A recent poll showed that more Americans trusted Donald Trump, someone who has not gone a day in his short tenure in office without him or someone on his staff telling a verifiable lie to the press, to tell them the truth compared to the U.S. media.
A recent poll showed that more Americans trusted Donald Trump, someone who has not gone a day in his short tenure in office without him or someone on his staff telling a verifiable lie to the press, to tell them the truth compared to the U.S. media.
People start from different places (education, background, prejudices), so they interpret even the same set of facts differently. We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking.
Now your university educated will call it filtering/magnifying/selective truth/implementation of propoganda models (see: Chomsky)
Your average person just says "they lie!" And "fake news".
When dealing with organizations as fundamentally dishonest as the corporate media this is the most you can expect from Joe public.
А у вас негров линчуют
riiight
Yes.
BBC has spent decades earning a reputation for being (mostly) accurate and unbiased. RT has spent at least one decade earning a reputation for being Putin's mouthpiece, and part of his mechanism of control over Russia. The two are not remotely equivalent, despite lapses you can cite at BBC.
- the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
- ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect
That certainly sounds exactly like the media's behavior in this country to me.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda
EDIT: formatting
Is the BBC state funded?
As to how much of a public institution it is, I think it's important to look at how much of the organization's budget is from the state. For PBS, it appears it was around 12% in 2010[3]. RT appears to get almost all its funding from the government (if Wikipedia is to be trusted)[4].
Sorry for the Quora links, but really, there's no reason to accept anything I present over what people there might be able to supply anyways. I present them not as sources, but as additional discussions about the topic.
1: https://www.quora.com/How-biased-or-accurate-is-RTs-coverage...
2: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/how-the-truth-is-made-at-...
3: https://www.quora.com/What-portion-of-PBS-funding-comes-from...
That only seem to go one way...
I think it was mainly targeted at Democrats/Hillary supporters rather than Trump supporters (they obviously didn't need to hear an excuse for why she lost).
That you took offense to it only after November 10, 2016 is inconsequential.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news
Spikes like that don't happen by accident.
This is what happens when you get a pathological liar running for president. Trump "defended" his lies with more lies, such as calling honest news sources "fake news".
Sure, some people also wrote about how trump won because of fake news (i.e. blog posts about things that aren't true, like the comet pizza thing), and that must have contributed, but that is just one of many things.
Like I said two comments down.
>You are very confused
I don't think so.
>fake news started long ago
you can only pick one.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news
Edit: oh look you downvoted the comment below after I pointed it out. how cute.
anyways, even the fake news phenomena that is being discussed today has been around for quite a while, so you are still incorrect in your assertion that its a recent phenomena started by the DNC and hillarys campaign
snopes even did a write up about fake news sites in january of 2016[1]
The problem is that the mainstream has lost its influence to a lot of smaller players and they are doing whatever they can to get it back. Facebook and Google are having political problems because they are viewed as part of the cause of the mainstream media's lack of influence and they are trying to comply with pressure from somewhere. I don't think fake news really hurts their bottom line. In fact, Facebook and Google being viewed as politically biased might be a reason for people to switch to other search engines, especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.
Ironically ? This was more predictable than the coyote's fate in cartoons.
Apparently the reaction to getting an undesirable leader in the white house is to prepare a massive shotgun, give it to the government (that said leader will be controlling), and make sure everyone is threatened by it.
It seems that because "of course" Hillary's defeat was nobody's fault, not hers [1], not the party [2], and not her supporters [3], and it wasn't Trump's efforts either, so it must have been nefarious actions from evil outsiders. This disaster started rolling to make sure this was the narrative surrounding Hillary's defeat.
Obviously, I feel like the the fault is not in our stars, not even the Russian ones.
This will get a lot worse before it gets better.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZHp4JLWjNw or http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/john-podesta-wikileaks...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVKC0egDBpk
(I am not saying the above links illustrate the reason we ended up with Trump. Each of them by themselves probably did not make enough difference to turn the tide. But they are fuckups. They did not help. Enough fuckups and you loose. And yes, I think Hillary lost the election much more than that Trump won it. Hillary defeated herself and Trump moved into the vacuum that remained without fucking up sufficiently himself. But making his election the actions of evil Putin ... stuff like that has the potential to give Trump 8 years. Frankly, even if it's true (because of course Russia ... and the US ... interfere in eachother's elections).
