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Comment by creaghpatr | Hacker News Reader

>So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.

As long as it remains an assumption that these are 'independent' non-partisan fact-checking organizations, I would discard any conclusions drawn here.

Also Breitbart is highly editorialized news and commentary, but it's certainly not fake. The fact that its CEO strategized the largest political upset in recent history is very, very real.

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The sentence before the ones you quoted is:

> At issue is the publication of news that is false or misleading.

Initially in the election, "fake news" was a term primarily used to refer to stories and sites that were complete fabrications, created to make money from ads and for political ends. Use of the term quickly expanded to include more long-standing practitioners of distortion, like Breitbart.

The whole point of this article is that "fake news" can have real consequences so the supposed successes of Steve Bannon has nothing to do with the veracity of the publications headlines and stories.

Here's just one example of a fake Breitbart headline:

>Condemned as "fake news" by some media pundits, the Breitbart article was headlined: “Revealed: 1,000-man mob attack police, set Germany’s oldest church alight on New Year’s Eve.” However, according to local journalists, there was no mob and the St Reinold Church – which is not Germany’s oldest – did not catch fire. Local police said the night was “rather average to quiet” and the number of incidents in Dortmund on New Year’s Eve had decreased to 185, down from 421 in 2015/16. The brief fire on scaffold netting near the church was reportedly caused accidently by a wayward firework.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/breitbart-new...

>Here's just one example of a fake Breitbart headline

But it starts to get a bit confusing when you actually look at the accusations and rebuttals, especially when you look at the fleshed out indy article [0]

Accusation : "The right-wing American website, which enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in 2016, claimed a 1,000-strong mob chanting “Allahu Akbar” set fire to the country’s oldest church in Dortmund."

Rebuttal :"Mr Bandermann on the other hand, in a Q&A-style response published the following day, said that from between 6.45pm and 1.30am, groups of young foreign men formed a large group of 1,000 people. He said the fire at the church only set light to netting surrounding the building and lasted just 12 minutes." ... "He said that saying Allahu Akbar is as normal as saying ‘Amen’ in church,"

So which is fake news? On the facts, the Independent agrees (although through semantics "church netting on fire, not the church" "group" not "mob") with the Breitbart article.

If they both agree on the facts, but spin them different ways, how do you determine which is "fake news"?

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/edited-1038-...

edit: They did actually issue a correction for something they got wrong in the article

"Correction: This article states St. Reinold’s Church is the oldest in Germany. We are happy to clarify that accolade belongs to the Trier Cathedral."

Replying to the deadpost:

>They've literally _never_ accidentally reported in a direction that was opposite their editorial spin.

You won't find any news outlet who will err two ways.

If that's the logic you use to indict an organization as "fake news" then you could apply that example to just about every major news publisher.

My point is that conflating Breitbart with The Onion for sake of studying propaganda trends is extremely sloppy. I not trying to be an apologist for Breitbart which is pretty blatantly right-wing propaganda and has been forced to retract stories in the past.

They justified it because right-wing propaganda apologists often claim their outrageous deceptions are satire. For the purposes of studying the dissemination of stories that are not true, lumping the Breitbart with The Onion makes sense to me.

I despise Breitbart but I agree that there's a really sad irony when readers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist point at others and never look at themselves.

The PropOrNot scandal was a disaster, but its victims remain blissfully unaware.

If maliciously misreporting a few things a week is your bar for fake news, then just about every publication out there is guilty.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/03/time-smears-charles-koch-i...

Whataboutism. Downvoted.

The difference is that responsible organizations wind up firing people who cross the line.

In the context of that sentence I take independent to mean "unrelated by connection to each other" rather than "unrelated by ideology." In that context I don't see a claim that they're non-partisan.

For that matter, nor can I think of any outlet in modern days which would both a) report that information were they to find it and b) not be immediately and loudly labeled partisan by a significant portion of the internet.

many of breitbart's articles are so far removed from reality that they border on fake, and the onion is definitely fake as they exclusively publish satire. So although those sites may not be explicitly 'fake news', their inclusion in this research makes perfect sense.

Obviously "fake news" has become used for content in which truth isn't really a dominant virtue...especially when it's being overridden by "strategizing political upsets"...and especially when that's tied to just making a shitload of money manipulating people.

Traditional editorials like, say, in the National Review or NYT, may well be wrong, but at least they're trying to be right. Likewise, the "independence" of fact-checking orgs doesn't lie in being "non-partisan" so much as making speaking truly an overriding value.

(I'd concede that Breitbart in particular probably isn't a paradigm example of a fake news outlet, but it's obviously on the spectrum.)

Having said that, I suspect that Breitbart, The Onion, CNN, NYT, Buzzfeed, superPACs on both sides of the aisle et. al. do use bots to advance their social media engagement- because why wouldn't they?

There's 2 elements to this study, one which is determining what is "fake news" and the other is "how do bots influence social media engagement?".

The latter is important to study but how do we judge the organizations singled out in this study without a baseline of "real news" (for lack of better word) to compare them to?

What we can do is say, "How many stories do these various news organizations promote that are obviously and comically fictitious.

That "spirit cooking" story was a great example of a totally absurd sequence of decisions designed to create a talking point which was subsequently promoted, so it's a good point.

But the article's point is that if we start making it very hard to have fake users, suddenly these games of signal boosting become massively harder.

>But the article's point is that if we start making it very hard to have fake users, suddenly these games of signal boosting become massively harder.

I agree with this point and think that the cost/benefit analysis of allowing bot users on social media sites should be re-evaluated.

I love how in the minds of certain people, every single and in some cases long established news org's are, always suspect.. except for Brietbart.

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