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Comment by JacobJans | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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-...

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/

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Sounds like a problem with your friends, not Facebook.

Not at all, unless he has 16.000 friends.

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