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Comment by heartbreak | Hacker News Reader

> Trump coined the term "fake news"

Trump did not, in fact, coin the term “fake news”.

Didn't it mean satire, like the Daily Show and the Onion, before?

> Once upon a time (like, three [thirteen] months ago), "fake news" had a precise meaning. It referred to total fabrications — made-up stories about Donald Trump suffering a heart attack or earning the pope's endorsement — and the phrase burst into the political lexicon as Facebook and Google vowed to clean up some of the garbage that had polluted the Internet during the presidential election.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/09/fa...

I'm shocked that yours is the only comment on here that actually remembers what happened. The actual "fake news" that was entirely fabricated as click bate was discussed for a few weeks even on This American Life if I recall correctly. There was even an interview with a guy from Georgia (the country) who made a mint making up stories that appealed to Trump supporters and now nobody remembers how that important concept was hijacked by the demagogue.

Fake news was an own goal by the left wing press. After selling a fable to their readers about a Clinton landslide, they tried to deflect by blaming the election outcome on fabricated stories. But there was never any evidence these stories had more reach and influence than what mainstream outlets were peddling. Same way there is no evidence Russian Facebook ads and social media postings eclipsed the millions e.g. the Clinton campaign spent to Correct The Record. Similarly, laments about r/the_donald were categorically ignoring how the default news and politics reddits had become unofficial Clinton cheering squads with moderators complicit.

Most ironically, lefties lamented the ignorance of right wing voters in accepting stories that confirmed their bias and preconceptions, while they themselves eagerly accepted the fake news narrative.

Fake news was not an important concept. Media manipulation however was, and the two got conflated for very obvious reasons.

You really don't know, do you?

> Following the 2016 election, a specific concern has been the effect of false stories—“fake news,” as it has been dubbed—circulated on social media. Recent evidence shows that: 1) 62 percent of US adults get news on social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016); 2) the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories (Silverman 2016); 3) many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016); and 4) the most discussed fake news stories tended to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton (Silverman 2016). Putting these facts together, a number of commentators have suggested that Donald Trump would not have been elected president were it not for the influence of fake news (for examples, see Parkinson 2016; Read 2016; Dewey 2016).

https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf

I don't know if the original fake news was important to the election. I do think though that it's a very important issue in general. How do we prevent entirely fabricated click bait from going viral?

Researchers at Harvard made a study on which news paper focused on which candidate and was used by followers by each side (https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33759251/2017-08...). The washingtonpost had, like many others, a very clear bias in both which candidate they promoted and their intended reader demographic.

I don't trust anyone marked clearly blue or red to make a trustworthy description about events around the election. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news#Definition), even if they are not intended to be used as an authority, are more trustworthy. Alternative one can look at the baloney detection kit by Carl Sagan and simply define any baloney that get published in news format to be fake news.

The Washington Post has existed for 140 years and has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. It's the newspaper that broke Watergate.

You can acknowledge a news source for its editorial bias and still trust it not to print outright falsehoods on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal is editorially right-leaning but that doesn't mean I think it prints lies, I will trust it regarding statements of objective fact up to the point that you can trust any news source (of course both WaPo and WSJ flub stories and have to make retractions from time to time, journalists are humans).

I don't doubt that they stays to the facts, but I also don't trust them to tell the truth.

Let me take an example story that was printed in most news papers after the election. Two facts: The number of new articles written during the election about the Clinton email scandal was twice as many as the Trump tape scandal, but news papers also wrote more than twice as much about the Trump tape scandal than the Clinton email scandal. Both are factual true, but any conclusion made on them is akin to falsehoods because they leave out the necessary context. What is missing is time, as in that news paper wrote about the Clinton email scandal the whole 6 months that the study looked at, while the Trump audio tape scandal was earthed only one month before the election date. As such looking at articles per day while each scandal was new, the trump scandal created significant more articles than any other month, while the long duration of the email scandal created a much higher total number of articles than those of the single month that the audio tapes were discussed.

But it is not news to say that an event stretched over 6 months can create more articles than a single month, or that the last month of an election generates a lot of news articles. It is something a Wikipedia article might mention to balance a paragraph, but it do not generate clicks from a political targeted audience. Lying by omission is technically not an outright falsehood, and they aren't required to make retractions to fix it, so both sides instead paints them selves as victims of the media and media is happy to write articles about it that tailors to their matching demographic. Money is gained and all that is lost is trust.

The Washington Post, IMO, has taken a serious dive in the past few years. Unlike the NYTimes and WSJ, WAPO has simply become another click-bait, hit-piece site like Salon or Buzzfeed. It's shameless.

I disagree, it has very much been on the ball regarding its investigative reporting this year. The editorials have been the same constant stream of hysterics you see everywhere else, but they've broken some fantastic articles regarding disinformation campaigns with hard fact-based reporting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kreml...

Fake news is a term invented by the Nazis during the 30s to describe media they disagreed with.

In German, Lügenpresse (lying press, literally) has the same origin and use (including the same resurgence through use by the alt-right)

There is no alt right in Germany. We are dealing with a surge in far right activism, but those people are just that: Right wing extremists. It’s not a new phenomenon, it never went away completely.

The AfD is literally the alt-right.

Same ideology (which is distinct from the NPD), same marketing, same reasons for resurgence, and even similar sources of funding.

Who are these mysterious funders of the alt-right, in either Germany or the US?

Unlike the left, which does seem to have a few favorite donors concentrated high up amongst the elites, it doesn't appear that the alt-right has many friends in high places these days.

Unless you're trying to insinuate groups like the Koch Brothers and similar, but I've always been under the impression that most of the typical right wing donors were not in favor of things important to the alt-right, including lowered immigration, reversal of trade agreements, white nationalism, etc.

A term can't be "invented" if it was in another language. Coining a term literally only has relevance in the language it's coined. The concept of an untrustworthy press is much older besides.

It wasn't exactly in a different language — the Nazis did also produce propaganda in english (which literally used the term fake news), and during 2016, both translations of the term came into use by supporters of the Trump campaign, from which it grew.

Maybe, but the point is right - "fake news" isn't a new thing, it's just a new name for "only slightly more bullshit than what's on national newspapers and television".

The origin of the term "fake news" was rewritten by the people who did actually coin the term right around when every totalitarian state in the world (quite predictably) adopted it to justify their crackdowns on speech. (It was obvious they would because it meshed so nicely with the existing narratives they used to justify this to their citizens.) The claim that Trump didn't coin the term is now an alternative fact; the only permissible non-Trump origin is the supposed tie to "Lugenpresse" that's also since appeared.

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