At this moment, is there a general consensus or definition as to what is a "fake news" and how and who decides upon it?
I mean, obviously, it was Googleable, as Buress said in his routine. And yet the question isn't whether or not it is "fake" -- though clearly many people thought it was fake, or outrageous, which is why it was such a funny bit in Buress's routine. But there's also the question of whether it was news. Because it was a big deal, and then it dropped off the news cycle because nothing big came from it. And then Buress simply reminded people that the cases existed and then it blew up in such a way that it's hard to believe that Bill Cosby, just a few years ago, was pretty much a hero.
The rape claims were such old news that a highly senior CNN journalist wrote Cosby's biography and just left out the rape accusations because he "didn't want to print allegations that I couldn't confirm independently". The Buress incident came about the time that the biography was published, and the biography pretty much died on the shelves:
http://www.newsweek.com/cosby-biography-mark-whitaker-i-was-...
Hell, you could make the case that the famous Boston Globe Pulitzer-winning investigation [0] into the Catholic Church would have been deemed "fake news" at the time. The Globe itself covered accusations of priest abuse a decade earlier and the Church argued that such cases were horrific anomalies, and the Globe editor at the time apparently agreed that there wasn't a systemic scandal. It wasn't until the Globe got a brand new editor that a renewed focus was made on cases that victims' lawyers had revealed years prior.
Who decides it? Well right now traditional media sources are leading the charge, and our benevolent Silicon Valley overlords are working feverishly to help out. Media and tech companies are both filled with people of a left-leaning persuasion. Again, pure coincidence I'm sure, and we all know these people are above injecting their own personal biases into protecting us from fake news, so we're in good hands.
What's even funnier is to see people on r/politics say "you know I always thought Beck was an OK guy, just a little misunderstood" after he went nuts about Trump.
There are probably other factors here that make this even easier. These sites use fairly shady advertising networks so that's another factor to tie in. They have English language articles but with the grammatical mistakes a 'real' news outlet wouldn't allow due to being written by algorithms or ESL writers.
Fake news detection probably isn't as much about the content but of the methods used to spread it. That's my guess. Unless Google has some incredible AI, they'll just weigh it like they do with other sites abusing SEO. Seems like just a refinement of their panda system focused more on 'news' sites than link farms.
The 10,000 staff just are there to handle edge cases and help tweak the system. They're not going to read every moldovian fake news outlet scammer. In fact, considering most of this is autogenerated by the tens of thousands, they simply can't keep up.
I kinda of see this like spam filtering for the web. Eventually it becomes economically feasible to generate and promote tens of thousands of fake whatevers (it doesnt have to be news) and Google is just trying to keep up. The larger political issues are moot as it doesn't matter what your bias is in politics. If your search engine keeps feeding you low-information or outright false crap most of the time, you'll think about moving to a different search engine.
The problem is identifying the fake news, which isn't something people are going to ever agree on fully. You can use a reputational test, which works well for keeping out the Alex Jones-level stuff, but it's not going to keep out stuff like like mainstream media promulgating stories about Al Quida working with Saddam Hussein, or Iraq having chemical weapons, or something.
In the actually search results, I get to see a dozen links with probably varying answers, but for something like Google Home which only reads the top one, I'd rather get no answer at all than a potentially wrong one.
That's the difference, when I search something on my PC and get 10 different results I can read through, vs when I ask Google and get a single sentence back, or see a snippet at the top with a single sentence.
We don't need an embedded reporter on the other side of the planet anymore, because the people there will be tweeting it out.
The last several major news events for which I had access to cable television immediately devolved into "watch news anchors read Twitter". This was true of the Dallas riots and the Turkey coup last summer. There were several minutes straight of "this is a tweet from someone nearby...", interrupted only by commercial breaks and commentary, not real reporting.
There are several YouTube channels that get more daily viewers than television channels. PewDiePie has over 50 million subscribers. The rising generation grew up accessing any content they wanted on-demand and does not understand a world of scheduled television programming. CNN is quickly becoming grandpa's way to get news.
The traditional news media has been disrupted and outmoded, and "fake news" is their temper tantrum, their attempt to stay relevant. The old broadcast media establishment has lost their influence, and they will not go quietly into the night.
It's sad and ironic that Google's political agenda is causing them to betray their users. We need aggressive market-equalizing reform.
However, the reason you see news anchors reading tweets is not because there isn't a better source of content than tweets, it's the idea that tweets are what people want to see. Viewer engagement in an interactive age. It's part of Twitter's strategy, as well.