The Poison on Facebook and Twitter Is Still Spreading
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They don't validate sources, rarely investigate, heck they barely even copy edit these days. They re-report entirely false stories published in questionable sources, using their name to validate it. Obviously everyone knows how deeply inaccurate any story becomes once technology is involved, now imagine that level of inaccuracy spread across all the topics they cover.
Its painfully self-interested for them to be claiming to be such a clear source of truth.
Time and time again, I've caught insanely biased or flat out wrong headlines that these news outlets sheepishly "correct" later down the road after the story has trended and most people remember what the original headline said. It's abominable, but they have no shame at all. HuffPo is possibly the worst, but I've seen this happen just about everywhere.
No, they're definitely not all like that, but it always seemed to me that enough of them are that it's a problem.
I remember at one point in conversation it was mentioned that some people in the newsroom, who remained nameless, were more conservative than liberal. The prevailing reaction in the room was astonishment, which is troubling since there's no reason why both conservatives and liberals wouldn't be interested in the production of accurate, slant-free news.
Including the one we're commenting on. There's a narrative being driven here, and it's sad so many even in our industry can't recognize it. We can argue levels of harms by these open content platforms (I often reside on the most-people-aren't-stupid, sticks-and-stones, please-no-gov-interference side), but there's no arguing what harms interests want you to think are occurring.
Not sure what narrative you mean, but it's not something any of us who work on HN is aware of.
Externalise the negatives, privatise the profits.
Alternatively, newspapers are in the business of telling ""truth"", and are getting increasingly out-produced by myth. Myth is cheaper to produce and often sounds more true to the uninformed listener. But it's dangerous to build a society that makes its decisions entirely on myth. Ultimately it will end up with a lethal myth like the blood libel, or anti-vaxxerism, and people start getting killed in large numbers.
(Someone will now point out that newspapers themselves have an unreliable track record of truth, and they're not wrong - this is also a serious problem.)
It's also more likely to be shared[1], and thus generate ad revenue
edit: And this comment gets two downvotes 5 minutes within posting it, despite the story already being off of the front page. There are obviously gatekeepers actively monitoring comments and trying control the narrative here on HN as well.
The "fake news" meme itself is the last desperate attempt to preserve the fake news monopoly which giant publishers enjoyed for so long. There is really nothing left when this one wears out.
Before "fake news" we had massive injections of noise to drown out information, but that didn't work quite well, not in the long run.
The current trend of turning giant social platforms to Disney-like dystopias is not working well either. People are flocking back to ... web sites!
So what can we expect after "fake news" ? Probably Disneyfication of DNS, and that's where it ends.
Because audiences will shift to the lowest commeon denominator - IP addressing, as they did in the beginning (Napster, Gnutella) and still do (Bittorent, Tor).
Isn't this the nytimes and friends complaining that they don't get to monopolize poison like they used to?
A company that hires someone like sarah jeong has no business complaining about poison.
The sooner the nytimes goes out of business, the better the country will be. The nytimes has poisoned so many minds and caused the nation to be so terribly divided that it will take years to recover from the mess they created. God knows how long it will take us to recover from the endless wars they propagandized for.
I wish zuckerburg, dorsey, brin/page would grow a pair and fight back against the media posse attacking them. Or deplatform the nytimes to lower the poison on their platforms.
The nation is divided, but NYT isn’t to blame. There are two sets of people, with very strongly held yet divergent ideas of what this country stands for, and what direction it should go in. The New York Times has nothing to do with that.
When you incentivise 'engagement' above all else, this is the inevitable result. The core business model is broken (in relation to being a social good), not their stance on poor information.
If it is a poison, which I think it is, stop using it. It’s akin to an abusive relationship. At some point you (journalists) have to just help get the abused out of it. You’ve tried to get the abuser to stop but it hasn’t worked. The abuse has not only continued but it seems to have increased dramatically. Stop empowering the abuse and GTFO. Boycott if you have to. The Internet is not Facebook nor Twitter.
[1] -https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_regio,_eius_religio
While the current administration won't step in, I fully expect future administrations will - you cannot run a tool that enables foreign meddling in elections and not expect regulatory antibodies.
There is a place in this discussion for granular analysis of what is abuse and what isn't -- edge cases, grey areas -- but we're not there yet. We're still working on preventing nation states from wholesale hijacking of platforms to spread propaganda. Let's get closer to solving that point before we we discuss adding friction to the slippery slope.
Just look at this[1] if you want proof that this is not sustainable. I wonder who benefited from and supported this...
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-onli...
You can find numerous examples of this under the lists of Reddit accounts banned for this exact thing.
"HILLARY IS PART OF A PEDOPHILE PIZZA GANG"
"SETH RICHES HACKED THE DNC"
"MUELLER IS INVESTIGATING HILLARY!!"
"SOMETHING SOMETHING MUSLIMS ARE BAD"
Do we want freedom of speech, and an even playing field for freedom of expression between common people and media conglomerates? Because that's what those look like, for better or worse.
If your arguments lose to fake news, then you should get better arguements.
It’s not arguments vs fake news, it’s real news vs fake news. And that’s the difference between real news and fake news—if you don’t like your fake news, you can get new fake news, again and again and again, until you end up with a lie so beautiful it makes your heart sing. But you can’t get new real news, this is the only reality there is, no matter how ugly it is. But it’s still harsh reality, instead of a beautiful lie.
For context to what he is saying.
The problem is automated newsfeed, which makes users read "recommended" content and ads instead of allowing them to choose which sources they trust.
The real solution is to switch to Mastodon and similar federated networks, where everyone can select who to follow and receive nothing else. It is easy to subscribe to actual people with similar interests who "boost" (repost) the kind of content you like. They filter out misinformation way better than any of those Facebooks and Twitters can ever do.
You think that only listening to people with similar interests, will filter out misinformation? What?
On the other hand, social media platforms inject content that is popular, according to the number of "likes" and "reposts" into your newsfeed. It means the content has gone viral and it has already spread to several clusters around you, most of them centered around some other topic and, therefore, unable to properly evaluate it.
To answer your question, I don't think it will completely filter misinformation, but I think this strategy is better than anything Facebook and Twitter can come up with.