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I don't think "fake news" is a particularly good PR term.

I just think there's a lot of people who will take any buzzword and angrily throw it at things they don't like.

I'm continually amazed by the things I see described as "political correctness", and "clickbait" or "virtue signalling" are all the same as "fake news" in common usage. They all translate as "stuff I don't like or agree with and is therefore bad" and any genuine meaning they may have once had has been stripped.

The problem I don't hear anyone talking about is the continuing underestimation of new media, and it's effect on society. My generation can't wait to cut the cord. But we still think CNN and Fox are leading the narrative, and they still think they are leading the narrative, but I find out about news on The Rubin Report or Joe Rogan's podcast way before I happen to pass by an old tv at the gym turned to CNN. These aren't news sources, they don't claim to be, but I end up first hearing about events with their spin for better or for worse. I take things with a grain of salt because I understand they're just entertainment, but it's a slippery slope that I can see people getting further and further entrenched in Vice's take, or Alex Jones's take, etc...

Not sure what your point is. Yes new media has an effect but so what? A lot of it is just as proper content as CNN or Fox. Nothings really going to change that much.

I think you can add "racist", "sexist" and a number of other labels that are thrown around irresponsibly. Let's not forget both sides are at it. My observation is that the left used to at least pretend to operate on a higher moral plane, whereas even this pretence now seems to have been abandoned.

Worse than abandoned - the high moral ground has been turned into a weapon. Left-wing discourse on the web has become all about proving your virtue so you don't get kicked out of the gang. I've been a hard-core left winger all my life, and recently I got accused by one of my own peers of being a racist because I said that I think that Sly and the Family Stone's album "There's a riot going on" isn't funky. I shit you not.

> "Pay us money and we'll properly inform people of your favorite brand/policy/candidate and block competing brands/candidates. Don't rely on TV news anymore. Come to us"

Well said. Are people savvy enough now to see through that?

> Well said. Are people savvy enough now to see through that?

Absolutely not. The internet has turned "I read it somewhere" factoids into a constant barrage of crap that is addictive and unfulfilling and kinda rage inducing. I'm hoping sometime in the future-ish that people will wise up, but its very hard when all of your media is tailor-made to keep you just pissed off to demand more.

I am unconvinced this is ghe case. If anything we have never been as aware as we are today about "facts" its just that the frequency of both claims and rebuttals of those clims have gone up.

Instead of fake news we had urban legends and old wives tales -- and these stories spread for decades or centuries. Now the velocity has increased, allowing these stories to appear to have some concentrated influence on current events.

Jump back before the web and Snopes and it was extremely difficult to even verify a story was fact or not. Facts usually meant going to a library and finding a book that was written years before. Even then, just establishing that the author's name was real was a long and very rough process.

I agree, we have come a very long way and are much better off today. This is hardly a crisis, just growing pains.

> * Now the velocity has increased*

Exactly. So we (as a society) no longer have time to chew on things and think rationally. Instead, it's a race to speed of reaction / wit. It's an emotional race condition.

IMO 3 things can happen in the future:

1) New media becomes the elite's puppet just like old media.

2) New technology will disrupt and destroy old and currently new media and create decentralized social media where fake news will be the norm and the elites will lose control of information.

3) New uncensored platform appears to appeal to a general need of people wanting to see what they want to see which again reopens the debate.

The first is more likely than the second. But for the first time in a very long time the second option has a chance.

1) it's already the case. PR firms have created many credible user accounts in most social media, maintain them for a long time, and now use them to influence it on day to day basis. I bet even HN has some of those.

2) already the case. it's called world of mouth. we just use technology to propagate it now. We never had so many chat apps, social networks, content sharing services, etc.

3) this I want to happen, but every attempt is not only hard to use, but also used for very illegal/immoral stuff that makes it the target of regulations, preventing it from becoming popular. And even if it ever reach popularity, it can cross a threshold making it full of trash like the previous medium, and we would have to restart again. Maybe we should create a system that is hard to get it, to prevent people that are not interested enough to come and trash it.

>> "Pay us money and we'll properly inform people of your favorite brand/policy/candidate and block competing brands/candidates. Don't rely on TV news anymore. Come to us"

> Well said. Are people savvy enough now to see through that?