This is something I hear a lot. But according to [1] only 54.6% of the voting age population turned up to vote. Of that Trump got 46.1%[2]. So it's definitely not 50% of the country that voted for Trump. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St... [2] http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-...
The majority of Americans do not approve of him, after one month in office.
Trump 16 - 19.5%
Obama 12 - 20.9%
Obama 08 - 22.8%
Bush 04 - 21.2%
Bush 00 - 17.9%
Clinton 96 - 16.9%
Clinton 92 - 17.5%
Bush 88 - 19.6%
Reagan 84 - 23.1%
Reagan 80 - 19.3%
Carter 76 - 18.7%
Nixon 72 - 22.3%
Nixon 68 - 15.8%
Johnson 64 - 22.3%
Kennedy 60 - 18.9%
Sources:
The term "fake news" is not gaslighting. It was coined to describe news that was, quite literally, intentionally made up with the intent to deceive and manipulate the reader using objectively false facts. For example, the fake electoral map that showed that Clinton only won the popular vote along the coasts, and that everywhere else (including Chicago!) voted uniformly for Trump.
The term has since been appropriated (one might argue intentionally, by progenitors of said fake news) to describe any news that has a perceived bias or slant differing from the one held by the person speaking, but that's not "fake news" - that's just... well, news.
> We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking
I agree with this. To a large degree, if people collectively possessed better critical thinking skills and demonstrated the interest in using them, actual fake news would be a non-issue. As I said, true "fake news" is trivially verifiable as false (e.g. Trump winning Chicago), but it's spread by people who either don't have the skills to think that deeply, don't want to think deeply, or simply don't mind blatantly lying in order to push their agenda.
We should look at the basis of the argument and facts presented - the content, and just ignore the rhetorical packaging like 'very fake news', it's not helpful to argue over whether things are fake or not or what exactly fake news is, because definitions like that are so easily twisted. You might find that you oppose fake news only to find it has been redefined successfully to mean everything Trump disagrees with.
...where on earth did you read that anywhere in what I wrote?
Again, I don't think the labels are as interesting as the claims - better to focus just on what is true and what is not for one atomic fact, not on whether a given fact is 'fake news' which shuts down rational thought and becomes a partisan matter. The sophistry of vague terms like fake news is dangerous whoever wields them and has been really well used by people like Trump to simply distract from reality and shut down the critical faculties of those watching, even when they hate him - it distracts from the actual argument with arguments about what is fake etc, etc.
Imagine if you will a search engine applying labels like 'fake news', 'true fake news' and perhaps 'fake fake news' to results - this is pointless, and would not persuade one person, but would help to polarise society further into different camps, just as Fox News and CNN say have become different constituencies who wouldn't dream of looking at the other channel.
I don't see "fake news" as vague. Fake news is fake. There is nothing ambiguous about the term; many people (eg Trump) have co-opted the term wrongly. If you publish an article saying Adam Sandler committed suicide (http://archive.is/n78Do) and the truth is he's still quite alive and making movies... that's fake news. Can you think of a better word? Liars? Con artists? All these apply to me.
I do think that true fake news websites did embrace Trump more than other politicians, but I believe a lot of this came more from Donald Trump's position as an "anti-establishment" candidate making him a perfect target for writers targeting the conspiracy minded. I think it's fair to say that a lot of conspiracy theory relies on large distrust of institutional authority. I doubt personally that the fake news sites would've similarly embraced Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.
None of this is terribly new to the Internet (stuff like the National Enquirer and Weekly World News would probably be described as "fake news" now). I agree that, if one is prone to believing conspiracy theory, I'm not sure simply a warning label in a Google search will persuade anyone.
Nevertheless, since Google and Facebook are essentially about advertising, my thought is that there might be an economic motivation to at least quietly make sure true fake news sites are less visible. I doubt many mainstream corporations want to be associated with true "fake news", personally, and the often questionable content they have. (Unfortunately any algorithm alterations probably will have to be done quietly, since it's now such a political football.)
