Fake News on Facebook? In Foreign Elections, That’s Not New
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Half of the country voted for someone else. Not someone I liked. I am baffled. What happened? Because they read about lizard people or how Obama was born in Africa" or, the officially sanctioned response: "Because of those pesky KGB agents hiding in the bushes". That is the easiest rationalization and one which leads to least cognitive dissonance and one in which the other side is completely demonized or idioticized.
All those working men and women from PA and MI who before voted for the "right party" almost religiously for years, all of the sudden have been brainwashed by sneaky foreigners to believe in lizard people, they are all now white supremacists and like Hitler (nevermind they voted for Obama just a few years ago), and will also use gays for target practice.
This problem is undoubtedly different than if some newspapers in one town or city publishing wrong information; then it was contained to a geographic area, but that's no longer the case with electronic media.
But if you say that out-loud then you're "undermining democracy" or you're a Russian shill, or both. Never mind that as a reader of The Economist for more than 10 years it pained me to see how low their standard for reporting anything Trump-related went, and we're talking about a British magazine which wasn't involved directly in the US elections. They were calling Trump all sorts of names even though he hadn't spent one-day in elected office, while when they interviewed a genuine war criminal like Tony Blair about a year ago (on 3 or 4 pages) the word "criminal" never made it into their reporting, not even the more tame "liar" (which Trump was called hundreds of times, never-mind that everyone and his dog lies come election time).
Stuff like NYTimes and Washington Post were funny to read at times.
How wrong I was.
Trump baited them into a lot of free press.
PS: Bias would be something like: "Trumps 100 Billion dollar wall designed to keep immigrants from leaving!"
OR
Trump voters were misled by their "sources" and try any mental gymnastics they can to reaffirm their preconceived notions.
If it quacks like a duck...
It wasn't that long ago that all those aforementioned outlets were telling us that we'd get mushroom clouds in our cities if we didn't invade Iraq.
Out of one side of their mouth, the NYT is saying "sorry folks, we'll get back to pursuing honest coverage now", yet out of the other side they're saying "it has nothing to do with our coverage, it's all due to fake news!". The fact that they are doubling down on this bankrupt strategy in such a blatant and contradictory way is ironic, because it will only accelerate their demise.
The fact you bought Trump's blatant lie that the NYT apologized for its coverage tells me all I need to know about where you get your news and how discerning you are.
A few examples of many:
Campaign staff discussing how to blunt the successful Bernie Sanders attack that cast Clinton as the "establishment" candidate. Their strategy involved getting bloggers and columnists to "write about this from a racial justice and reproductive rights perspective, including a few people who joined us on a call to talk about the "Bernie Backlash" that was unfolding even before his remarks last night—current list is Elianne Ramos [HuffPo], Jessica Valenti [Guardian] (who is writing a column on this as we speak), Jamil Smith [MTV/Viacom], Sady Doyle [Guardian, The Atlantic], Aminatou Sow, Gabe Ortiz [WaPo, Univision], and others". /podesta-emails/emailid/56243
Lisa Lerer (AP) writing an article about Clinton's "Wall Street problem" is asking campaign staff how she should characterize her article: "she is asking if we wish to characterize her remarks in any way." /podesta-emails/emailid/36373
Campaign staff for one candidate are being given the opportunity (CNN) to provide with questions to ask another candidate in an upcoming interview. /dnc-emails/emailid/27526
Mark Leibovich (NYT) allowing campaign staff to edit his article - literally picking what to include and what not to include in the article. /podesta-emails/emailid/4213
Party staff saying Kenneth Vogel (Politico) gave her his story in advance, and that if there's anything the campaign doesn't like, she can "push back". /dnc-emails/emailid/10808
And of course the infamous Donna Brazile (DNC/CNN) getting caught red handed giving debate questions in advance multiple times, and was subsequently fired from CNN.
Also worth mentioning remembering they were pulling the same tricks and more on Bernie. The head of DNC was fired because of emails that showed the supposed neutral DNC was in fact fully against Bernie.
Sure, it's a bias that you ought to measure and factor in into your projections and your campaigning, but to say that the fake news item swung the vote in one or either direction is to completely miss the point.
Yes I did. Did you read my comment? There is a reason we are all of the sudden talking about Fake News and just a few days almost nobody thought about the phrase. It has little to do with elections in India.
[2014]
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-intern...
> The Internet’s fake news problem
> Some of it is satire (The Onion and, to a less proven extent, its clickbaiting sister site Clickhole continue to bear the standard of mastery), but the larger part of what’s out there is “satire” — from the chronically unfunny half-jokes of the Daily Currant to the shrug-inducing falsehoods of Empire News , the toothlessly goofy sendups of Free Wood Post , the over-the-top Christian-trolling of Christwire , and the more pernicious race-baiting of sites like CreamBPM and Newsbuzzdaily .
https://newrepublic.com/article/118013/satire-news-websites-...
