Don’t Want to Fall for Fake News? Don’t Be Lazy

MIT this and Psychology that don't change the fact that the world is made of a web of abstraction of trust. It is not possible for any individual to have the time or competence to evaluate the trustworthiness of every single entity they rely on in day to day life.

If I employed a plumber and she did a bad job because she used a tool wrongly or used the wrong pipe fitting, will it be reasonable for the world to expect me to know the intricacies of plumbing (where do I learn them? How do, I, in turn, trust that source of information, and ad infinitum)?

Yes, it's good to do some basic due diligence for things that affect our lives, but there's a reason high-trust societies are much nicer to live in.

Rallying against objectively "fake" news doesn't do anything about the much more serious problem of the way that mainstream news is less than truthful in more subtle ways, such as under-reporting or not reporting things that are true, emphasizing certain facets of a true story to follow a crafted narrative, reporting on things that otherwise wouldn't be newsworthy to advance that narrative, etc. Disproving blatantly fake news is trivial, disproving years of propagandizing full of half-truths and consistent narratives is impossible.

The example is silly. There are several sources of the same video. If it's not a funny meme, a normal person will look for the original video. In all of the videos he applies pressure on the intern's arm, you can see it by how her body moves. To shift blame to Sara Sanders because she shared a GIF instead of a video, is the "spin" that reveal bias. You can put the original video instead of the GIF and the Sanders tweets stands: "[We will] never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern" The article falsely claims that Sanders cite the GIF as grounds for revoking Acosta's press pass. The mentioned grounds for revoking Acosta's press pass can be seen in all videos and cameras. (touch the arm, apply pressure). It's not the GIF, it's what happened. The article implies that the GIF was intentionally modified, but the truth is that:

>At BuzzFeed News, Charlie Warzel dug into the creation of the Infowars clip, establishing that it was made by zooming in on a GIF excerpt from the original video. GIFs can drop frames when constructed, and video-encoding methods can introduce other changes. In the end, Warzel couldn’t decide whether the video had been doctored or not. Citing experts, Motherboard concluded that the video wasn’t doctored, but that it was "altered" —a distinction that might confuse as much as it clarifies.

The article also falsely claims that "The events described in Sanders' tweet simply did not happen."

So, if this article plus its title is meant as an "Study on Irony", then it's a great article.