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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

This is scary because it translates to not just centralization of news sources but also centralization of power and wealth in general. Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations.

I think I prefer to live in a world with fake news than one where the elites curate everything we learn.

The world has always had conmen, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen and fake news; in small quantities, they are essential to make sure that people keep questioning everything.

Fake news is like a vaccine which protects us against a zombie apocalypse. Most news cannot be scientifically proven to be true; so it doesn't make sense that we should all believe it just because it's popular. Popular news sources are more likely to be true but they are also a lot more dangerous if they're not. Given enough time, these big news sources will be corrupted.

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Fake news is the zombie apocalypse. It's cheaper to produce than real news, and so there's likely to be much more of it drowning out the real news. It's also useful to corrupt people's belief in the possibility of getting accurate news. The public retreat to partisan news sources if there is no source in the middle that can be trusted. The quality of decision-making goes down and it becomes easier for real corruption to flourish once everyone is accused of corruption by fake news.

> It's also useful to corrupt people's belief in the possibility of getting accurate news.

That's why the GP called them a vaccine. To be a vaccine, first it has to be a virus.

There are some odd happening recently that people attribute to fake news (usually with weak evidence, and way too many competing possibilities that they ignore), but I don't think anybody can classify the current world as apocalyptic.

Funny they should use that analogy, since one of the achievements of "fake news" in the broad sense has been eroding people's belief in vaccination. Perhaps not apocalyptic yet but undoubtedly getting people killed.

Sure, but getting less people killed than ever before.

> one of the achievements of "fake news" in the broad sense has been eroding people's belief in vaccination.

That's an unusual way to describe The Lancet, who are responsible for inflicting Wakefield's bullshit on the world, and taking an eternity to retract it.

Once the facts were known, the Lancet retracted and was contrite. That's a cock-up and apology, not fake news. Fake news would be the news outlets that continued to promulgate the idea.

Yes, ideas are like viruses. Fake news is like a vaccine because it keeps the immune system alert and engaged. That way if a really dangerous, fast-spreading idea comes along one day, society will have sufficiently heterogenous world views to limit its spread.

That's a stretch.

>> It's also useful to corrupt people's belief in the possibility of getting accurate news

That's the point. Accurate, impartial news does not exist and there is no benefit for the majority of individuals to believe that such a thing exists. All news is fake to some extent because there is always room for an agenda. The only reliable way to stop elites from setting the agenda is for people to believe in stuff which conflicts with the agenda. Whether it's fake news or not is a detail which doesn't matter.

People should be encouraged to trust their intuition even if it occasionally leads them to make mistakes.

Sure, all news is fake "to some extent," but giving up entirely is like running Windows XP in production because all software has security vulnerabilities to some extent.

There's an important difference between people who are genuinely pursuing the truth and those who are genuinely pursuing deception. There's an important difference between a well-intentioned developer who writes a buffer overflow and one who adds a backdoor.

And fake news itself has an agenda: to convince people that there is no such thing as truth, that nothing that the elites say can ever resemble truth, and that caring about what the elites do is futile because the truth is unknowable. Your approach effectively endorses that agenda above others.

> no benefit for the majority of individuals to believe that such a thing exists

How can democracy operate if the levers are broken? What are you voting on if you don't believe that any of the information about candidates is real? Or the content of the laws passed?

The levers are broken, it's really hard to debate that at this point. Maybe they were always broken and the internet has helped shed light on the true state of things or maybe due to crumbling business models the media has become more dishonest than ever. That definitely impacts the effectiveness of democracy. Thankfully the internet is still open enough that large media companies are having a hard time monopolizing the narrative.

> People should be encouraged to trust their intuition

The proliferation of fake news doesn't do that. Fake news just reinforces people's biases as they self-select to read a fake news outlet that they agree with, killing any remainder of sceptisism and critical thinking.

> People should be encouraged to trust their intuition even if it occasionally leads them to make mistakes.

That's how it works with real, good-but-not-perfectly-impartial news. Fake news on the other hand is almost entirely lies that remain unquestioned by its consumers, resulting in many many more "mistakes".

I am really confused by the use of “elites” in recent times. What is actually meant by the term? Am I an elite if I have finished my PhD? Do I need to be in the 0.1%? It’s such a broad term that it basically becomes useless as it means totally different things to different people...

From my perspective I am not really afraid of elites per se but false information (or lying people) spreading which enables unsocial and unethical behavior not only to continue but to thrive.

You can compare humanity to a human body... what you are describing is an auto-immune disease where your own anti-bodies are attacking your own body... just because there are cells which are “higher up in the nevous system and decide what the body should do”?

If the cells are working healthily in your interest, let them be... if they are misfunctioning and causing harm, by any means, try to replace them. Throwing around with general terms is not helping anyone in this situation.

"Elites" means people that are actually competent at their chosen profession. So real journalists, politicians and the like.

> Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations.

That depends on the publisher. Subscription revenue is now 2/3 of the NY Times business as one major example. There are few larger news publishers in the US than the NY Times. As recently as 2005, 2/3 of their revenue came from advertising. That ratio has inverted. The NYT subscribers are on average 30x to 40x more lucrative than the ad-only readers.

The Wall Street Journal has been able to accomplish a similar, gradual build-out of their online subscription business. The Washington Post is pursuing the same model and will likely reach a similar balance on revenue over time.

A good subscription business will always beat a good ad business, unless you're Google or Facebook (in which case their hyperscale enables them to monetize drastically more users than they could with subscriptions).

No coincidence the NY Times has rebuilt their business and their stock is approaching ~15 year highs. Meanwhile, ad businesses like BuzzFeed are in collapse mode (BuzzFeed's ad-based ARPU is less than 1% of what the NY Times derives from its subscribers).

There's no doubt that a publisher who can convince its readers to subscribe should absolutely do that. The problem is that outside of NYT, WaPo, and WSJ and niche or special interest publications, subscription rates are far, far lower.

The accessibility and ubiquity of the big names are creating a winner take all scenario. The buzzfeeds, along with traditional regional and local newspaper media, are forced to fight for national advertising income which is becoming less lucrative and more obtrusive by the year. Advertisers have all of the leverage.

Long story short, most for-profit general news media media is in a bad place with no way out.

Convince its readers boss to pay for a sub I think you meant like the FT in the UK a lot of subs maybe for City professionals

NYTimes (and others) buys small journalism orgs/individuals that it likes. A small journalism outfit is like a startup that can get an exit via acquihire. Economy of scale is a law of nature.

Fake news is like a vaccine which protects us against a zombie apocalypse.

That's what I would've said a couple of years ago. Now it's clear that fake news is more like a vaccine that really does cause autism.

A world where the elites curate everything we learn is the world of fake news. We are living in a fake news world and have been since forever.

> Popular news sources are more likely to be true.

Why on Earth would you believe such a thing? That's utterly ludicrous.

What do you mean by "fake news"? Are you using it on the original sense that described articles by people in the country of Georgia that literally were making up stories that would get clicks and ad revenue or in the newer sense that Trump has corrupted it with, meaning news he disagrees with/dishes but still might be correct?

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