According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem
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What we should say is that all aspects mentioned in the article are problematic: the decline in the media, the rampant levels of fake news on the internet and the way social media can so quickly and pervasively spread patently false information. None of them are necessarily the problem alone, but they are each serious problems and all the moreso when in tandem as they are today.
The rise of the combination of third Party vote - Gary Johnson and Jill Stein + other was over 4% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... - and less overall votes says that, far from people seeing their own side, people didn't like ANY side.
The question should really be "What made Blacks and Latinos turn out in lower numbers, and what made so many people vote Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or other, especially in swing states?" That doesn't seem to be the question anyone wants to look at, and I reckon that's the real story here: how invested in the two party system, and their own survival, the media is.
Those also came about due to stricter limits on how to id oneself for voting, and ... well, either retarded or hostile (your choice) voting office setups that forced people to wait far longer than reasonable to be able to vote.
Both of these very effectively keep particularly economically weaker voters out of the game.
Completely my personal opinion: Until the US moves voting onto a weekend and makes it a multi-day affair, and makes affordable unified country-wide id available and usable, the US democracy doesn't deserve the label.
I agree that the questions of voter turnout, third party support, and fatigue of the two major parties, the two party system generally, and the established media are all worth discussing. I disagree that nobody wants to discuss these things as there have been many thoughtful articles on major media outlets on these topics (not that there shouldn't be even more, just that it's in accurate to say this isn't a set of questions anyone is discussing).
I also disagree with the notion, which your post seems to imply, that these discussions are mutually exclusive with the issues summarized in my post. Indeed, quite to the contrary, I would imagine these things are all interrelated and reinforce each other. Fake news, especially with negative or scandalous slants, being spread rampantly on social media contributes to further discord and disillusionment with the establishment and reinforces people's distrust of media, either party, and likelihood to either abstain, protest vote, vote for alternative parties, etc.
I am not quite sure why we can't operate like the rest of the world and charge for services - as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers.
Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through.
Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else.
Arguably, some news outfits were designed as profit making entities, and 'news' was just a vehicle to that profit. CNN is a relatively latecomer in the news world, and because they were formed primarily as a cable news channel ... they went about their business very differently that more classical print houses.
One thing we don't talk about enough: 'information consumption habits'.
People checked out the news every day to keep up. Now - they can read FB/Instagram and keep up with things that are possibly more important to them in their lives. So - the new social opportunity is literally grabbing 'waking hours' from regular news sites. Bloggers - good or bad - can report on events in some cases somewhat reliably - and so there are other outlets.
If you live in Toronto, you used to buy the 'Toronto Star' or 'Globe and Mail'. Now you can read NYT, Guardian, Washington Post - so there's a degree of consolidation as well.
Sadly, it's a mess and I hope someone can figure it out :)
So maybe the problem is not bad news reporting, but the scarcity of highly educated and/or conscientious readership?
That is, maybe we should fix the education and the citizenry -- else people won't make much out of well written news anyway, if not for anything else, because they wont be able to evaluate them...
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time --
when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all
the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome
technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing
the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the
ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority;
when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our
critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good
and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition
and darkness...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
[2] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-k...
Because the price is too high. Ads pay $1/thousand impressions. Subscriptions go for around $10/month. Convert to the same units, and it'd be something like $10/hundred impressions, or 100x the price.
The numbers are, of course, far from exact, but correct in terms of order of magnitude.
Bring the price down. Use micro payments, use bundling, use yearly subscriptions. At these prices, ads are the best user proposition and there'll be no uptake from subscriptions.
The NY Times alone is $15/mo, WaPo is another $10, local news - $10, the Economist is $15/mo, the WSJ is something like $30/mo, FT also $30/mo
If I were to pay my way through all the paywalls I see in a month, I'd probably be paying over $100/mo for news alone!
And what if something like the Bitcoin micropayment network made this possible in a decentralized way?
If you can't or don't want, I'd say the situation is more grim than before when people had one or a few somewhat neutral established sources of news such as the main newspapers or evening news on television. People get to pick what to believe and enforce their own little bubbles of reality.
So it might indeed come down to how educated and critical people are whether this ubiquitous news trend turns out to be an improvement or more harmful. I'd say that right now, in the West – where traditional media on the whole was at least somewhat neutral – it's not looking great. But in less democratic places where the media is state-owned, alternative sources of news might have a positive impact.