> Upworthy and Viralnova, at least, are honest about what they're selling: gaudy, sentimental, life-affirming stories. But the Currant class promises humor and almost universally fails to deliver it—because the actual goal is SEO clickbait. Given that, you might wonder why they even bother identifying themselves, usually in disclaimers at the bottom of the page, as satirical news sites.The answer is simple: to avoid a lawsuit.
> But the biggest mystery isn’t the identity of the conmen—it’s how much they're hauling in. Barkeley told Slate that his humor provides him with a “tight but livable” income. A number of publically available valuation services, which are by no means precise, estimate that The Daily Currant brings in anywhere from mid-five figures to $130,000 dollars a year on ad revenue alone. Finkelstein, the SEO expert, says even those numbers may be low, as they doesn't include revenue derived from short-term revenue bumps when a story goes viral. “I would estimate their yearly revenue from display advertising at about $100,000–$150,000 a year,” he said, noting that even with his expertise and access to estimation tools, it's not an exact science. “It isn’t perfect, but it is close. But at most, over the few years they’ve existed, The Daily Currant may have made as much as $500,000 in revenue—split between two people who are hardly doing any work.”
> The Daily Currant is likely the king of this particular con. But others may be catching up. The same public revenue calculators place Mediamass’s annual ad revenue alone at just under $40,000; Huzzlers' is rapidly approaching $45,000. Not bad takes, especially when you consider that some of these sites don’t even bother to write their own unfunny canards: They just steal them from other sites.
[2016]
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-human-news-editors-2...
> After a Gizmodo story claimed Facebook editors had suppressed conservative news from the Trending section, the social network fired those editors in favor of an algorithm. As part of the change, the Trending section no longer shows custom headlines and summaries of news topics.
> “We’re not in the business of deciding what issues people should read about," he said. "We don’t create content. We’re not in that business.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/10...
> Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors
Ok then, I'll just post one link:
Why is it people always try to argue ignorance is okay because it is popular?
You posted a wall of links talking about Fake News without explaining or adding anything to it. I never said Fake News were unknown.
The point was that the sudden popularity (of the topic) has certain implications, which I feel are not correct and too dismissive.
[1] - http://www.dailyo.in/politics/bjp-modi-bhakts-social-media-t...
There's even two reasons:
- Distract from looking at how biased the NYT et al. were
- Censor those pesky midges who say different from the approved line
Win-win.
(Bonus URL: http://nypost.com/2016/11/15/new-york-times-edits-its-electi... )
I also think the story that all these people who voted for Obama switched to Trump isn't true. The people who voted for Obama didn't even vote this election [1].
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/omribenshahar/2016/11/17/the-non...
Washington Post (if you trust it, I don't much, but got nothing else here) says this
---
Nearly 1 in 5 Trump voters say they approve of Obama's job performance. That would mean about 8 percent (note: large margin of error) of Americans went to the polls on Election Day liking what Obama was producing as president but deciding to vote for the other party's unpopular nominee anyway.
---
They are quoting Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University there
Romney 2012 - 60,933,504 votes, Trump 2016 - 61,000,837 votes.
Obama 2012 - 65,915,795 votes, Clinton 2016 - 62,109,875 votes.
Let's not forget that second term presidencies typically attract fewer voters, and 2012 was a low point for Obama, whose personal record is 69,498,516 votes in 2008.
People who traditionally vote Republican showed up and voted Republican. People who traditionally vote Democrat simply didn't show up.
You maybe right. I think some of traditional Republicans voted against Trump. I don't have hard numbers, but at least from my circle of acquaintances two life long Republicans voted for Hillary and against Trump, and a life long Democrat voted for Bernie then Stein. I would say it is probably not as simple as "simply didn't show up".
Edited in response to rdtsc's reply below: This comment was in response to "Hillary having the worst Democratic performance in 28 years"
Right but what's the point though? What is it in response to?
Yes electoral college is how presidential elections happen. To win the election one needs electoral college votes. I've heard she had a stellar team and a tremendous experience as a politician. You think they didn't know and instead went for the popular vote?
I believe both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump targeted swing states, neglecting the rest of the country. Clearly Donald Trump did this better. I'm not fond of either of those candidates, but neither do I mean to blame them. Above all it is the electoral system that has failed.
So, it is possible that the popular vote with the electoral college would not be mirrored by a popular vote without the electoral college.
The electoral college distorts not only the results of presidential elections, but also the conduct of presidential election campaigns.