It's not that Trump is so trustworthy it's just that one person can't possibly lie as much as thousands.
Interestingly enough the media parroted the "debunked" claim when the article was using statistics from Sweden's own government. Rape is up 70% since 2005.
Grenade attacks are also a thing in Sweden now, which is absolutely unacceptable.
There was one grenade launched in Sweden in August last year. There's at least 1 killed by a semi auto in the US per day. Sweden has near zero homicide rate.
edit: it seems there was more than 'one' explosions in Sweden, but looking at the wikipedia article history linked below doesn't fill me with confidence considering how the language used has changed between august when the article was made and now. Also note how the wikipedia editors write about organized crime using old grenades from WWII and not migrants bombing Swedish people.
As a matter of fact, Trump built his political career on lying about Obama's place of birth.
See:
https://www.thestar.com/news/donald-trump-fact-check.html
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/uselection/2016/11/04/don...
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-false-statem...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/donald-trump-o...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/...
Trump Lies about His Birther Past: A Closer Look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sBhANSz--k "Trump built his career on a racist lie because he's a racist and a liar" -- Seth Meyers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claim...
> I understand I said there were 57 states today. It’s a sign that my numeracy is getting a little, uh …”
>“I don’t know,” Trump repeated. “I was given that information.”
---- "Here's the bottom line, we've got to keep our country safe," Trump said. "You look at what's happening. We've got to keep our country safe. You look at what's happening in Germany. You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they're having problems like they never thought possible."
He continued, " You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe." ----
0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/21...
Most recent New Year's eve: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/749511/French-government...
There are constant serious incidents in Stockholm and Malmo, every Friday. There are constant serious incidents (like 10-20 cars torched minimum) in every major French city every Friday, including even Brussels on occasion, for over a decade now. There are serious incidents in Rotterdam and the poor parts of Amsterdam.
I'm not sure why this is not being reported, although in the French case it is pretty clear the government is suppressing reporting. But of course, after a decade of this few people are unaware. The problem is, everybody knows, and the suppression is causing people to assume things are worse than they are (although they are far beyond what even a San Franciscan would tolerate). The issue is people can just leave their homes, drive 1km further than usual and see proof positive (torched cars being cleaned up, destroyed businesses) that the government is suppressing news. And no, it (mostly) isn't immigrants doing this, although it definitely is muslim inner city youth.
The issue is simple: the governments are lying. Very, very transparently lying. For the fool's hope of turning an anti-immigrant wave back. Meanwhile, you can't actually say you feel like this in most settings. The issue with that is what happens at work. 90% or so of a consulting team working at some bank or whatever will be of the opinion that this needs to stop, and some percentage of them feels that electing Le Pen/Dewinter/Wilders/... will accomplish, maybe not a stop, but an improvement. And it absolutely can't be discussed, because that is sure to, at the very least, result in complaints to HR or management. Meanwhile 100m down the road, 15 floors down, things are slowly getting worse. Some days you can't get a sandwich without getting confronted with it.
Will this get us Le Pen ? God I hope not.
This is the Kuleshov effect of speeches.
I certainly hope that if there is 70% of the population this can still help, that it accomplishes that goal without making the other 30% even worse.
* Drunk the Kool-Aid
* Ignored doing the most rudimentary test of replacing his name with any other and matching results.
Maybe Hacker News needs fact checking integration also.
Snopes is definitely ideologically biased. http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/16/snopes-facebooks-new-fact-...
Looks like we're stuck in a loop here.
Look at proof, not at people.
It would take a couple of generations though.
When my brother was in medical school, one of his textbooks had a sidebar that claimed many doctors would believe in quack medicine. In that case, though, it appeared that they thought they were too smart to be fooled.
;)
I hope you're not excluding HN with 'we' and 'our'. I see a lot of tech people, actually most people in general (including myself), just as clueless and ignorant about the facts. The supporters of Linux and open source claiming "superiority" vs competing tech comes to mind.