This is the obvious critique you could give any media that claims trying to filter out falsehoods.

You can either trust nobody (which many people have unfortunately decided to do) or listen to the various news providers and see who makes the better case for you to trust them.

I don't know that Google and Facebook makes a worse case than so many other outlets?

Well with that many US presidents in the KKK and his unmatched worldwide penetration google has it worse than most if not all.

If people were savvy enough to see through that, nobody would be talking about "fake news" because it wouldn't be a problem.

Fake news isnt a problem for anything but your wallet. Fake nees is not made to make you actually believe but to get you to click or share. We are beeter off against lies than we ever were

> Election was lost to a TV personality even though mass media was supposed to prevent it.

This is not something I can follow. Trump got the most screen time of any candidate, Clinton included (Sanders got the least of the top 4).

If the media was supposed to "stop" Trump, why did they pen so much ink and cut to Trump's random assertions in the middle of major policy positions of his adversaries.

Based purely on a "google fight" comparison of screentime, it was clear who the media wanted to win, and who would win.

Trump brought ratings, and Clinton thought she had a lock so she denied interviews and press time. It's as simple as that in this case. Cable outlets clearly wanted Clinton to win, it's just that once they figured out Trump had a shot, Clinton was on a death slope from her own sloppy campaigning. The last 4-5 months of the campaign (once Trump as the nominee) was spent attacking Trump relentlessly in media outlets. The press, imo wanted Trump as the GOP nominee because they thought Clinton would destroy him and thought he would implode the GOP. The last part is still playing out, but their blindness to seeing Clinton's scandals the way middle America did allowed other outlets to step into the fold to cover them. Since the media attempted to ignore many of her faults early on, when they suddenly had a shot to jump on board they were mocked.

The "screentime" argument, not a very good one. Trump has had more criticism and negative press flung at him than probably anyone alive EVER in just the last year, from almost every country on earth. Eastern Europe was getting just as much anti-trump media as the United States. I guess you could call that "screen time" too.

Just saying Trump had more screen time is a small picture of what the media have been doing to Trump. The lack of screentime for Clinton was a benefit as we saw. We actually saw correlation with lower national polling the more screen time she got. The more she was under wraps (remember the LONG countdown since she had had a press conference, it had been something like 250 days I think). Many talking heads were saying that was on purpose.

The more coverage that Trump got for "outlandish" behavior, the more immune we all became to it. He, and the media, normalized his shocking behavior.

Such a contrast to John Kerry's swiftboating... Somehow Trump repelled any smear attempts. Personality? Media? Society?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftboating

The original "Teflon" (the opposite of one who is swiftboated) president was Ronald Reagan. Like Trump his base was "states rights". He announced his campaign for presidency at the Neshoba county fairgrounds [1] trumpeting "states rights" - a dog-whistle for white nationalists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan%27s_Neshoba_County_Fair...

Yes, I think the appropriation was astoundingly effective. A few days ago I heard someone refer to actual fake news as fake news and I suddenly remembered CNN talking about fake news right after the election before Trump started slinging it around. I had completely forgotten.

The original concept of fake news was actually quite interesting: People who knowingly writes completely false things ("The statue of liberty has fallen down" or "Water found on the sun") just to get people to click the ads. It's a much easier problem to solve than biased news.

It was a term applied to propaganda provided to news organisations in the early 1990s as "ANRs" and "VNRs": video and audio news releases, complete with fake reporters.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news

There was some usage earlier in the 20th century, 1920 - 1950 or so.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fake%20news&ye...

Exactly my thought when reading the article. Of course Facebook and Google have the power to stop fake news, simply move away from the ads business model and suddenly there's no incentive to invest in fake news.

Fake news is an offshoot of the web being an advertising space with a seemingly unending supply of brain hacked human bots.

100 percent agree with this although I doubt many will see the reality of what you said.

Facebook and google played a huge part in spreading clickbait and fake news titles and and now all of a sudden they are trying to "stop" it lofnl.

> simply move away from the ads business model and suddenly there's no incentive to invest in fake news

Getting your desired message heard and accepted is still a pretty strong motivator - though yes, this does deincentivize the purely 'fake news for profit' camp.

> simply move away from the ads business model

"simply"?

