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Comment by crocodiletears | Hacker News Reader

Slanted though it may be, Fox's reporting is generally about as on the level as their contemporaries, and their written articles are a notable step up from their tv coverage.

They've even received some praise from Sy Hearsh for having what he saw as one of the most promising investigative teams in the industry (I'll have to find the interview later today and update the comment with a link).

I do question the wikileaks rating, but wikileaks isn't a news site, and everything they publish ought to be a matter of 'buyer beware'.

I also question Microsoft's decision to include the plugin at all. I'd rather not have an arbiter of truth looking over my shoulders, reminding me what i should or shouldn't read.

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> is generally about as on the level as their contemporaries

This points to another pretty obvious problem with NewsGuard, though: flagging happens at the site level instead of the article level. It's obvious why that's necessary, but the result is a complete failure to deal with any source where quality varies widely. Fox's written reporting is sometimes quite good, but Glenn Beck's old videos are still posted under the same domain. The result is that NewsGuard happily puts a big green checkmark above a video declaring that the US is the only country in the world with birthright citizenship.

In the same sense that labels like "no added sugar" can actively mislead by giving the appearance of health, I worry that NewsGuard is going to warn people away from Onion articles while encouraging them to accept outright lies without due diligence.

Interesting idea, Truth as a Service. You don't have to use your own critical thinking, just take what the machine says! /s

Well, right now a lot of people use pundits for this already, so it's not really that new to people. It's hard to gather and interpret all the evidence and make a reasoned opinion. Given all the things we form an opinion on daily, it's actually probably impossible. Much easier to defer to an expert for most things. Unfortunately, "expert" is a loaded term here, and people aren't always getting what they think as the people we've deferred our reasoning to have their own agendas, or try to extend their reach to items they are not experts on. Then they're just pundits that have an opinion about everything, because their job is no longer to be as correct as possible on what they can, but to have an opinion on everything.

I mean, that's what Certificate Authorities are.

...Though, that being said, the original idea behind X.509 certificates was quite different: you [the domain sysop] would use your critical thinking to pick a root CA you trust, and configure your machines to only use that single root CA; and then that root CA would either directly sign [code, server, client] certs they trust, or would cross-sign other CAs' root certs to indicate that they trust them to delegate to them. Essentially, a domain (like a corporation or university) would have a business relationship with a particular CA, who would "do their critical thinking for them" (and would also be legally liable if they failed to do that critical thinking.)

For X.509, we pretty much immediately moved away from that world, though, to a world where each application (e.g. OS HTTP API, third-party web browser, etc.) is acting as a root CA, you endorse that root CA by installing/using the app, and then the app devs make decisions on what to trust/delegate trust to.

Which is kind of what's happening here: you use your critical thinking to install an app/OS, whose devs are then your "truth source." Sadly, though, this isn't a business relationship where they can be sued for failure to deliver quality content through that channel. (For contrast, where a customer is paying a business for "truth", see: investment newsletters.)

Journalistic institutions themselves already employ vast fact-checking tools and services internally to verify articles and information, and you already indirectly rely on them. This is only sensible, critical thinking is helpful but is not the same as checking factual statements.

And it's a good thing that fact checking exists as a service (now apparently also in independent fashion), because nobody has the time, knowledge or capacity to literally dig through every piece of journalism they read, on every topic.

> I also question Microsoft's decision to include the plugin at all. I'd rather not have an arbiter of truth looking over my shoulders, reminding me what i should or shouldn't read

This is such a tricky point. On the one hand I almost agree with you in the sense that it could have a dangerous outcome: ceding control to an entity who essentially influences what content users should read.

On the other hand, the amount of misleading information on the web is having a very real, very serious impact on the world. If used responsibly this might influence positive change.

> the amount of misleading information on the web is having a very real, very serious impact on the world

I'm not convinced this is true. I'm more convinced many really want it to be true to explain results they otherwise can't. And as expected, they have convinced others this is true. It's just another in the long line of bogeymen.