Your claim that supporters of Linux who claim superiority over competing tech are clueless and ignorant about the facts is not supported by evidence. Do you have any?
Not that I feel the need to prove anything about myself, but I have been using Linux since 1995, so I have had a fairly long-term experience with using Linux, and I personally have never found it to be faster. To that end, I will concede that the word faster is not a measurable metric. We'd have to define a workload - one that isn't biased towards an OS design, provide an argument that it is a reasonable workload to compare OSs with wildly different design goals, etc, etc.
>Your claim that supporters of Linux who claim superiority over competing tech are clueless and ignorant about the facts is not supported by evidence. Do you have any?
Yes. I've been reading Slashdot since it started. There isn't a single story about Windows or Microsoft on Slashdot that doesn't contain false information.
A recent example: Salon just ran an article on Milo Yiannopoulos. He was sexually abused as a child and made claims a year ago that recently came to light that it was mostly his fault and he seduced the transgressor, somewhat excusing the behavior. At that very same moment they removed articles that seemed to support pedophilia that they had published previously.
https://mobile.twitter.com/stillgray/status/8338350313281249...
My theory is that public opinion takes a long time to shift on these issues, and the media has been a fundamentally dishonest and deceptive industry for so long it's hard to outdo them in such a short time.
The media nowadays covers a very wide spectrum from honest mainstream media (NYT, WP, BBC etc) to partizan sources that include a high proportion of lies (Fox News) to the totally dishonest and unreliable (Breitbart, Infowars etc).
Mainstream media reporting based on trained journalists and subeditors, fact checkers and ombudsmen (who publish corrections) is not "fundamentally dishonest and deceptive", despite the efforts of liars like Trump to undermine it.
The American tragedy is that a large proportion of the electorate has been corrupted by alt-right media lies to the point where people deny things that are provably, factually true.
For an informed account of the problem, see: http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...
"The results were vastly skewed along partisan lines, with 81 percent of Republicans trusting the administration over the media and 79 percent of Democrats deferring to news organizations over the White House."
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-media-trust-poll...
IMO the poll doesn't reflect anything other than people's willingness to believe, against any and all evidence, that their "side" is correct. It feels like a very specific effect of the internet - with five seconds of googling you can find an opinion that reinforces yours, rather than confront the fact that you might be wrong.
The speed with which the likes of Mr. Yannipoulous are pre-empting the rise of mainstream fact-checking/referencing is startling. It shows that who stand to lose from more effective veracity-detection tools will attempt to outpace the development of said solutions by rapidly deploying undermining rhetoric.
Of 26 checked statements, 20 were mostly false or worse.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/stateme...
Discussing his speech in Florida, they claim he referred to a terrorist attack in Sweden. He never mentioned a terrorist attack.
They said Trump's approval rating is 41% [1], cherry picking one of the lowest polls. Lower, in fact, than any recent poll listed on RCP [2].
1: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/feb/18/...
2: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trum...
("Recent" not including one poll from 19 days ago, 17 days before the Politifact article, that reported 40% approval.)
e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/world/europe/last-night-i...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
And the Fox News report (which is mentioned by Politifact) Trump later referred to is about crime.
And regarding Florida:
"Look around you... Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy... look at leereeves last night, would you believe it?"
Am I referring to you as a serial killer?
I don't know where 41 came from exactly but I know that at that same time, Rasmussen was reporting 53% approval. How did Politifact choose?
As for Florida:
> They’re having problems like they never thought possible.
He said problems, not attacks.
And the Politifact article was written after (and even mentioned) Trump said he was referring to a Fox News report [1] about problems in Sweden, which isn't about terrorism.
Sure, and tomorrow it might be 20, or 60. You can only use previously existing data.
> I don't know where 41 came from exactly but I know that at that same time, Rasmussen was reporting 53% approval. How did Politifact choose?
I'm assuming the Gallup poll they link to stated 41 at the time of publication. That's the beauty of sourcing. You can always verify it. Step two is knowing if Gallup is trustworthy, that's where your RCP comes in, which puts it against other sources, most of which we recognize. Further steps would be sourcing their respective data, etc.