And one does need to explain why such large percentage of Trump's supporters believe things like Obama being foreign a born muslim, and why they voted so conclusively against their own self interests
A very common digital ad is: "The Rock arrested for suspected steroid abuse" and a picture of him in cuffs (screenshotted from a movie). If you click through to the landing page it is a hard sell for some body building supplement that's "so good it should be illegal."
In other words Fake News is a dark pattern and with the election the same shady, spammy, scummy folks switched it up for politics.
They're putting out fake news stories on both sides [1] just trying to drive clicks and shares and get people outraged enough they'll "Like/Share" the ad to their social networks.
Absolutely. The other classic is ads disguised as news. Sometimes they'd usually be a little disclaimer but not always. Some videos have people acting like news anchors talking about buying cleaning products.
So it is about revenue as well. However I don't think it is coincidental everyone all of the sudden started to talk about "Fake News" since a few days ago.
Personally, I stopped using Facebook a long time ago partially because of the platform's embrace of "clickbait" and obnoxious "viral" sponsored content. The "fake news" stories, which are just another side of the same coin, confirms to me that Facebook is not a terribly trustworthy social media platform. Maybe it will confirm this to other people too. So it will be interesting to see how Facebook reacts.
The article is about other countries where the phenomenon is widespread.
If HRC had won. I'm pretty sure we'd have been having the same conversations although not reported with the same urgency.
We certainly would not be talking about how mainstream media outlets also kept pushing fear mongering narratives.
denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance
^-- you are hereHowever, fake news is a huge problem, especially as more and more people get their news from Facebook. Even if fake news wasn't THE factor this election, it was A factor, and it's not hard to imagine a future in which fake news determined the outcome of an election.
That seems worth a news article or two.
Also regarding your thought that it's just sour grapes after losing, here's a fascinating This American Life episode from during the election on roughly the same topic, but talking about the USA:
https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/599/se...
"Ira's quest continues. He calls his Uncle Lenny, who gets his news from Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and lives with an entirely different set of facts, and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the CATO Institute, who explains that the central issue in Donald Trump’s candidacy is based on something that isn’t true."
See I was not so sure about the direct cause and effect bit.
That sounds a bit too dismissive. I am sure it has to have some effect but not sure that's the reason for an electoral landslide and Hillary delivering the worst Democratic performance in 20 some years, despite having experience, a mass media support, DOJ and POTUS on her side, a lot more donor money and resources.
Saying this is because Macedonians brainwashed our citizens about lizard people or KGB agents seems dishonest.
Makes sense. I'd want to know the effect the fake new had. I suspect it is not as big as presented, at least not compared to the current hype about it. I am guessing you think it is more significant?
> Prior to this, the effects would have been written off as harmless.
Yap. I was joking the other day, I wouldn't mind a test before voting "Do you think Earth is flat?" / "Do you think lizard people run our government?" / "Is earth 5000 years old?". If they answer yes, they vote goes uncounted.
Also obviously people who believed those things could just mark "no", and it would probably also strengthen those beliefs in those that hold them.
I disrecomend that plan.
An anonymous smear campaign began against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, flyers, and audience plants.[126][142] The smears claimed that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains' dark-skinned daughter was adopted from Bangladesh), that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a "Manchurian Candidate" who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days.[126][136] The Bush campaign strongly denied any involvement with the attacks.[136][143]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#2000_presidential_...
It's by no means impossible that that stuff swung the election. I mean I actually believed there may have been paid protestors and that's the first I've seen of it being faked (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11...)
This whole fake news controversy makes me really sad. Democrats aren't learning from their failures.
That's real news with an anti-climactic ending.
Trump would not have won without also carrying most of the traditional Republican base, but it's quite possible that something with a small effect ended up flipping the vote in one of the states that decided the electoral college.
What about people not liking her policies or what she has done, is that because of "Fake News". Should we go and censor that. Telling them they read "Fake News" and instead they should have been watching the "real news" like CNN would also sound rather silly, don't you think?
The question is more whether inaccurate stories influenced enough people (3 types of influence: vote changing, increasing enthusiasm which encourages voting, decreasing enthusiasm which discourages voting) to push the margin in Wisconsin to 30,000 in favor of Trump. I have seen no proof that it happened, I'm just saying that I think it could have happened in such a close race.
Exactly, I'd want to know more as well.
> I'm just saying that I think it could have happened in such a close race.
The margin was close in many states, but overall Hillary still got the worst Democratic turnout since early 90's. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending who you ask) electoral collage is how presidency is won. So campaign strategy focuses on that. In that regard with Trump's landslide, putting "Fake News" as a major reason I think is dismissive.
There are serious conditions under which so many people elected a TV show star as a President, and even though I am just as baffled and don't have the answer, I suspect focusing on "Fake News" is a misdirection.