Considering I have caught my mother on more than one occasion sharing fake information from groups that fit the Russia propaganda angle to a tee (whether or not they actually are Russian ops), I would say it is in fact having a very real impact.

And for reference, the group was called 'American Warrior Revolution', so you too can take a peek into the insanity I'm referring to.

What "Russia propaganda angle"? Almost everything published about Russia in western media is wrong or outright fraudulent. Go read Glenn Greenwald's articles on the Intercept for many very clear examples.

Maybe your mother is sharing fake information, or maybe your own information is fake and the problem is the inverse (or maybe you're both wrong in different ways).

You're objectively wrong, and the information she shared from that group was the very definition of fake. Here's the exact comment that was shared from that group:

"R.I.P. Justin Allen 23, Brett Linley 29, Matthew Weikert 29, Justus Bartett 27, Dave Santos 21, Jesse Reed 26, Matthew Johnson 21, Zachary Fisher 24, Brandon King 23, Christopher Goeke 23, and Sheldon Tate 27.... All are Marines who gave their lives this week for you. There's no media for them... not even a mention of their names. We’re too busy talking about trying to get “Baby It’s Cold Outside” off of the radio. Please honor them by copying and pasting this post."

Except obviously, they didn't die last week as of that post. They died seven years ago. Now why would a large group share literally fake information like that? And why would you immediately jump in and attempt to discredit my argument given that I even gave you the name of the group? Take a cursory glance at them and their actions.

I may be missing something fundamental here, but I'm not sure what that post has to do with Russia or propaganda. You say it's obvious they didn't die last week, but it wasn't obvious to me upon reading - perhaps because I'm not American. But if there's no date in the text, maybe your mum just didn't remember the original event, thought some soldiers had died, and she would be honouring them with some copypasta?

I guess I don't see a need for a conspiracy, Russian or otherwise, to get people re-sharing posts on Facebook that explicitly say "if you don't reshare this you're a bad person".

No offense, but what your mother shares does not determine what is a very real impact. Also, whether something is shared does not mean it is impactful.

> whether something is shared does not mean it is impactful

Actually, I think whether something is shared and how prevalent that sharing is among the populace is a better indication of impact than many others.

For example, one (fairly binary) way of measuring individual impact might be whether it's viewed as worth spreading to other people. Things not worth sharing may or may not be impactful, but things worth sharing almost definitely are.

Scaled up, if a high enough percentage of people in a group view something as worth sharing, then it is impactful.

> Scaled up, if a high enough percentage of people in a group view something as worth sharing, then it is impactful.

Disagree, but impactful can be seen as an overloaded term. We need to accept in modern situations that the ease of sharing something might be more of a reason it is shared than whether the sharer/recipient is impacted by it. Or there might be many other reasons. The important thing is accepting that we don't know what is impactful and not running to the heavy-hand of the law/censors assuming we do.

That's true to a degree, though I still feel like a good portion of the stories are missing details. Their bias really comes out with the stores that they are (and aren't covering).

Which is the real problem with mainstream media today IMO, not fringe outlets like infowars or whatever.

I agree with you there, but I don't think you can say much better about any other news source, unfortunately. They just lack a lot of the 'subtlety' publications like CNN have. They'll never be a paper of record like the NYT, byt they're pretty par for the course. Just right leaning.

> Their bias really comes out with the stores that they are (and aren't covering).

Which, in my experience, "is generally about as on the level as their contemporaries", just concerning different stories and the way they're spun.

It's not just that, though. Fox uses one domain, foxnews.com, for all their stuff. So NewsGuard is putting the same happy checkmark above good articles (biased topic choice or not) and absolute nonsense from their TV shows which they repost online.

See: Manufacturing Concent.

Prehaps especially if we're talking fox news and not fox and friends which is held to a lower standard. They're still certainly not as reliable or credible of a source as wikileaks. The worst that has been alleged of wikileaks is selective leaking. They're more reliable and credible than ANY mainstream US source.

The Fox News channel’s opinion programming concerns me more than their news coverage.

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