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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the problem is not a technical one, and the term 'fake news' is in itself gaslighting and part of the problem - as soon as you accept this term, you accept people just shouting fake news to shut down conversation (as Trump does frequently to shut down lines of questioning he doesn't like, notably in his press conference before he'd even heard the question). We should reject the premise of any argument that depends on some news being fake and some being real, and somehow if everyone just knew the one truth it'd be ok.

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.

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"Fake News" was a term created to explain why Hillary didn't win the election. If she had won, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Ironically, Trump has successfully comandeered the term to criticize his enemies in the media.

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.

> especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.

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-...

You can make that claim about most US elected officials. It's broadly understood that nowhere near 100% of the US voting-eligible population votes in elections, and that when someone says "50% of the population voted for...", it means that 50% of those who bothered to vote at all. It's the same thing as the stories you see citing a study that finds that X% of Y's have Z trait. Everyone understands that it's referencing a percentage of those included in the study, not the entire population.

The assumption with the study you mentioned only works when those included in the study are a random sample of the population, expected to be representative. I'd argue that people who vote aren't a random sample and not representative of the population. In other words, when people don't like either candidate, they are more likely to stay home. Therefore, a percentage of the population that voted for a candidate could potentially be an interesting measure. Just pulled together some numbers by dividing the winner's popular vote by the total US population in that year, and was actually surprised at Trump's showing. He's at the median of all presidents since 1960. Not sure what meaning could be extracted from it, though, as there are many factors that would affect turnout.

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:

http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table

http://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/

Yes but 50% of America did not vote for Trump. He got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.

The majority of Americans do not approve of him, after one month in office.

Depends on who you ask.

https://imgur.com/a/MzDa4

What an interesting distribution... From the table it looks like there is a correlation between method and results. Are people less willing to put their trust in Trump over the phone than in anonymity, or are the people who are making calls biased, or...? :)

Why are you linking to approval ratings in a discussion about votes?

Read the last sentence of the person I replied to's comment.

Ah, I missed that. Fair enough.

> Ironically, Trump has successfully comandeered the term to criticize his enemies in the media.

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).

People were using fake news before hillary lost the election. The extreme amount of obviously rediculuous and impossible "articles" (yet believed by a fair amount of people) caused the widespread use of this. As an example, the endless stories about the comet pizza place and hillary hiding and supporting an international child trafficing ring or something like that.

The majority of TV media routinely engages in "just honest enough so you can't sue me" reporting. They consistently misrepresent the facts and spin things to their agendas.

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.

I am not convinced that the TV media is intentionally dishonest (other than obvious propaganda machines like RT). In the stories I have seen where I knew what actually happened, the errors and omissions in the media could be adequately explained by ignorance, laziness, and lack of resources. TV "news" is primarily an entertainment business and in most cases there's simply no incentive to present complete and accurate stories. If viewers will watch anyway then why waste time doing extra work?

There are numerous cases they got caught making up stories.

> adequately explained by ignorance, laziness, and lack of resources

That only seem to go one way...

What makes RT propaganda? The fact that they are critical of the US in ways our own media isn't?

Uhh, the fact that they are the state run media arm of a notoriously free press-hostile regime in a country with a famous history of a government propaganda arm?

RT is state-funded as is the BBC and PBS, among many others. But none of them are immediately dismissed as propaganda. Why? Simply because "it's Russia?"

No. Simply because it's propaganda.

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.

Where is evidence of this 'reputation for being Putin's mouthpiece?' Other than your impassioned assertions? Also, all media is biased. BBC is biased toward Western and UK interests, RT is biased toward Russian interests. This is something RT freely admits. But does BBC?

RT is beyond biased. Your claim, if true, equates all media to propaganda. Biased media is simply not the same as propaganda.

Secondary and tertiary definitions from MW for propaganda:

- 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

> RT is state-funded as is the BBC

Is the BBC state funded?

"The BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC

Yes, most of their operating funds come from taxation. Technically only people with televisions have to pay.

> Why? Simply because "it's Russia?"

Yes.

