Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Some groups flat out make up news stories to fit some narrative. What else are you going to call that than 'fake news'?

'Candidate X comes out as gay.' 'Secret photos reveal candidate X at KKK lynching.' Are both rather over the top, but also the kind of lies that influence elections.

View on HN

If you don't like that, you're going to hate the physical realm, where anyone can make any claim and you're left with nothing but your wits to discern the truth

> If you don't like that, you're going to hate the physical realm, where anyone can make any claim and you're left with nothing but your wits to discern the truth

So you're saying that we should let these organizations lie as much as they want, because people lie in your day-to-day life? The people you meet in your day-to-day life and lie to your face are much more limited in the number of people they can influence with lies.

Why shouldn't we make enormously more powerful institutions more accountable for lies?

This misunderstands the way technology, social media in particular, have exacerbated problems with misinformation. No one is claiming the media was perfect before. Obviously hoaxes and false rumors have always been a thing. But social media has made disinformation scalable.

Speed and scale of speech do not impact whether or not it's got an equal seat at the table. It just means you're cool with any expression as long as it's not threatening. Which there's nothing special about, it's how basically everyone is by default. There's no principle there.

Propaganda is used because it works and scale ends up changing type. Consider the difference from 1 dead cell vs 1 million dead cells at the tip of your finger vs 1 billion dead cells in your arm.

but look at how you're framing it. the undesirable speech isn't a disease the body has, it's a part of the body. we are the collective, even the gross parts. if we want to change what we don't like, we do it with competing ideas, not by cutting them off

These are not competing ideas, they are just lies. I have no problem with the Weekly World News being on a fiction shelf, but we have libel laws for a reason. The truth does not have a sign outside saying 'This is true' and lies repeated often enough get a following.

PS: There is a huge difference between blowing things that actually happened out of proportion to support an argument and saying anything that someone might believe.

So what is the definition of "fake news"?

For as long as I can remember, National Enquirer and other magazines like that adorned the racks of every grocery store and book store I've ever been to. Yellow journalism was coined as a term over 100 years ago. There's nothing new about "fake news". And it has been scalable since the invention of the printing press.

No one believed bat boy and even the plausible stuff in those was never the subject of design making. The National Enquirer is as much News as the Onion is.

The tragedy now is that there are sites that aren't neatly packaged as entirely false but are. The Internet has empowered people like Alex Jones and other people spouting pure falsehoods.

"Some groups" includes the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Rolling Stone, etc.

"Some groups flat out make up news stories to fit some narrative. What else are you going to call that than 'fake news'?"

Thankfully we have a word for that, and it even has a relatively well agreed upon meaning: lies.

The problem with the label "fake news" is, as has been pointed out, that it can mean different things to different people.

I think the counter argument is tabloids are not simply called lairs.

Weekly world news can have 'Batboy returns' as a headline and sure it's false. But, bookstores also have fiction sections...

You can find the same crap with slightly better spell checking by the checkout isles in the grocery store.

This isn't new.

I find it actually kinda worrying that many seem to have a perception that making up news is a new thing. The only thing that has changed is the volume of information, people in control of news sources have been lying since time immemorial.

People believing in such vast quantities does seem to be new. I don't know anyone who believed the non-sense in the National Enquirer, but I do know a few people who buy because they think it is funny.

People, whole communities of people believe, non-sense today. Not small groups like Flat-earthers or chemtrail theorists who number in the hundreds or thousands (per their website/forums sign-ups). There will always be some people on the fringe.

We avoided truly ridiculous ideas for decades. Things like "911 was an inside job" or "Obama was born in Kenya" are believed by tens of millions of people. This is a new thing in my life at least. The last issue this big and this false was prevalent was McCarthyism.

According to the article Facebook is using the term "false news" to try and sidestep that issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com