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Comment by tropo | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's bad.

The definition of "fake news" is a list of 21 conservative web sites chosen by BuzzFeed. For some reason, BuzzFeed wasn't in that list.

Unsurprisingly, by that definition, fake news is primarily spread by conservatives! Chart C shows that as the strongest result by far. Chart B, going by age, is a weaker result. Well yes, it seems that conservatives live longer (living less dangerously?) or that people turn conservative as they age. It is well-known that older people lean conservative.

This study is, itself, impressively fake, just like BuzzFeed.

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Are you aware that buzzfeed actually has a pretty good news section too?

It doesnt pay well enough, so they also have the clickbait stuff

BuzzFeed is the site that spread the "piss dossier" nonsense. You can't get much more fake than that without invoking aliens and Elvis.

You mean the same dossier that has increasingly had various points of data within it proven true?

I couldnt find any article on buzzfeed regarding that, and neither have I followed that dossier so I cannot comment on that.

Mind sending a few links my way?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier#P...

Are you referring to the dossier that a court found was in the public interest to publish because it had so much merit? The same dossier that two presidents were briefed on and was a subject of an active government investigation? That dossier is now, provably, not fake. It seems like you might be unintentionally spreading fake news yourself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2018/12/20...

The existence of the dossier itself is provably not fake. The content however is, along with the original story of how it came to be funded, created, and disseminated.

It's not even plausible. The man is a germophobe. He had to overcome a handshake aversion (Where has your hand been today? Eeeew...) to even run for office.

It was trivial for the people in power to brief presidents or start a government investigation, with or without merit, and this leads the court to determine public interest. It's getting to be circular logic here, with merit coming from merit.

You keep saying the content is fake, but again, we've seen various claims made within it prove true over time. Why are you keen on peddling fake news yourself?

The pee tape may or may not be real, almost any intelligence dossier like that is going to contain information across multiple sources some of which may not be correct. This does not invalidate the document as a whole, especially because again, we've seen many claims within it bear fruit over the past few years.

You're making straw man arguments without any proof or substance. Is there anything, articles, quotes, even tweets, anything that shows that the Steel Dossier is fake news? I'll admit that I thought it was unnecessary and possibly fake at the outset, but the data changed my mind. A court ruling, the news that two USA sitting Presidents were briefed on it, and the fact that the people who continue to deny it tell provable lies on a daily basis is a pretty strong set of data to counter the points you are making.

This leads me to the conclusion that you are either 1) uninterested in the facts 2) making your arguments in bad faith or 3) all of the above

In any case, arguing with you will not bring further truth out. Enjoy your day

The burden of proof falls on those who want to believe the claims.

The fact that the dossier is notable (in the public interest to publish) does not mean that the dossier is correct. The court only ruled that the dossier was notable. The fact that presidents were briefed means that the dossier is notable, not that it is correct. The bit about people telling lies... well that is an ad hominem that also doesn't help to satisfy the burden of proof, plus if that were a valid argument then it could be applied to the source of the dossier.

the pee tape is real.

Uh oh, you're getting grayed down. Get those critical thoughts out of your head at once and get back onto the reservation.

>>>

As a robustness check, we constructed alternate measures using a list curated by Allcott and Gentzkow (2), who combined multiple sources across the political spectrum (including some used by Silverman) to generate a list of fake news stories specifically debunked by fact-checking organizations.

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We took this list and removed all domains classified as “hard news” via the supervised learning technique used by Bakshy et al. (23) to focus specifically on fake news domains rather than the more contested category of “hyperpartisan” sites (such as Breitbart).

>>>

> that conservatives live longer (living less dangerously?)

or have more money to spend on healthier living (high quality food, high quality entertainment, high quality housing, plus medicine, etc)

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