I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible.
You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.
or that Hillary Clinton only won 57 counties in the 2016 election https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-cou...
However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.
Go look at donald trump's twitter feed. It's full of outright incorrect statements being presented as fact.
Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news.
As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources.
That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions.
I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public.
If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites.
Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.
Moving away from extreme cases, things are still wrong enough to cause trouble. False information is inherently surprising when presented as true, because it isn't expected. It follows that false information lends itself better to clickbait titles. This in turn leads to false information having better click through and sharing metrics. Sharing metrics and engagement metrics are used to power recommendation systems. So it follows that recommendation systems are biased toward recommending false information. Compounding the issue, content producers know this. They optimize their content for an environment which promotes false information, which biases content in a way that generates the sort of speculative conclusions you mention. As a natural consequence of the flawed environment, this flawed content is then seen by a greater number of people.
That out news system isn't as good as would like is just true. I still remember the TED talk when I found out about how much better the world was doing by most metrics. All those educated and rich people who could afford to attend a TED talk and yet the majority had no idea as to the true state of the world. If the news wasn't biased such that it presents a false narrative, then why such glaring ignorance among the educated?
Me = not an expert on elections
Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver.
Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine? Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?
You got lucky. If you can consistently beat his methodology then you'd be just as famous and wealthy and well regarded as he is instead of an internet nobody.
This is like saying "college is for the birds, I just plan to win the lottery."
>Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?
Absolutely. Missing the boat on what turned out to be something of a freak-show election where 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast is tough for anyone to get right. And most of who, did so by dumb luck, not some wonderful new methodology that is useful against past election data or current election data. The very same people beating their chests over Trump's win predicted Moore would win Alabama or Saccone would beat Lamb.
In other words its just dumb partisanship, not some new polling or statistical technique at work here. Patting yourself on the back because you 'called it' for Trump is a meaningless statement unless you have the math to prove your methods are better than Nate Silvers.
Silver didn't call a close election, though. That would have been impressive. All he said was that it would be closer than a landslide.
Silver predicted a fairly high probability of a very close election, including a 10.8% chance Clinton would win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote.
> All he said was that it would be closer than a landslide.
No, Silver's model provided a lot more detail than that.
Nate Silver is a statistical analysis expert, not particularly an election expert.
> Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver.
Really, for all the elections that year? What about 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014?
> Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?
Where can we see your historical set of outcome predictions to validate their superiority?
> Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?
Nate Silver has been right more often than coin flipping.
In math, if you only write the correct answer, you'll get a zero for not showing your work. In debate and discussions, there can zero, one, or more than one correct solution to a topic, and "showing your work" is often more valuable than having an answer, and answers can be right or wrong explicitly depending on your work.
Most coins are 50/50, not 75/25.
Also, the answer entirely depends upon whether there's anyone out there who can do better than 50/50.
That was, in fact a fake news story. The fact it asserted had no basis in reality.
The political angle it has taken is unfortunate -- due to the prominence of "fake news" in the last US election; the net effect has been a devolution of the word into a snarl word for "I don't like your particular political point of view". IMHO what you are describing -- a news organization has a bias or opinion (strong or not), but still tries to maintain some degree of connection with factual data -- is not fake news.
And now the term has been hijacked to mean any new you disagree with.
Weekly World News is fictional satire about aliens.