Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Come on guys, there is a huge difference. Lumping together everything you don't like about X is not a productive way to address individual problem. It really only helps to give yourself an excuse to throw your hands up in frustration.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-25/washington-post-nam...
When the idea of "fake news" is used to discredit sites like ZeroHedge and WikiLeaks as "Russian propaganda", you know it's not about fakeness/truth, but only about control - in other words, propaganda.
(I'm not saying that ZeroHedge is a quality site, far from it - but they've always been anti-establishment, pro-conspiracy theory, and they haven't changed their stance during this election campaign at all.)
It's very similar to "election fraud" - before the results, when Democrats were confident they'd win, Trump warning about election fraud was branded a lunatic, a threat to democracy, now we have the same situation on the other side but suddenly it's "the right thing to do" (smart and trustworthy people, e.g. Nate Silver, have dismissed the claims).
The bias is obvious for all neutral people. If a problem is only a problem when you have it, it's not a real problem, merely propaganda.
It's clever branding I give them that, but I doubt it flies after election cycle meltdown.
https://twitter.com/EUvsDisinfo
http://europa.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=cd23226ada169...
http://europa.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=cd23226ada169...
https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/21...
Every time this topic comes up, we have to tediously explain the difference, not because the difference is hard to understand, but because people seize on the name "fake news" as an excuse to attack the media. There's nothing wrong with media criticism, but you shouldn't write it in a way that obscures to readers what these stories are actually about --- webspam farms running entirely fabricated stories.
I'm really surprised this even has to be spelled out, TBH. IT goes to a point where I feel people are intentionally obfuscating the issue.
While occasionally people are duped by The Onion, the site itself doesn't pretend to be posting real stories. Believing this is akin to believing the fakier news, which is basically the tabloids of old. Lizard people, celebrity "news" and gossip and the like. A certain subset of folks have always gone for that stuff, but I like to think that more of them read it for the giggles. The main reason any of this gets into mainstream is lack of fact checking by the real news folks.
But the other breed, the serious fake news, is the real problem. Even otherwise intelligent folks can't really sort out if they are real or not because it is just so freaking plausible. Their goal is to be believed, and reaffirm some suspicions and beliefs people have. Even worse, some of these sites will mix in factual stuff with their fakes. These are the ones that, "seem to be seeing this as an opportunity for a power play". In a sense, any news organisation that caters to any political party - fox news to an extent, and the more insidious players (occupydemocrats, for example) - are guilty of just this. Twist, lie, and misrepresent are part of the game.
Stories in the mainstream press can be slanted, or even false --- stories are retracted all the time! That doesn't make them "fakenews". Fakenews sites are spam, fabricated out of whole cloth.
Only later did they issue a quiet retraction. This is par for the course for US media organizations.
1. CNN misapprehended Spencer's comment, which wasn't about whether Jewish people are human, but instead whether members of the mainstream media are. The story wasn't fabricated --- it was misreported. Again: the media does not have to be perfect for us to reasonably talk about "fakenews", which is webspam consisting of entirely fabricated stories.
2. Here's something you will not see happening on fakenews sites:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3961672/CNN-Jake-Tap...
Look! A retraction!
PS:
It's worth adding that part of the uproar over this CNN chyron is because Spencer is in fact a white supremacist and does in fact have strong anti-Semitic views, and CNN was in part being accused of amplifying those views.
The continued insistence that any discussion of fakenews include litigation of all the flaws of all other news media is a form of trolling, meant to prevent us from discussing the phenomenon of fakenews.
Even though they aren't claiming these claims are true, its at the very least, incredibly misleading. They spend most of the article talking about how Putin has poisoned people in the past, and talking up the Drs credentials. There should be a disclosure that the claims are unsubstantiated. Or it should never have been posted.
That said the Washington post did some of the best reporting this election season.
It's true that headlines like these cause people to become certain about what is an unsubstantiated idea. But it's also within the realm of possibility that Putin did try to poison Clinton. It would be far from the most egregious thing he's ever tried to do, and (as the story describes) he's done it before.
They didn't report it as fact. They reported it as, "This respected guy is saying this thing."
Read the Podesta wikileaks if you haven't already.
The things on your parenthetical list have all been extensively covered in mainstream media. The key is to include newspapers among your sources, instead of just mostly TV news sites which tend to be less broad and less deep.
