Why?
After all, it's unlikely we'll ever see a day where everyone agrees on everything so completely that no two humans disagree about anything! And as long as that's the case, we'd better know how to deal with people telling us things that are wrong.
The theory goes that seeing social media messages with obvious lies like "Put nails in your tyres for better winter traction" and "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets to build an immunity to larger bullets" teaches people scepticism and rational thought they can apply to much more complex statements like "inflation is caused by the fed printing money" and "the highest crime areas are those with a lot of immigrants"
Does it work? Have we seen it working hitherto? You be the judge!
The problem here is that these "propagandists" cater to people's emotions in a very persuasive manner. It's not that it will blatantly tell you "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets", but rather it will inseminate the thought that perhaps you should shoot your neighbor, out of fear. The message is so masterfully targeted and gamified that even if 1 person starts having more "critical thinking" and simply shrug off the information, there are 10 more people ready and willing.
Rwanda is possibly the best most recent counterpoint to this argument. Granted that the medium was radio as opposed to internet, and that there are therefore different regulatory mechanisms that can be applied (public airwaves vs TCP/IP) - but it shows the danger of getting people into a warped reality bubble.
https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2013/05/10/radio-i...
If you can accept only really verifiably sourced news, things become really inconvenient for both journalists and political opposition.
And where do you put the bar? No interpretation allowed dry facts? Court rulings?
Example from the last US presidential election:
* The Pope endorses Bernie Sanders -> this is fake news
* The Pope endorses Trump -> this is fake news
* The Pope endorses Clinton -> this is fake news
All three spread on facebook, btw (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pope-francis-shocks-world-...)
Also, anonymous sources are not fake news, they're anonymous sources. If labelled as such, the are fine.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-tu...
Just like we had all of Greece, and all of Poland then, where there's naught but a wilderness now.
'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.
Publishing Treasury analysis, he said a Leave vote would cause an "immediate and profound" economic shock, with growth between 3% and 6% lower.'
Edit: Honda Swindon is the latest, just now.
No mention of 'when we leave', is there?
Also if you have a special hotline to Honda management please enlighten us further, because as far as I'm aware nothing has been shared at this time pointing to it being caused by Brexit. Also there are significant global trends affecting the car industry that have nothing to do with Brexit. Please don't be disingenuous.
Did you even read your own post?
> 'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.
Leaving is not voting to leave. UK hasn't left yet. Note that I think that the statement is wrong, but it certainly hasn't been disproven yet.
A sibling post has already highlighted one of the most notorious examples (voting Leave will trigger an immediate and huge recession), which was promoted as totally the consensus and nobody intelligent could possibly disagree with this guaranteed-to-happen-by-experts prediction. But there were many others (£4300 worse off in 15 years or whatever it was). Did the government really believe these predictions? We can't really know if they were intentionally manipulative or earnestly believed.
The Turkey case is maybe a bit like that. How likely it is to happen depends a lot on your beliefs about what future EU leadership will do. Recall that Turkey joining has been official policy in the not too distant past. Recall also that the people who ultimately control the EU - men like Juncker - routinely say in public that all borders are bad and that the future of Europe is vast quantities of Islamic immigration, that there is a moral imperative to let that happen in fact. And Turkey is a huge and Islamic country on the border of the EU that wants to join the EU. You don't have to be particularly weird or paranoid to assume that whatever objections may currently exist might go away in future.
Or you could say it's evil and manipulative and fake news. Depends entirely on your perspective.
There's one difference - the economic prediction was short term and already proven false. Turkey joining the EU was a long term prediction with no particular attached timeline, I think. It's harder to falsify.
If it was only things like these, no one would have a problem.
But in practice, anything other than "Hillary Clinton is completely healthy" and "Trump is a Russian puppet" is categorized as fake news.
This push against fake news is just the elites trying to hold onto the power of controlling the narrative.
By whom? No serious fact checking effort I've seen suffers from that problem.
There was a very recent example of this where Buzzfeed chose to publish an 'explosive' story about the Mueller investigation. So explosive was the story that the Mueller team took the completely unprecedented step of publicly clarifying that Buzzfeed's story was fake. [1] I doubt they simply made up the story. In reality they most likely simply failed to effectively carry out their due diligence, but this is in many ways no better because there is a major economic incentive to skip or engage in sloppy due diligence. When you run explosive stories you get substantial revenue gains due to the exclusive attention you gain. And there's also the risk that a story is true and, in the process of trying to validate it, you end up getting beat to the press by another media organization - once again hurting your revenue and visibility.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2019/...
There are opinion pieces thinly disguised as "fact checks".