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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

This is such nonsense. What is happening now is unprecedented.

As an example. Some random guy tweets that CNN showed Porn instead of an Anthony Bourdain show. Based on nothing else Daily Mail, Esquire, GQ, Fox News had articles up immediately giving the claim legitimacy and a massive audience in the tens of millions. Of course it never happened. This isn't on some spectrum of different opinions. This is a flat out lie, that was never fact checked by seemingly reputable companies that suddenly became true.

The fact is that because of Twitter and Facebook and the financial importance of being first to the punch the integrity of news is slowly but surely going down the toilet. So yes the fake news epidemic is real, serious and very much a new phenomenon (because media companies rely more and more on internet revenue).

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It used to be these "reputable" organizations used to have reporters investigate, and do a story. Then came citizen news and they'd report on what someone reported to them without sending an actual journalist to establish basic facts. So you had these organizations trying to scoop each other without getting or trying to get any facts whatsoever just to get something up first. And now you have people essentially "news-swatting" them.

They brought these problems on to themselves by trying to play fast and loose with journalism in the first place, now they get played and are feeling a bit upset and want some payback.

I don't think the problem is that "citizen news" are not fact checked, because generally, citizens don't create fake news, and when something is worth reporting, there are multiple distinct reports.

Fake news are created by news spammers and propaganda organizations. These guys do it on purpose, for cynical reasons. They won't stop, so we need to filter them out.

What is needed is a blacklist and a way to collaborate in fact-checking. I often seek Wikipedia for news for this reason - it tends to be more fact checked and complete.

After a news piece has been tested and found fake, then we need to apply machine learning to quickly identify all clones of that news floating around (this is easier that the original problem of detecting if they are fake).

So basically the internet needs an immune system.

To summarize your argument: people lack critical thinking skills, therefore we need an Internet-wide censorship system.

It's a new phenomenon for someone to tell a lie and have it spread like wildfire? The internet might enable both the truth and lies to spread faster, but I don't see it as something fundamentally new.

Yes it is a new phenomenon. Because of Facebook and Twitter fake news can reach tens of millions of diverse people in seconds. Please explain when in history this has otherwise been the case. And remember we aren't just talking about one off examples here. We are talking about a constant barrage of completely fake news.

Even what you're referring to has been around for at least 15 years, the internet is not exactly new anymore. I don't disagree with you that the spread of false information is a problem, it's more that I deeply disagree with the tone and proposed solutions within most of these articles about 'fake news'. I would like to utilize the corresponding ability of the internet to rapidly disseminate truth as a way to combat falsehood, and to me this entails building open, distributed discussion platforms where both anonymity and verified identities are possible.

Drudge or CNN have been capable of spreading 'fake news' to tens of millions via the Web in the US for 15 or more years.

The current propaganda over fake news is solely about the Trump election result and attempting to install a form of censorship & control over information either directly (outlaw 'fake news' via political content controls or similar) or indirectly (get FB/Google/Twitter to shut down distribution, which they're thrilled to do) to prevent that from ever happening again.

When Trump is finished with the US you'll understand why people are panicking.

When "fake news" is finished in the US you'll understand why people are panicking.

Propaganda (barrage of fake news) predates the newspaper and certainly predates Facebook.

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