Because i suspect what is wanted is not a subscription but "for the day" payment, much like with a physical newspaper or magazine.
but most newspapers have adopted a more "blog" or TV news like approach, with new articles rolling in constantly rather than having a daily packet ala what you get with a print edition.
Never mind the hassle and worry about leaked/hacked credit card data.
This shows that the average "information consumer" considers the so called "news" worthless. Action speaks louder than words.
The average "information consumer" considers his/her own private data also worthless, otherwise would not sell it for free eg. for worthless goods.
Distributing articles over the internet scales better than distributing rice packets through stores.
I would happily pay for an all-you-can-eat, ad-free subscription model, just as I'm happy to pay for Spotify. But it has to cover all the content I actually read, which in effect means hundreds of tiny specialist blogs and major publications like WSJ.
Unfortunately such a subscription model doesn't exist. And very few businesses are in a position to create it. Perhaps Google could, by offering a no-ads subscription across their adwords networ. They are unlikely to ever offer this though, because it would cannabalise their existing, highly profitable ad business. Hardly anyone else would have the necessary traction to make it work.
After all, Google ads tend to be among the least obnoxious, so if I were to pay for no ads (on the basis that I simply don't want to see ads and not because of a greater societal benefit of removing them as a perverse incentive) then I would want a very clear contract that says for X group of websites, I will get no ads and they will get revenue from my browsing. I don't want there to exist some group Y that still gets revenue from my subscriptions, even though they continue to show ads anyway. In that case the subscription is unfit for purpose; it might as well be called a donation instead.
It's also possible that Google intends to play both sides and offer higher-priced, high-priority ads that are always shown. It could just be the AdBlock mess all over again, which is the trouble with having conflicting interests.
Then we have radio for music. At one time in history, this was the main method for people to access music. Radio has some clear draw backs and limitation for the consumer, and record labels offered an alternative where consumer could buy CD's with a limited number of songs without the restriction that radio has. Let again guess that about 6-8% of consumer accepted this deal, while everyone else continued to listen to music for free and paid by taxes/advertisement that gave very limited compensation to musicians that only could guess the number of listeners.
Then we had TV for films. At one time in history, this was the main method for people to access movies, but at some heavy limitations. Rental services offered an alternative for a limited number of films without the restrictions of TV. Let again guess that about 6-8% of consumer accepted this deal, while everyone else continued to listen to watch movies for free and paid by taxes/advertisement that gave very limited compensation to movie producers that only could estimate the number of watcher.
And then we have the Internet that has everything from text, to sound, to audio-visual, using both models. Let me guess that its going to be about 6-8% paying customer. Unless we expect the media budget per family to increase by 10x in average, I have some doubt that there is a good plan on how to get such increase in spending.
(Taxes, as in state owned Library/Radio/TV. Sweden have a tax-but-not-tax on TV).
Mass media has mostly lost their grip on manufacturing consent.
It was effectively used in the past for that. The Democrats have relied on it too heavily. That was the old school strategy - those who control the media, control the outcome. In this case it backfired on them.
The more money, manipulation and control they poured into it, the more insiders they had, the less trustworthy they became. Instead of stopping and re-evaluating, they doubled down on lies, which made them even less credible.
One thing they missed is that to be effective, they had to keep up appearances of some nominal impartiality.
In a way they are one of the primary reason this election was lost. They manufactured Kool-Aid, which is fine, that's their job, but then instead of giving it to the Trump supporters, they gave it to Hillary supporters. They were showing all blue maps with a Hillary landslide. There was no other choice, of course, after endorsing her openly for months, they'd never show an all red map. Even if somehow they had one projected. (They didn't. USC / LA Times poll predicted a win for Trump, and it is an interesting reason why, but that for another discussion...)
The idea perhaps was to discourage undecided/Trump voters by showing that candidate has 1% chance of winning, so why bother voting. In the end it had the exact opposite effect. They showed a Hillary landslide and so Hillary supporters stayed home. Why bother putting your shoes on or staying in line if it is landslide anyway.