Fake news could have a similar effect. I don't think it is worth obsessing over it in context of the election, but I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand. People adopting insular world views is a real problem. Organizations with as much influence over content as Facebook can't just pretend they are neutral.
And again, there was no landslide.
Certainly. What would you say to encouraging people to be more critical in reading the news?
The whole "Clinton paid people to protest" stream was created by a fake news author, who even created a fake craigslist ad for their story. [1] They even bragged about it on reddit, claiming they think they helped Trump win the election because of the frequency of how millions of people shared their stories on Facebook.
Enough of these fake news stories circulating leads to swaying people's opinions to make statements such as the Clintons are "even more terrible than you think" without evidence.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/...
It is dishonest to pretend that the dems are claiming fake news is the only reason they lost. Conversations list it as one of a host of contributing factors, not a whole explanation. We all know this, and you should be ashamed of having pretended otherwise.
It's also absurd to claim that the response is mere sour grapes. People have a tendency to ignore problems and hope they go away until they are too big to ignore. This is such a case. Filter bubbles and fake news seemed troubling, but when Trump managed to beat a number of well qualified Republican candidates, it became clear that fake news had more power than was believed.
It's beyond belief that fake news has now become a political issue. On the one hand we have people who want it to be easier for an individual to know if they're being lied to; and on the other hand we have the Trump-loving wing of the GOP. (this is not the entire or even a majority of the GOP). It's wholly reasonable to care about truth, and to want more truth.
Your post has no value. You are just attacking the character of people with a valid concern, and you're backing up that attack with mischaracterizations and lies. Thus, I suppose, it is unsurprising that you oppose truth in media.
I didn't say it can't matter. I said I don't believe it is the reason for an electoral landslide. Do you?
> It is dishonest to pretend that the dems are claiming fake news is the only reason they lost.
So we agree there. It is a matter of degree. It seems you think it has a stronger degree and I think it didn't. Hopefully we'll see some impartial well done studies about it. So far I just have an opinion and it's ok disagree with it.
> People have a tendency to ignore problems and hope they go away until they are too big to ignore. This is such a case.
That's a good explanation. I like it, I can agree with that.
> You are just attacking the character of people with a valid concern,
But isn't "attacking the character of people" the theme here. The idea that people who haven't picked a candidate I liked are idiots / racists / homophobic? I've heard that quite often in mass media and I find it too dismissive and simple. I didn't say you said that but I've heard it enough time to form an opinion.
> Your post has no value.
Sorry. I didn't mean to waste your time. It was my opinion. Yes it probably has no value.
2 or 3 states could flip the election, 6 states had very close races.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
A landslide is like Ike got. 60% of the popular vote, 457 electoral college votes, 41 states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
So rather than introspection and analyzing why they lost working class voters (black, white, _women_, etc.), for example we saw party reg changes in the primaries favor Repubs, why are so many people mesmerized on this one theme? I think it's to feel better by believing the result is not "legitimate". If Dems continue this line of thought, they will lose the rust belt next time again.
Where are the discussion on the main causes? Most discussion is about this tempest in a tea-cup. Not much time is dedicated to how the primaries were run and how one candidate felt they were entitled to the candidacy and how that candidate failed to seriously address working class issues in a way working class people can identify with. Nor do we see a discussion on how the candidate's flaws undercut their ability to effectively counter the opposition candidate.
Do you think a strong candidate would not have won by 5% percentage point versus the ultimate winner, given the winner's weaknesses and lack of experience. That alone should send alarm bells up the Dem hierarchy as well as constituency.
> So rather then introspection and analyzing why they lost working class voters (black, white, etc.) why are so many people mesmerized on this one theme?
Yes, you said it better than me.
> I think it's to feel better by believing the result is not "legitimate".
Interestingly someone was asking the other day how come the right has all these conspiracy theory, where are the left conspiracy theories? (And I am being generous here painting Hillary as the "left", but that's for another comment). And I couldn't think of any right away. Maybe the idea is the minority resorts to dismissive conspiratorial thinking. It is used as an explanation for why things don't work the way they hope. Perhaps we are seeing an inkling of that happening.
It is always far easier to shift blame. Forget politics, on anything really. When you do that, that's the end of the discussion. When you point the finger at yourself, it's the beginning, because now you have work to do.
People almost always point somewhere else. Actual change is hard and almost nobody wants to do it.
This is very dishonest. Evey article analysing the election results is talking about the working class, Hillary's arrogance, the DNC and so on. The fact that people are also talking about the explosion of fake news around the elections doesn't mean people aren't also talking about other issues.
