Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebcode | Hacker News Reader

"fake news"... I believe this phrase was originally coined to denote articles that were paid for/commissioned by corporations. It's like flipping through a newspaper to see some outlandish headline, and then, looking at the top of the page, seeing "paid advertisement" in tiny print.

Only these days, there is no tiny print, and the entire newspaper is one big paid advertisement for the oligarchy.

I know pizzagate is verboten, so I doubt Big Brother will let this through, but just in case, and with hope for the future, I'm just going to leave this here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

View on HN

No you're thinking of submarine pieces. Fake news came to prominence as a term when conservative clickbait from random domains started popping up in early 2016. The left started using the term very prominently, but then when Facebook tried to crack down on it all, the right appropriated the term as a general term of derision towards non-conservative news sites.

I don't understand the argument you're making with the Google trends link.

What I see is that a term which entered the common lexicon specifically to describe things such as Pizzagate is correlated with searches for the thing it describes.

Is there some other point you're trying to make?

More chart illiteracy probably. Here's a chart zoomed in https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-09-01%202... and the fake news area under the curve is quite a bit larger until around the time of the election. About the most honest thing you can actually say is that around the election people just started googling it more. Big whoop. There isn't any correlation with the term "fake news" as you may glean from the first chart.

"Fake news" was in the lexicon well before pizzagate, which you can see in the link. The point I'm trying to make is that the phrase "fake news" was pushed in place of the phrase "pizzagate", and this was done by all the major media outlets when the phrase pizzagate came to prominence.

To my mind, if there had been no "pizzagate", there would have been no spike in "fake news", and we wouldn't even be talking about "fake news" today.

I think that's a poor interpretation.

Yes, putting the two words "fake" and "news" together into a Google search happened prior to pizzagate. But the term "fake news" as it's understood now came about as a result of the propaganda that was spread during the election and only recently became part of our lexicon, lexicon meaning common usage.

Fake news was not part of our lexicon well before pizzagate.

Pizzagate refers to one instance of fake news, but fake news cannot be used in place of the phrase. I would say the term may have been pushed in place of "propaganda" since media outlets wanted to distance themselves from the tactics, but pizzagate cannot be used to refer to any fake news in general.

Had there been no pizzagate we would still be discussing fake news, as it is only one of a multitude of examples.

I respect your opinion. But when Hillary Clinton gives a speech rolling up "foreign propaganda", "fake news", and "silicon valley" all in one sentence, and following directly in the wake of the shooting at Comet Ping Pong (4 days later), you can be pretty sure that some serious connections are being formed. (Even if only in your own brain.)

In case anyone is curious, the sentence spoken by Hillary Clinton on December 8, 2016 is "Bipartisan legislation is making its way through Congress to boost the government's response to foreign propaganda, and Silicon Valley is starting to grapple with the challenge and threat of fake news."

Alice: “Standard boring political statement.”

Bob: “Alice is a reptile from the planet Xenon!”

Carol: “That’s clearly not true. What Bob is saying is fake.”

Bob: “See! Carol is part of the concpiary!”

I thought the term was coined by Trump? And it seems like people who use it, use it in place of "propaganda" not "pizzagate"

The term was adopted by Trump as a way of subverting its then-emerging use to label the phenomenon of propaganda being produced supporting the Trump campaign following what a RAND Corp report has described, in its recent application by the Russian government, the “firehose of falsehoods” model (at the time this was seen as analogous to the Russian use of that propaganda style; it's since become clear that at least some of it was, in fact, Russian state propaganda, making it following a current style of propaganda observed in Russian state propaganda less surprising.)

Trump's adoption of the term to preempt that use was very successful, as is evident in the common perception that it is something he invented.

Nope, not coined by Trump. I did a bit of research. I found "fake news" in this link from 2005 on democracynow.org: https://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/14/state_propaganda_how_...

I'm not trying to say that people who use the term now are using it in place of "pizzagate", but that media outlets, during the months of December 2016 and early 2017, used the phrase to talk around "pizzagate"; and now "pizzagate" has faded, but "fake news" remains.

I think propaganda is a more appopriate word, and we should just use that. But because of the way associations work, whenever I see "fake news", I am reminded of "pizzagate". And I know I'm not the only one.

Thanks for setting me straight.

I find the term juvenile, personally, but it's here to stay for now it seems.

As I recall he (mis)appropriated the term, as is his habit. It wouldn't be surprising if tomorrow he started talking about how "woke" he is and how that adjective actually doesn't mean what we think it means. "Fake news" was originally a term for news-like narratives from sources other than the news media.

You're thinking of "alternative facts", which came from his presidential counselor, Kellyanne Conway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com