So then last week everyone started talking about "Fake News" almost overnight. All was good, nobody likes lizard people, everyone thinks that's crazy. But then it quickly turned into a label that gets thrown at "news I don't agree with". Just a few days ago, a story about an oil field and Texas and it seems they got the estimates wrong or the model for the cost was off and it immediately got slapped with the label of "Fake News".
In a certain way it is not surprising. Throwing labels around is basically the new way of conducting discourse. One can blame Twitter for it (I am sure there is some study already on how Twitter affects discussion and exchange of ideas). You can say so much in a 140 characters so what you do is throw a label at the end "Fake News" / "Soros" / "Sexism" and you're done, point proven.
And besides, having a poor model is not at all fake news. Fake news is completely making things up.
In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, some hedge funds did private polls, rather than relying on the publicly disseminated ones (which of course predicted a Remain victory). Those same hedge funds bet on Brexit and made a lot of money. What does this tell you about the quality of the public polls?
Fact is, polls can be used as a tool to bludgeon a minority opposition, by sowing disunity amongst the opposition, and by demoralizing them through the strong suggestion that victory is impossible (NYT: 15% chance Trump victory).
We have evidence that the Clinton campaign aggressively pressured a multitude of actors into bending the rules. (See Wasserstein-Schulz and Donna Brazile scandals.) We have strong evidence of quasi-universal, vehement opposition to Trump in the mainstream media, and therefore of the willingness of those actors to succumb to such pressures.
In addition, if you understand how stratified sampling works, you can convince yourself that it is not so difficult to skew the results in one direction while still maintaining plausible deniability.
So why do you think the proposition that polls were systematically biased is so unserious?
> Fake news is completely making things up.
Sure, but the professor who typed up the widely-shared hit-list of "fake" news sites included Breitbart and Drudge Report, which are manifestly not fake news sites.
Two reasons. One, and the most obvious one is that the polls weren't very far off. They had the average amount of polling error that there has been (according to what 538 said on their podcast). The polls indicated a 3-4 point national lead, and she ended up with a ~1 point national lead. The second is that polling agencies have their reputations and there hasn't been any indication from wikileaks that there was any tampering or attempted tampering.
So: would you agree that the proposition of systematically biased is unlikely, while also agreeing that serious people could harbour doubts about the impartiality of said polls?
It would seem to me to be in the interest of everyone (ironically, especially liberals, although it seems they haven't quite gotten the point yet) to seriously investigate these allegations in light of the revelations of Wikileaks, revelations which the mainstream media worked so hard to cover up and discredit.
If the polling is far off from the results, you either get unwanted investigations or you lose credibility for future polling.
Anyone with sufficient resources to influence something on this scale is likely playing a long game, and it's clear that the game is being played on some level. Look at the way the DNC started out with the bulk of the superdelegates for Hillary in order to give her an early credibility jump over the opposition, just in time to get actual credibility by winning Texas.
Especially when someone is donating to a campaign, they want to donate to a winner.
Not really. The polls indicated that it was basically 50-50. The media chose to interpreted the polls to predict a Remain victory. The difference is subtle but important.
suggestion that victory is impossible (NYT: 15% chance Trump victory).
This annoys me no end. In what possible world is 15% an "impossibility". Is rolling a 6 on a fair dice or getting heads three times in a row when flipping a fair coin also an impossibility?
I disagree. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...
> This annoys me no end. In what possible world is 15% an "impossibility".
In the world of opinion pieces in the run-up to the election. In the world of 24/7 television commentary from the likes of MSNBC, CNN, etc. What world have you been living in?
Sorry that last bit was absolutely not aimed at you, but at the media that, as you said, looked at models showing Trump having a 15-25% chance of winning and saying first "according to the models Trump cannot win" and then "Boy did those models get it completely wrong".
I didn't say that. I said even if poll results showed more red on the map, they would have probably chosen not to show it.
> And besides, having a poor model is not at all fake news. Fake news is completely making things up.
I didn't say poll were fake news. That's was issue discussed in my comment, throwing labels like "Fake News" at stuff you don't agree, isn't it.
> but isn't that the whole idea behind data journalism that you build a model and feed data to it?
Not so simple. How they sample matters, what demographics they include matters, how they adjust results matter.