They lost to a very weak, inexperienced opposition candidate with a bad ground game and roughly half the political advertising, compared to the Dems' machine --that shows that Dems miscalculated badly. This should be their focus, not Romanian's and Balkan's fake news endevours --that's a curio, for sure but it should not be among the main topics of discussion as to why the Dems imploded (House, Senate, Governorships and Presidency -all, everything!)
The situation under which a country elects a TV star and the most experienced politician around has the worst electoral failure in 28 years for their party is very serious. There should be a lot more serious introspective discussions.
Mind you, typically (and I am using dangerous stereotypes here) liberals have considered themselves more intellectual, logical, better educated. I was expecting a lot more from them. Instead I see irrational lashing out, blaming, and finger pointing.
It's possible that we're reading the data wrong. If so, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com to clear things up. Either way, though, please don't post like this.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
Ask yourself the following questions. Is this article covering some specific recent event? Is there any investigative journalism involved? No and no. So what is it "informing" us about, exactly? All I see is a bunch of random stuff pulled together to promote a pre-determined meta-narrative.
If you don't believe in meta-narratives, just look below the text to "Related Coverage" box on the page:
STATE OF THE ART
Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power NOV. 16, 2016
Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites NOV. 14, 2016
Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence NOV. 12, 2016
The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day NOV. 8, 2016
And it's disconcerting to see just how hard some outlets try to (morally if not otherwise) discredit the outcome of the elections right now. NYT is actually not the worst in this regard. Just open the home pages of Washington Post or The Atlantic. Political FUD stacked on top of more political FUD. Maybe I have a memory lapse, but I've never seen anything quite like it.
All the same journalists who pushed for the Iraq war on false intelligence are still there at their jobs doing the same crap. There are zero consequences when "mainstream" journalists push fake news.
Thanks for reaffirming this entire concept.
The piece was written yesterday in response to meetings in Berlin between Obama, Merkel and others. Breitbart reported on it too, obviously with a very different spin [1].
> If you don't believe in meta-narratives, just look below the text to "Related Coverage" box on the page:
That an article is lumped together with other articles covering the same topic (same tags) is of surprise to no one who has ever worked with publishing or SEO.
> This is what high-grade propaganda looks like. It doesn't use outright lies, but rather relies on reframing, anchoring, deliberate name-dropping and rote repetition to establish certain associations and emotional responses. I find it infinitely more sinister than some outrageous bullshit appearing on Facebook.
> And it's disconcerting to see just how hard some outlets try to (morally if not otherwise) discredit the outcome of the elections right now. NYT is actually not the worst in this regard. Just open the home pages of Washington Post or The Atlantic. Political FUD stacked on top of more political FUD. Maybe I have a memory lapse, but I've never seen anything quite like it.
Well, by GPs own logic, that post is anchoring. It's just framed as generally as possible to appeal to people in the same way as horoscopes.
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/11/17/o...
The meetings were mentioned twice. Most of the article has nothing to do with them.
> That an article is lumped together with other articles covering the same topic (same tags) is of surprise
Yeah, I'm sure it's pretty normal for NYT to publish articles bashing social media on bi-daily basis. I just happened to miss all of those before the election.
You conveniently fail to mention that every example in the article is real, factual, and documented. Do you have any specific examples mentioned in the article that are demonstrably false?
Without any specific falsehoods, you're simply indulging in an ad hominem attack on the source as being biased in and of itself based on what you perceive to be their motives.
It has exactly one example that supports its thesis. That example involved several other factors and the end result of the election was not affected. Here is some coverage from the time it was happening:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0529/Indone...
The rest of the NYT article is a hodgepodge of unsubstantiated statements, hand-picked opinions, pictures and social media quotes. Or do you seriously consider a badly Photoshopped picture of someone's T-Shirt to be a "fact" that illustrates the influence of Facebook on world elections?
> Without any specific falsehoods
You seem to have missed the part where I specifically said that high-grade propaganda does not rely on outright lies.
...
Meanwhile, the title of the article in question was changed from "Fake News on Facebook? In Foreign Elections, That’s Not New" to "Fake News in U.S. Election? Elsewhere, That’s Nothing New". This serves to further illustrate my point about framing.
The quantity of journalists are now the surplus, and the real scoops that generate traffic (and revenue) are scarce. Because of this economic inversion, we now have the companies running the media institutions. In a mainstream economic environment, you then have two choices: media that plays into the confirmation biases of its readership (customers) - just as NYT is doing here - or investigative journalism that is digging up heretofore unknown stories people are trying to conceal (eg The Intercept, Muckrock) to get the pageviews and therefore the ad revenue.
If one news outlet breaks a story - even if it's a multi-month, highly-researched think piece - every other website will quickly summarize it and provide one link back to it. The link back is at least citing the source, but the summary is likely good enough for most users, and the originating news outlet gets no ad revenue if the reader only reads the summary.