> He said problems, not attacks.
In the same breath as specifically cities with attacks in recent years.
But even ignoring that, let's say he wasn't inferring attacks, then:
* What problems?
* What specifically about last night?
"Problems" in the area he was talking about (unrest) usually means attack, so it's not an unreasonable assumption about what he meant.
He of course later stated he was referring to a Fox News segment. How that makes it better is beyond me though, seeing as:
* The segment was blatantly lying. [1]
* He can get briefings from 11 intelligence agencies.
* Sweden has crime statistics and is generally considered one of the least corrupt states in the west. [2]
[1] http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/nyheter/swedish-police-featured...
[2] http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percepti...
The Gallup poll they link to isn't even about his approval.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/203834/americans-world-standing-w...
That's the problem with assuming...
The rest of my post though?
I tend to trust more often when a source publishes something that runs counter to (my perception of) its bias. Such as this article from the WaPo:
> Yet he also acknowledged that the country is reaching the limits of what it can handle, and may have no choice but to tighten its policies in the face of an influx this year that is expected to bring more than 150,000 asylum seekers to a country with a population of less than 10 million.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/behind-swedens-w...
Yes, Sweden takes in (per capita) among the most refugees. [1] This has been the case when I've looked at data for at least 4-5 years.
Yet violent crimes has gone down. [2]
> Honestly, I have no idea what's going on in Sweden. I've heard so many different stories and it's hard to know who to trust when neither the media nor the government are trustworthy.
What specifically is it that you don't trust or wish you had more information about?
I see nothing wrong in the article you link. It's interviewing a representative of the rise of "Sweden Democrats", which is a nationalistic party on the rise that has gotten ~20% of the electorate, in a multi party country, which is very significant.
It's however not relevant to any crime statistics or unrest, but merely _perceived_ unrest, much like the alt-right movement, Brexit, and similar.
A lot of Swedish statistics are mandatorily published in English, so it's not terribly difficult to get it if you try.
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/09/daily-c...
[2] https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statist...
https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statist...
Those stats only go up to 2014, before the refugee crisis.
You're right in that there is a spike in 2015, but the 2014 stats are more than twice as high as 2016.
And regardless of which, it's completely relevant if we want to measure immigration as a factor on crime.
Half as many applications in 2016 as in 2013?
Those are only "asylum" applications...could they be processing people under other categories now?
What media are you referring to?
This is literally the Swedish equivalent of the USCIS. If you rather listen to your preferred outlet reporting otherwise, then bias is certainly at large.
If either of those are true, that would be a story I'd like to read.
Has anyone reported that?
I'd like to know why those numbers fell. Did Sweden stop immigration? Did refugees stop coming? Are refugees being admitted in some other way, not counting as asylum?
Edit:
I found an article in Foreign Policy from over a year ago. According to them, Sweden closed the door.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/10/the-death-of-the-most-ge...
Interesting that the media continues to chide Trump and laud Sweden, if they've both done the same thing.
Strawman.
Either he claims Sweden has immigration problems, which data suggests against, or he suggests Sweden has an immigration problem but they stopped immigration. So which is it?
Either one makes Trump look like an idiot.
>Conversely, 57 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the country’s standing in the world. That’s the highest that number has been in a decade, according to Gallup.[1] And Trump’s approval rating, of 41 percent, is lower at this point than any other president Gallup has tracked since Dwight Eisenhower.
the link in the politifact article is very clearly talking about americans having an unfavorable view of the country, and not approval ratings.
Why are you lying?
If you look on gallup for the day of the politifact article[2], you will see that it shows % approve is 41%.
as for why they would choose the gallup approval ratings over rasmussen, there are very many answers to that question. rasmussen is an online poll, which has been viewed by pollsters since forever as much less accurate than live phone surveys (since online polls can very easily be gamed brigading, they dont verify the identity of the respondent, etc.)
The average from all the approval ratings is 45%[3]
[1]http://www.gallup.com/poll/203834/americans-world-standing-w... [2]http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-app... [3]https://imgur.com/a/MzDa4
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/02/03/daniel-dales-d...