Rational analysis should not care of the source of information, but about its veracity.
Alas people are not that great at this, hence propaganda works.
You can mislead without lying. Veracity is not sufficient.
tl;dr - I agree with you. NYT has some street cred, Breitbart has negative of that, that's why people should require more evidence for Breitbart's claims than for NYT's, and yes, we should take bias into account, but that's different, sort of orthogonal effect.
I'm in complete and utter disgust, thanks Washington Post for waking me up. Which Soros' funded NGO's can I apply to for my daily rations of cookies and riot gear?
"What difference, at this point, does it make?" - Hillary Clinton
PS: Maybe Bezos should authorize linking this post in the black Friday emails I've been getting lately, and for every person that clicks through, they can get a further discount! Im sure more others are bound to become "woke" (thats the phrase people are using this days, no?).
But considering the Supreme Court's historically zealous defense of the First Amendment (see: Citizens United), we're unlikely to see much change in that regard.
It should be seen as a given that there is significant Russian propaganda working all the time on every issue they care about. Of course they would be trying to influence the American election.
stories which detail items of unpopular fact surrounded by biased opinions which threaten the status quo are being lumped in with stories which fabricate facts and are transparently clickbait.
the first type of story headline: "hillary took money from the saudis and will sell us out"
the second type of story headline: "hillary murdered young children in 1990"
see the difference? one of the two has a fact regarding campaign finance (presented in a very slanted yet still correct way) that is tied to a speculation/opinion (easily identifiable bias) that will validate a broad range of opinions and potentially begin to form opinions in the uninformed. the other is a bogus fact that will draw attention and validate the most extreme already-existing opinions.
the mainstream media is viciously desperate to make the issue of hillary losing the election into a matter of "too many people fell victim to the fake news stories which claimed hillary murdered children in 1990. those stupid republican idiots are just so darn impressionable." this couldn't be farther from the truth. masses of people falling for headline 2 generates rioting in the streets, not voting for an "outsider".
people saw the first type of story, and believed it. facts often don't have to be twisted in order for the reader to arrive at a certain conclusion, and hillary was laden with a billion of these facts.
the whining regarding russian interference in our election is very much overblown, as well as cynically ignorant/ intellectually dishonest. the USA meddles in countless other elections, consistently, via propaganda and other means. this doesn't make it right when anyone does the same to us, but a discussion of foreign influence in our elections should be within the proper context: geopolitical powers meddle in each other's affairs as much as they think they can get away with.
furthermore, russians did not start propagandizing yesterday. many of the urban russians are a technologically inclined and cosmopolitan people who are prolific on the internet, and it is certain that these people are the ones filling the ranks of putin's propaganda forces. they simply aren't stupid enough to try making completely counterfactual claims fly-- it's a waste of their time. the russian angle of propaganda has been (even since the times of the early soviet union) a kernel of undeniable and ugly truth, which can be opined upon within a range of speculation. you could say that in this election, their angle was "hillary clinton is corrupt". this angle of propaganda only works if people immediately recognize the kernel beneath the headline, and identify with the sentiment.
for many people in this country, "russian propaganda" fit cleanly with their own domestic "not-propaganda" media sources. so what if it was the russians feeding information to wikileaks? for many people, the relevant facts of the matter pre-emailgate were exactly the same as after. calling the real development of narration around the kernal of hillary clinton being corrupt "fake news" is a massive disservice to the public, as well as abject denial of the situation. voters didn't like hillary because they thought she was corrupt. there were many media which supported and fostered that dislike, using facts. there were many other media which fostered that dislike using fictions. don't throw the fact out with the fiction, regardless of the source of each.
btw: i voted green party, not in a swing state. if that makes any difference to you.
---
this is the part of my comment where i make a lofty call for improved critical thinking training for our citizenry. the way to kill the problem of propaganda is not via suppression of inconvenient storys, as zuckerberg wants to do with "fake news", but rather an increase in general ability to identify and deconstruct malicious thoughtware. there are a few easy rules of thumb that could help people a lot. maybe i'll write them into an ebook. the problem is that a lot of people don't give a shit about critical thinking, and find any kind of intellectualizing to be faggy.
That is the difference between "fakenews" and "biased" or "sensationalized" news. There is no number of paragraphs you can write that will make the difference between those two concepts any less stark.