I decided to look, given that I'd heard a lot about Rt being untrustworthy. Here's what a cursory search found, but it's possible the results may have been biased by my search term. It's up to you to determine whether these are credible or if there's another side not represented here. One (American) new sanchor for RT quit on the air because they believed the agency was advancing Putin's agenda over the news[1][2]

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...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Budget

The BBC gets almost all of its budget through taxation and mandatory purchases of "television licenses"

No, the fact that they're state owned media and used by the Russian government to put out propaganda makes RT propaganda.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/

EG: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/useful-experts-in-russian-media/

While the article mentions RT as an example of state-owned media, none of the cited incidents actually involve it. Also this website self-identifies as anti-Russian "disinformation." RT, ironically, has a similar mission against mainstream Western and EU media. So every one of these outlets has bias (even though not all of them are honest enough to claim it). So who should we believe?

ahh a classic

А у вас негров линчуют

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

Ironically, your implication of tu quoque is itself a logical fallacy. I am not saying "RT is unbiased because Western media _is_ biased" - in fact I am saying all media is biased but of the parties mentioned only one consistently draws ire for its bias.

"RT is the only media outlet criticized for bias"

riiight

You quoted something I didn't say. How does that even work? Is there a word for this? There should be. Anyway that's not what I said - I said they are the only ones who draw consistent ire. As in they are forcefully denounced as biased consistently, instead of all of them being called out for bias and conflict of interest equally (which, really, many more news networks should be).

QED

"Fake news" (along with Russia-panic) started its life as part of a propaganda offensive by the DNC and DNC affiliated media (CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) to justify why Hillary lost that didn't involve blaming her.

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).

No, fake news started long ago. You are very confused if you think these mainstream media companies are lieing to avoid talking about why hillary lost. They give lots of reasons that appear to be valid, like that she didn't pay enough attention to those important three states, and that she had no widely publicized plan to deal with the people that lots their local factories and jobs. I think this latter case was really important, and HRC really missed out on this area. A lot of trump supporters seem to believe that billionaire and job exporter trump will somehow get their factory jobs back to their town. This idea has been widely discussed.

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.

"fake news" as a phrase only started showing up regularly after Hillary started doing badly.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Fake%20news

>No, fake news started long ago.

Like I said two comments down.

>You are very confused

I don't think so.

>"Fake news" (along with Russia-panic) started ... to justify why Hillary lost that didn't involve blaming her.

>fake news started long ago

you can only pick one.

That is why I used "quotation marks" to indicate that I was referring to the moral panic about fake news that was suddenly plastered over the Dem-linked media (NYTimes, Washpost, CNN, CNBC, etc.) starting November 10th which led to the search spike which can be very clearly seen here:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news

Edit: oh look you downvoted the comment below after I pointed it out. how cute.

i cant even downvote you because you responded to me? but you can blame me if you want.

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]

[1]http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/

Fake news started with the Tea Party, "shock jocks" and other right-wing conservative attempts to discredit reality-based news media. Blaming the DNC is a good example of fake news lies in action.

Fake news started hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The recent hysteria about fake news started roughly 48 hours after the Presidential election results.

Fake news was abundant enough that it became a meme in 2005 as "truthiness".

That you took offense to it only after November 10, 2016 is inconsequential.

The media's sudden obsession starting Nov 10th is graphed here:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news

Spikes like that don't happen by accident.

No, they don't. In this case, on your link, the top "related topic" is Donald Trump and the top three "related queries" are "trump", "trump fake news" and "trump news".

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".

You're looking at a specific term that has caught on, of course there is a spike. The ancestral comments are talking about the idea of disinformation, which I'm guessing has been around as long as humans started talking to each other (hell maybe even before that).

Also the term 'filter-bubble' which acts as if conservatives are simply not exposed to liberal viewpoints.

> the term 'fake news' is in itself gaslighting and part of the problem

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.

True fake news is not produced by Democrats? Hmm. I think better to reject this style of argument altogether, whoever uses it, the term has been poisoned irredeemably by its misuse and evacuated successfully of meaning, if it ever had any. I suspect this was a deliberate strategy by Trump's campaign, but it also shows up the vacuous nature of the original term that it can be so successfully co-opted. When you accept an argument on the basis of vague concepts like fake news, terrorists and protecting the homeland and you've already lost in a fundamental sense by failing to look at the foundation and assumptions going into the arguments over what is true and not.

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.

> True fake news is not produced by Democrats?

...where on earth did you read that anywhere in what I wrote?

:) Hyperbole I admit. You didn't say exactly that, but you did approach it in saying that 'true fake news' was labelled as such by the Democrats (implying they didn't make any), as opposed to the fake fake news term of Trump, which came later.

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.

"Fake news" sites is not necessarily politics. Call it conspiracy theory, rumor mill gossip, and the like. There are fake news sites on celebrities, supernatural events, "gross out" fake news, race / cultural baiting, and any other general outrage that inspires clicks. Snopes has a list of them compiled in early 2016, and politics is only a small part of it. (http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/)

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.)

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