I doubt anyone is going to propose such a system on the FCC board since they're busy with the open set box and zero rating regulations at this moment. Plus, SCOTUS already nuked that option decades ago in a series of cases related to the Fairness Doctrine, so there's no going back even with the most liberal of justices. They'd have to make a good argument for it to stick beyond "cause I said so."

The First Amendment limits the government's power to control speech. Its not "legal censorship" for Google, Yahoo, et. al. to control what is on the websites/property, it is their RIGHT to do it that the constitution respects (not ALLOW but RESPECTS). Your concepts are too sloppy for rational thought.

No, it's entirely legal to censor. That's why you can have gag orders on cases civil and criminal. I suggest you do more studying of legal procedure and definitions and less reading of Ayn Rand. BTW, my rational thought is probably sharper than yours any day.

What I wonder is how many humans he actually stands or sits next to each day and talks. Not online. Not camera to camera. But human to human / human to HIS mother-father - child

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