How can we shift that incentive?
I had this realization 7 or 8 years ago (just before the financial crisis started) when reading a book on the history of Lazard, the investment bank. At some point towards the end (i.e. closer to our days) it mentioned that one of its then main executives (Steven Rattner) was a very close friend with the NYTimes publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
Come the financial crisis and the US car industry almost going bust Steven Rattner is appointed as car tzar (whatever that is), even though he had no experience in managing anything automotive-related, it was all based on "let's choose people from a small clique of our friends and friends of friends", where that clique includes investment bankers, newspaper owners, venture capitalists, politicians, "media personalities" and the like. This is not how a true democratic and capitalistic system should work.
And I find it funny how legacy media now turns the blame on Facebook instead of looking at itself and changing its behavior. This is such a bad move (as expected by people who don't know what they're doing) that will only empower alternative media even more and further diminish the legacy media's influence over people.
Donna Brazille embarrassed herself by saying that message was altered, the DKIM hash quite clearly covered the message body.
The problem with FaceBook is that it is built in such a way as to create a separate view into the network for each person. By contrast, on reddit, everyone sees everything and debates anyone in comments, not just their friends. So the bubbling effect is much more pronounced on FB. People form cliques that drink their own kool-aid.
Maybe some basic journalistic notions should be taught in primary school and high school. How to separate BS from news and how to report on events. If we are to be self-styled journalists, then at least we should learn about it.
I think training in this new world to help everyone be a responsible social media journalist would greatly benefit society.
I get my news from ad-funded, donor-funded and tax-funded sources. None of these is perfect, but is news provided to readers/listeners/viewers for an access-fee better, or does it tell people what they want to hear?
It's also worth considering the respected print publications that get revenue both directly from readers and from advertising. My understanding is that they typically get more revenue from advertising, so are they really better than free news? All the ad-free news I know of is also free-of-charge.
Your link provides nothing to support that comment.
Your link does clearly show people's trust in the media is extremely low, but it makes no claims as to why the trust has eroded.
There have certainly been times when various media parties have not lived up to their ethical duties, but to say blanket that the media has "done everything it can to slowly erode trust" seems exaggerated.
Do you think political party rhetoric can erode trust in the media?
One presidential candidate regularly claimed reports about him from one specific media outlet were lies, although they have turned out to be usually true [1].
One presidential candidate made claims during the debates that he did not say things which, simply, he did. The claims he denied making were well-documented on the internet, frequently from his own social media account.
Is it unreasonable to think this rhetoric had some effect on the big drop in mass media trust from supporters of that political party, documented in the gallup.com link you posted?
And would you have recommendations for ways "the media" to gain back that trust? Note that I take issue with the phrase "the media", since it's another unhelpful blanket statement.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/do...
The other presidential candidate has been shown to be colluding multiple times with various media outlets, while they don't fairly report on that collusion. I think things like that erode people's trust in media.
That appears to be true, too - I agree!
So we've identified two causes of eroding media trust. I'd be curious if any research has been done on what erodes trust more: authority criticizing it, muckraking journalism (no pejorative implied there - muckraking is a good thing to expose corruption!), or other things yet.
The huge amount of fake news in people's social media has certainly had some kind of impact on people's trust of news sources in general, too. I am most interested in how to combat that; simply doing good work won't necessarily bring a media outlet the attention it needs to stay in business these days. Incentives in journalism are currently pretty out of whack.
Source?
Because that line is a prime example of the problem. The only thing the emails showed were checking stories for accuracies with sources, and checking what off-the-record information could be put on-the-record. Which is the ethical discourse.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/31/media/donna-brazile-cnn-resi...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/10/...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/...
Multiple outlets, though - I don't know about that. As pointed out, checking for accuracy and talking to a campaign is certainly not off-limit.
1) Uncertain at what level it was when the person involved got the boot.
2) Only one actor, which I'd rank fairly low compared to Guardian, Atlantic, Foreign Policy, NYT, WP, etc.
I read your links, and I agree with them, but it's still only what it is, uncertain what it means... there's definitely no proof of a conspiracy, regardless if there is one or not.
The seed of one of these maybe-stories, flaring into a craze of "every news channel is evil, burn them all" is unhelpful at best, damaging to democracy at worst.
Several "journalists" asked specifically for advice on how they should characterize their articles.
They were part of conversations with campaign staffers on what angles to choose to pursue for their articles.
Worst of all, they directly passed debate and other interview questions in advance to a certain candidate.
The media, and frankly those who buy into the "it's all because of fake news" nonsense, ignores this evidence at their own peril.