They obviously got it wrong. No it is not Fake News. But it would be interesting to see why they got it wrong and all had a consistent bias in one direction mainly. Their reputation is at stake so hopefully they do a more in-depth analysis.
http://www.hangthebankers.com/wikileaks-podesta-emails-polls...
The timeline of the Reuters polls suddenly bumping to a Hillary landslide confirms.
Speaking generally, "fake news" is a real problem, though a more accurate term would perhaps be "poorly vetted" news. Large media outlets feel the need and pressure to compete with the rapidity of social media for news since prior to doing so, the large media outlets appared to be lagging behind "real news".
I think that it's better to say that we're still not sure how to handle and adjust to a new world where data updates are instanateous for the general population. The traditional gatekeepers have lost a lot of power and many new ones have risen up in their place - the new gatekeepers have various degrees of fact checking and integrity, so they can produce more content and faster, meaning that anyone regardless of affiliation can find nearly instant authoritative sources on just about anything they care to in a matter of seconds, with search bubbles catering to their biases.
Fake news in the context of it being poorly researches and poorly vetted is a real problem. We don't have the system of checks that journalism used to have for instaneous news pieces, and it's not something you can mine out either - it requires some actual fact checking; did this person really say this? what is the context of the statement? was the piece legitimate or satire? It's not necessarily a disinformation battle, no, but man, it's really hard to sort through a lot of the information out there, especially when the majority of the populous is used to having a few definitive sources they can rely on for good hard hitting journalism.
Undoubtedly. However I agree with Snopes here in that this was not "the" problem of why this election was lost.
> I think that it's better to say that we're still not sure how to handle and adjust to a new world where data updates are instanateous for the general population
Agree. I see that the landscape is changing quickly but how it is changing or the exactly reason need to be figured out.
> Fake news in the context of it being poorly researches and poorly vetted is a real problem.
Yeah, I like that Google and Facebook have started to attack the problem. I am a bit suspicious of those using this label all too quickly as it dilutes its meaning.
> but man, it's really hard to sort through a lot of the information out there, especially when the majority of the populous is used to having a few definitive sources they can rely on for good hard hitting journalism.
Agree. The lack of trust is the issue. I am guessing that's why the appeal of Wikileaks and email. Those can obviously be editorialized based on what's released and what isn't. However what is released can be considered as a reliable source. So in this environment of uncertainty, many probably saw raw email texts as one of the few instances of "valid" news (for better or for worse).
Or...have they? They knew Trump's rallies were bursting with supporters while Clinton's were not. They kept up the narrative that Clinton was a shoo-in. And then 46% of all registered voters stayed home instead of voting. Had they told the truth, I believe voter turnout would have been much better. So how are you so certain the MSM didn't manufacture their desired outcome?
Turns out they were pretty much right which makes us question all the social science accepted as valid.
We are very very happy to talk gender or race, but not class. Class is very much forbidden.
Or, was there some other aspect of class you feel is broadly unaddressed?
Thus when industry workers etc see their livelihood go out the window because of pressures from a globalizes market, and more center-left politicians seems willfully blind to the issue, said workers end up voting right wing. Because although the message is at its core racist, the talking points alt least touch of the problem of jobs etc.
And the idea that misinformation has no impact is the equivalent of saying advertisement has no impact. Or propaganda.
What is happening is an attempt to cast doubt on the genuine information sources critical to a well informed electorate. The same way doubt has been successfully cast on climate change and natural selection. The word 'Lugenpresse' was used to do this in a previous generation.
That anyone genuinely believes the implication of this, that the entire free press of all democracies world wide is conspiring against the American people while Putin's press and tabloid websites are their sole champion, could not possibly be more absurd.
Traditionally information was power and the ability to influence large numbers people was valuable and this unique power was what made the news industry important and also made it prone to abuse and control.
The free press is supposed to play a critical role in a democracy but as a business it can't perform that function and is reduced to currying favours, pushing agendas and journalists trying to be part of an inner circle so it can't play the role we think it plays or should play. Best case they are just vehicles for advertisements but worst case they are colluding to manipulate the public.
Journalists don't go out randomly on the road to get news, various government departments, public organizations and businesses reach out and brief reporters. 'News' comes to them. Their power has tradionally come from having exclusive access to eyeballs which could fund having more reporters and thus 'more news' but that has become irrelevant with the internet.
