Hacker News Reader

Comment by allemagne | Hacker News Reader

There have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our way out of.

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Exactly this. You are just abstracting the decision about "truth" to another set of observers.

Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users.

EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when this becomes a powerful tool, the incentive to aim it at a broader or different set of goals is overwhelming.

Tools for analyzing information can work, but they need to help the person using them make their own judgements, rather than delegate the whole process to some third party or opaque model/algorithm.

This is the same basic difference that you can see between good and bad science lectures in schools. Bad lectures give students a bunch of formulas they have to trust and memorize. Good lectures describe how the world works, which they can confirm through their own observations and experiments.

Anything that relies on blind trust in some curator will eventually have the exact same problems news most media has right now.

These aren't crowdsourced news aggregator sites. These are webspam sites, spun the same way any other webspam site is spun (with scripts and templates). The only thing that makes them interesting is that their payload is 1-2 carefully produced political stories, not a sales call-to-action.

Fake news site are just the latest symptom of the two fold problem of anyone being able to put anything on the internet and people tending to like things that validate their existing views.

If its not news sites, its images with some text over them, videos, etc.

People need to stop using the word "fake news" as though people were seeing stories about "bat boy" in the grocery store checkout aisle and believing them. This is propaganda. It's inflammatory, it's knowingly false, and it has a political agenda. It's propaganda.

I'd challenge you to name one news site that doesn't have a political agenda. Everything is "propaganda", including your comment, and mine.

edit: if you're going to down-vote something which is plainly constructive and well thought-out, you should try to articulate a response.

[1] propaganda, noun, derogatory: information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

His comment is claiming that fake political news should be distinguished from the fake tabloid style news (bigfoot sightings/alien abduction/etc. that we've become accustomed to in the grocery store checkout aisle). The former is propaganda, the latter is not.

This distinction is correct, in terms of everyday usage of the word.

Your claim that "everything is propaganda" is plainly false. An author having a political agenda is not sufficient to render an article propaganda. This would be similar to claiming that every article written by someone with sexual desire is "pornography." It's plainly ridiculous, unless you are operationally defining "pornography" to mean something other than it does in everyday written English.

Things that are propaganda:

1. fake news stories disseminated with the express intent of influencing elections, which are known to be false by the author of the article / editor of the publication / etc.

Things that are not propaganda:

1. stories about bat children in supermarket tabloids

2. your comments

Things that might be propaganda:

1. fake news stories about political figures that appear in tabloids that also produce bat-child news (the article is false, the article might publicize and promote a political cause, but it isn't clear that it is a tool deliberately crafted to do that). What would clearly be propaganda in this situation though, would be a liberal/conservative/etc. spin site republishing a fake tabloid news story about Clinton/Trump that they must in good faith know is false).

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/propaganda

"The sky is blue."

That statement isn't untrue, it is objectively observation with one's eyes or using spectrometers in the case of an individual who is colorblind. It isn't binary, statements can be rated on a range of truthfulness from false propaganda to very objective...and, arguments that are isomorphisms of "all sides do it" are harmful because they essentially justify parties who benefit from such propaganda.

That the Earth's average temperature has been rising is also not untrue and can also be observed and measured. Yet it is often denied in political context, e.g. Sen. Jim Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate as evidence to the contrary.

"The sky is blue" is a non-political statement only because no one stands to make money convincing people otherwise.

I kind of lumped "non-propaganda" with "demonstrably true" which you are right about. A true statement becomes propaganda when spoken at certain times especially when communicated while omitting related details. I think the general point still applies, it isn't binary, some statements aren't propaganda at all, while some have some mixed in, and some are fully propaganda. On the continuum, I'd rate the statements under consideration from least propaganda-ish to most as

   "sky is blue" < "here's a snowball"
                 < "avg temperature of Earth's surface is rising"
                 ~ "${average_comment_on_HN}"
                 << "This snowball demonstrates climate change is a hoax"
                 < "${fake_news_articles}"

Is is fair to put "${random_comments_on_HN}" in the same category as "${fake_news_articles}" because they are both "propaganda?" No.

This is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest argument. There is a difference between making an argument with an agenda, even reporting news with an agenda, and propaganda. You can't just wash everything in shades of gray and shrug while saying "who knows what is truth? or what is false? oh well, guess we'll never know". Truth exists, and it is possible to determine what is true and what is not. Propaganda is passing off knowingly false reports in order to advance a political goal. It's a real thing, which is why there's a word that people created to describe it. Pretending that it's not propaganda has as much claim to legitimacy as any other news is not only wrong it's incredibly dangerous.

If it at least amplifies awareness in the general public about the problem, it's done it's job.

Isn't that exactly what the fake news sites works say?

People read what they want to read. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning You can get rid of the fake news outlets, but you can't get rid of fake news as long as there is free speech.

Eliminating it would be an overly ambitious goal. We only need to mitigate its effects.

I'd argue it could end up backfiring for multiple reasons. The most obvious one is that it will undoubtedly end up strengthening filter bubbles.

The problems that face us will not be solved by siloing ourselves away from views we disagree with. It might take more effort to filter out bullshit in our current age, but if we're not even aware of the bullshit someone else is feeding off, how are we going to combat it? We need to bring more people into public debate, not isolate them.

Counterpoint: if it provides a false sense of security, then it might have made things worse.

Also, confidence in the press is at an all time low, so there is already awareness. [1]

1. http://www.gallup.com/poll/192665/americans-confidence-newsp...

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