Lisa Lerer (AP) writing an article about Clinton's "Wall Street problem" and "she is asking if we wish to characterize her remarks in any way." /podesta-emails/emailid/36373
DNC & Clinton campaign staff being given the opportunity to provide CNN with questions to ask Trump in an upcoming interview. /dnc-emails/emailid/27526
Mark Leibovich (NYT) allowing clinton campaign to edit his article - they're literally picking what to include and what not to include in the article. /podesta-emails/emailid/4213
DNC staff saying Kenneth Vogel (Politico) gave her his story in advance (per an agreement?), and that if there's anything the Clinton campaign doesn't like, she can "push back". /dnc-emails/emailid/10808
Campaign staff discussing how to push back against successful Sanders attack of showing Clinton as being the "establishment" candidate. The strategy involves getting bloggers and columnists to "write about this from a racial justice and reproductive rights perspective, including a few people who joined us on a call to talk about the "Bernie Backlash" that was unfolding even before his remarks last night—current list is Elianne Ramos [HuffPo], Jessica Valenti [Guardian] (who is writing a column on this as we speak), Jamil Smith [MTV/Viacom], Sady Doyle [Guardian, The Atlantic], Aminatou Sow, Gabe Ortiz [WaPo, Univision], and others". /podesta-emails/emailid/56243
And of course we can't forget Donna Brazile getting caught red handed giving debate questions in advance...
Of course it would be foolish to expect corrupt media cronies, who socialize and schmooze regularly with a certain candidate's campaign staff, to expose their own corruption.
And it's real.
https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465
Mirror: http://archive.is/JBUzM
However, for someone who isn't familiar with tech too much, I think it's reasonable for them to hear a server and acid discussed, and assume acid was somehow poured or ventilated into the machine. It sounds really weird to those of us who deal with technology every day and had familiarity with this story, but I think it's a clarification worth making.
The word "acid" has a clear physical connotation, and the post pointed out that there was software that deleted emails, not some physical process. I don't think it was helpful to be in a fact-check, "this is false" style, but clarifying precisely what happened... that's what news is all about.
Please clarify why you think it's bizarre, so I can have a better understanding.
> Trump, Sept. 5: You see what’s going on with her emails. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgusting situation where she pretends like she doesn’t know. I mean, she had her emails — 33,000 emails — acid washed. The most sophisticated person never heard about acid washing. Acid washing is a very expensive process and that’s to really get rid of them.
> Trump, Sept. 6, North Carolina: But why do you acid wash, or bleach, the emails? Nobody even heard of it before. Very expensive. Just ask yourself.
> Trump, Sept. 6, Virginia: How about the acid wash of the e-mails that didn’t mean anything? How about the 33,000 missing e-mails that were acid washed — acid washed. And Rudy was telling me, nobody does it because it’s such an expensive process. OK, 33,000.
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-facts...
edit: I'm now reading all the replies to that tweet and further boggling at the people I share my world with. One claims everyone knew what he meant, while another seems to think the correction is that she used "bleach" (which has a high pH) rather than "acid". Another seems to believe NBC are autistic jews to even mention this.
To regain the trust, I think the main recommendation would be, explicitly include a plurality of views, and push back against this trend of "political correctness above all else" - critical thinking is still valuable, even if it sometimes results in some inconvenient truths.
Edit: [0] is an example of what good media should be. Actually non-hysterical and fact-based. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, it's laudable that he included a link to an opinion that contradicts his.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
Not feeding questions to a debate to 'the chosen candidate' before the debate.
I'm from Spain and I haven't seen such a thing.
To be precise: in Spain the movement that is typically called "populist" by the establishment is Podemos, which by the way is pro-refugees, and fake news have been widely disseminated (originating in conventional media, although being distributed in social media too) to discredit them. In fact they have won several lawsuits in the courts against newspapers that published absolutely made up news about supposed illegal funding, etc. (but who cares about the lawsuits and meager compensations they get, once the information has been publicized, the damage is done). I haven't seen any "pro-populist" fake news circulating around, though. The establishment parties have so many open corruption scandals that there is no need of any fake to discredit them.
As always, journalists make up whatever they need to go on with their "good vs. evil" narrative where everything the establishment doesn't like is "populist". And then the blame is on social networks...
It's the "when they go low, we go high" fallacy that will cost more elections to moderates. If it's free for all psyops out there, the non-authoritarians need a emotional-demagogue front-outlet too.
If bot's and brigades are one-sidedly spamming controversial twitter hashtag or or comment sections it's an inflation of their presence. Hashtags are useless for anybody who wants to hear a plurality of opinions these days. As long as social media is so easy to exploit by organized actors at marginal costs, it's worse than no social media at all.
If a channel is brigaded and spammed by one party it should be spammed by all, some sort of MAD-strategy might be needed, to get past the current status.
