Comment by arstin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arstin | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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