Or outlandish political statements. "Hillary Clinton has been diagnoses with cancer", "Pope Francis has endorsed Donald Trump". etc.

We had a better name for that, "clickbait".

Fake news are probably often clickbait, but most classical clickbait don't leave people believing completely made up things. "You won't believe what this actor looks like now" is not as damaging as making people believe "The US has invaded North Korea".

I know this just reflects our bubbles, but the only time I see "fake news" used as a slur for real news is in tweets from the President. So it doesn't seem like very effective appropriation to me. It just seems thin and obvious.

While I'm quite left of center on most issues, I'm also a political hound. I listen to conservative talk radio a couple times a week for the purposes of oppo research and fake news is regularly tossed around in reference to NPR, BBC, NYTimes, etc. Rush Limbaugh has 14M+ listeners per week who hear those sources called "fake news", so I'd sadly agree that it has been very effectively appropriated.

Doesn't it depend on what "effective" means though? Did anyone who listens to Rush Limbaugh have respect for NPR beforehand? My point is - have any minds been changed by the appropriation? In any case, most actual Republicans I talk to are very different than radio personalities, and don't buy this stuff about mainstream news being "fake". Liberally biased, to be sure, but the whole "fake news" aspect of that bias is recognized as propaganda.

You might be right about the bubbles.

I don't use Twitter much. But was searching the term a while back and saw in Google auto-complete of "fake news " CNN poped up as the 4th line. And still does, I just checked. I found that fascinating for some reason. Here is a $1B+ in gross profit mass media business reduced to being the only explicitly named news company in the Google search suggestion box for "Fake News".

> used as a slur for real news

There is spin and editorial bias all around...

read between the lines and investigate the editorial and philosophical slant and you will see this very quickly.

It's well more than editorial bias in some cases, it's blatantly misleading. Whether it's due to laziness and needing something catchy to write about, incompetence because they really don't understand statistics, or malice trying to pander or push a narrative I can't say.

Two recent examples.

* https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/more-bad-r...

* https://twitter.com/StuartBuck1/status/847104688562548736

Turns out one can only "manufacture consent" within certain parameters which are not far from the bounds of physical reality.

The media lost a lot of credibility from the second Iraq war which (almost to the publisher) they were cheering for. So when Washington Post (among others) started the Ra Ra for invasion of Syria to topple Assad more than a few eyebrows went up.

The public might be generally uninformed and uninterested but they aren't flat out stupid. And memory isn't quite as short as is apparently believed in some quarters.

This leaves an information vacuum. Which predictably is filled with anything that can match up with what people already "know" or otherwise want to believe.

Less is more when it comes to propaganda. Make it unreasonable and it all stops working.

Keep in mind that Chomsky "stole" the term himself:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)

Indeed. But he also put it into a more sinister light. Lippmann meant it as a positive thing.

Fair enough. Just giving the full context of the origin.

I'd thrown quotes around the term to indicate some level of irony / metameaning: the term was intentionally borrowed and adapted, to make a point, and one which Chomsky's first readers would fairly likely have been aware of. Chomsky's use of the phrase has now almost certainly eclipsed Lippmann's, one of the occupational hazards of re-working this palimpsest of social consciousness we're all engaged in.

The crazy thing is, this is just the tip of the fake news iceberg. What lies beneath the surface is an impending global information crisis. We are transitioning into a period where people have become aware that most information channels are subject to bias and exert influence, and the pervasiveness of these channels continues to skyrocket. We are receiving more information than ever before and yet can rely on less and less of it on its own.

The moment I heard the word "fake news" I recognized it as the big red flag for this transitional period. As expected, the term was appropriated instantaneously by opposing political groups because we all at some subconscious level realize what is happening and understand just how powerful the term "fake news" can be right now. It perfectly eclipses with the idea of consumer retention in media organizations.

I think you have to be careful about how you're using the concept of "manufacturing consent."

Part of what makes that idea so plausible to me is that there's no need for conspiracy. It's not the "mainstream media setting out to trick people" and it wouldn't be "google and facebook setting out to trick people." It's also not the government (or any other body) coercing the media into toeing some policy line.

The factors that result in "the manufacture of consent" are tangled and hard to pin down. Most of them boil down to internalized assumptions leading to the inability to think objectively about geopolitics.