I think there are some sources where it is defined in a more rigorous manner, Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent book is one example I like. They tried as much as possible to document bias in reporting for similar instances in corporate controlled media in US. There are a series of well documented cases.
In conversation, I agree, the term "bias" when it comes to news means "doesn't say things I like"
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
Absolutely should facebook and google be forced to reveal their (ever changing) algorithms. In fact (cf Kathy ONeills book weapons of math destruction) inwould prefer a legal framework forcing this.
But as for fake news being pushed into people's feeds, well this is a direct result of facebooks commercial desire to open up my feed to as many "friends and friends of friends" as they can.
My friends don't share adverts about the Rock that lead to body building supplements - no one shares that with their friends ! That's out there as a "you might also like"
Restrict Facebook to only showing what my friends actively share and guess what - no more fake news.
No more Facebook billions maybe but then who cares. It's a peer to peer messaging site - it's not important really
Edit: I would suggest that facebooks content would stall at the level twitters did if ones feed was driven by active sharing by ones actual nearest circle of friends.
I think I would like to know more about the extent of content that appears in a feed that is not active sharing vs active - it should resemble retweets.
Up to this day our news here are manipulated by Liberal Party -- they are the people that runs and plundered the Philippines after the martial law in 1986. Yes they are the same people that lost all the perks of corruption and drugs when Duterte was elected and would want to do anything to impeach him.
So what's your country's excuse of having fake news?
I'm talking about the WMDs in Iraq
Even the NYT themselves are saying that they will "rededicate themselves to honest coverage". Nobody says that unless they are implying they were previously not pursuing honest coverage.
Interestingly, one would expect people here (or I would dare say liberal in general) to be the more educated ones, with better self control, more rational and local approaches to issues and so on. One thing this election has shown is that it is not necessarily the case.
I've seen "down vote and run" on all kinds of comments, and I suspect for all kinds of reasons. throwaway accounts used for drive-by attacks look like they're allied with no one party as well.
Agreed. That's why I like to comment here even though the topic at hand is not necessarily technical. In other places it just turns into an mess much quicker.
To pretend this is just harmless, standard politics is bullshit. Cowards are behind this crap, and you sheep eat it up.
I would guess their eroding relationship with anything Whitehouse and the potential rise of Breitbart is causing panic.
For the last 15 years, they've participated in the fear mongering over-reporting on extremely rare Islamic terrorism to get readers and appeal to fearful Americans who don't understand statistics and don't get told by the media just how small a threat it's always really been.
The culture of irrational overblown fear of terrorism they've helped create is what created Trump, more than emails, more than fake news.
Big media players like the NYT play up threats for views and wonder why people vote for strongmen fascists to protect them from the big bad Muslims.
The first is that this is just a convenient scapegoat to avoid examining the failures of the Democratic Party in this election cycle. They can't have screwed up. Must have been FAKE NEWS which misled voters into erroneously not voting for them. Fix that and fix the problem.
Fine, whatever. Pin the blame there if you like. But…
My second reaction is that I think among what we are inclined to think of as "fake news", very little is actually outright brute falsehoods.
Such things as are actually libelous or fraudulent, perhaps they should be blocked, or dealt with in some manner. But most of what is shared is, I imagine, rather "fake news" in the sense of being ideologically shaded in a manner we find ridiculous. "Immigrants are going to murder your children", that sort of thing. And this stuff IS ridiculous, and false, and terrible… But not in a clear, mechanical, bright-line distinguishable way.
It's wrong because it's wrong, not because there's something for a fact-checker to point at.
And if we do put moderators in charge of deciding that such news is still clearly false and therefore not shareable, I get uncomfortable. Because the merit determination will just become "Whatever matches status quo consensus", which is just "Whatever pleases the status quo powers".
It was fake news when the New York Times beat the drums for war, Judith Miller speaking of WMDs in Iraq. But that would never be classified as such. The source was prestigious, and the claims buttressed the politics of the right people.
"fake" determination at any level where there is controversy would amount to simply enshrining consensus of that class of often wrong people. Indeed, I say to those liberals itching for something to be done, the same board that today puts the kibosh on articles full of conservative idiocy about global warming evidence being overblown could just as well tomorrow decide "Econ professor consensus says minimum wage hikes destroy jobs; articles arguing otherwise oughtn't be shared", or some such thing.
On the other hand, if "fake news" suppression only targets articles where there is no controversy as to their falsehood, then it is a solution in search of a significant problem. Such things exist, but did not (as far as I've yet seen any evidence to prove) play that major a role in the election. The story that fake news swung the election could itself be fake news.
Anyway, that's my skittishness over cries that communication networks don't do enough to crack down on voluntary sharing of "fake news".