I don't think people are willing anymore to pay for briefings from various public departments and private businesses with some opinion thrown in. If it comes free, they may choose to consume it for amusement but as a business model or a pillar of democracy it seem the 'press' has challenges and 'news' itself is going to need defining to give it value. And as citizens we need to find new modes of accountability for democracy because the press can't deliver it.
http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cance...
> The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer.
So basically, now, people give about as much credence to an established media article as to a social media article - which is a good thing in my opinion, given that established media are no longer vetting their sources as they should, are hypocritical about their opinions, and are instead giving in to the biases that they hold in their own echo chambers. Social media simply provides an alternative, equally biased opinion from the opposite end.
"established media articles" are as good as FB hoaxes. Sad but true.
Most of MSM has a soft-left bias and a lot of it is hard left - and not in the classical 'socialist' manner (i.e. representing working class) - they're now fully onto race and identity issues, and enforcing PC culture.
There was an article in the Guardian today - written by a woman, lambasting how rude and crude and disgusting the male habit of 'stag parties' (UK bachelor parties) are. The comments section (and this is a fairly left wing site) lambasted the author, because were the roles reversed, she'd be chastised, she's never been to a stag, and the female version of stags are equally as bad. But in the Guardian, they need an article every day to hate on white men. Even their readers called them out.
Every day there is an article in the Huffington Post or the Guardian or MSNBC that could very well be in the Onion. They are easily just as bad as anything alt-right. But in the article - only the 'alt right' was mentioned as being of poor quality. Again - this is obvious bias.
Fox News - at least the news items (not the commentary, which is bad) is actually looking reasonable these days, which is shocking to me.
Watch the local news only for 10 days. You'll feel something is 'too normal'. It's relaxing. It's just the news - that's it. Then - when you turn back to cable news - you'll realize how full of spin and ideology it is.
The only reason I watch CNN is to try to grasp what kind of spin they are applying, and why. CNN is soft about it (Fox and MSNBC are blatant), and probably the trickiest, but it's there if you look for it.
Are you counting by outlets or by readership/viewship? I think by both metrics, most main stream media is on the right or hard right. Which metric are you using that puts most of MSM on the left?
>There was an article in the Guardian today - written by a woman, lambasting how rude and crude and disgusting the male habit of 'stag parties' (UK bachelor parties) are.
That was an opinion piece. That's not really in the same topic as making things up like "NYT columnist calls for assassination of Trump" based on a radio interview for a station that doesn't exist.
Some people can't take a joke, it seems. Or rather, some men can't take a little lifestyle piece lightly without turning it into "enforcing PC culture". And that's all it is. Someone did a study suggesting that most men don't actually enjoy what they're "supposed" to enjoy, and the guardian does a little bit on toxic masculinity. They have a point, it's a ridiculous setup that men go along with because more unforced and genuine enjoyment feels in contradiction with their own need to perform masculinity.
The only people enforcing anything are the bars with "NO STAG/HEN PARTIES" signs, usually due to previous trouble.
(The Guardian comments are of course full of right-wing people hating on the Guardian. It's not a symmetrical phenomenon.)
You may have caught this on HN last month:
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/
If you were to apply that model for how advertising works to your use of CNN, you could conclude that CNN may "work" very effectively on you and everybody else, even if nobody were to believe anything they see on CNN.
Apparently logic has a liberal bias to.
An opinion has no nothing to do with what a fact is and whether snopes accurately debunks them.
Snopes is no longer a wholly credible source for fact checking when they don't stick to facts as stated BY SNOPES. Now I have to suspect every analysis on editorializing. Snopes provides their own custom narrative on judgement re: http://www.snopes.com/hillary-... [snopes.com] - she did laugh, she did plea bargain him out, etc. Don't say false when it's true, but you are trying to meet your own overall conclusion. It really soured me. Yes, the story is basically false, but the fact checking there is factually incorrect by their own measure. Her behavior isn't all that strange among defense attorneys (backpedal apologizing), so whatever.
That being said, the idea of "fake news" is tricky subject when real news can be spun so hard. Facts get blurred when put together in unexpected ways to form a new headline which is almost always to meet some agenda. On the other hand, a news story always starts with a perceived context, so which is more correct? The more factually correct or the more coherent/recent narrative?
http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-lau...