As India Votes, False Posts and Hate Speech Flummox Facebook
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Easier said than done, I know.
Edit: When it comes to improving distribution of and access to real news, there is a lot of low hanging fruit. Consider for instance the unfortunate state of affairs where most fake news is free, but a lot of real news is hidden behind paywalls. I understand that journalists have mortgages like the rest of us, they can't do it for free, but the social value of real news is sufficiently high we should be highly motivated to find alternatives to pay walls.
If people have a tendency to gravitate towards bits of information (true or false) that confirm their biases/make them feel good about their beliefs, then I don't see how "real news" can ever win. After all, there's only 1 real news and infinitely many fake news...
Or is there a way to think about this problem that I'm not grasping yet?
2) this idea that more speech is the antidote, needs to end.
3) it’s the era of content. If there’s better content out there, that content wins.
4) content has no inherent truth value or perhaps any value other than entertainment value for some subset of the population.
BBC news is free. Fake news is free, engaging, and customized to touch thing that trigger me, and come from sources that I trust. They match my prior assumptions and other content I have in my head.
News will lose, and has been ever since - the news cycle Did it in.
Frankly I think the internet creates an information loop that’s too fast for human societies to reflect.
Just as you are hopelessly to stop the distribution of fake news, you cannot make people like me stop pointing this out.
The problem of fake news is not limited to India, and the existence of free sources of real news, such as the BBC, is not sufficient. We need more sources of free news, written from a wide variety of perspectives from a wide variety of organizations, spread over a wide variety of mediums. The BBC is not always the first to break a story, nor does it always have the best presentation of a story. Sometimes an organization like the NYTs does it faster and better, but the distribution of that story is limited by the paywall. Tearing down paywalls and diversifying distribution channels is the only realistic way of combating fake news. Anything else is a pipe dream.
Historically news media was already in trouble because of the news cycle. News had to bleed to get advertising to survive.
Underlying that was the limited short term attention span of our species.
As long as there is only limited mental space for ideas, a fierce competition must exist to take up that space.
And to win, ideas that engage our hindbrain win. Sex sells, if it bleeds it leads. Tribalism.
This was the case before the internet.
The internet through this into over drive.
Now we can’t even keep up.
More content? People are already saturated.
There are hundreds of Indian news channels.
But there’s only a few formats.
A few talking heads yelling about the same issues and pandering to emotions.
A model learnt around the world.
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Don’t think that There’s things such as real news - sadly today it’s just “content.”
Look at what happens when day - ravish Kumar, makes a great show.
He loses. Because Arnab Goswami with his theatrics and fake screaming is more enaging.
Facts don’t win hearts and advertising time.
Most people don’t read articles before responding on social media. They read headlines.
Discussing news is discussing a battle already lost.
And if this sounds bleak - It’s actually hard to encapsulate how truly hopeless the current scenario seems to be.
Stop thinking about news.
Think of everything as content.
You are on HN because you like the content.
The fact that it’s true and tangible are bonuses - they match your interest.
The content on some websites in 2014 that the “govt was going to create a database on ‘hate speech’” is also content.
It got picked up and spun into “news”.
It wasn’t true. But it still got spread and there was eventually a congressional hearing on it or something in America.
The solutions you are discussing are irrelevant.
They aren’t aware of findings that show that one of the fundamental problems with social media is human attention span.
By adding more sources you only add more competiton to that limited resource. This means that you get a winner take all system as people de clutter their feeds and listen to only the most viral and engaging content.
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I am saying that tonunderstand the world today, you have to turn things on their head.
There’s no such thing as “news”.
Everything is effectively fake news for the larger population.
Real news just has the benefit of being from people trying to closely mirror reality.
This is the ontological error pervasive in discussions on HN.
The real horror is what we actually face - that “real news” is essentially the same as “fake news” to a large amount of the population.
They couldn’t make out the difference on their own.
Dress up “content” correctly and it’s “news”.
If FB did the same to journalists, it certainly would be disturbing, because FB's customers are not its readers and it has no editorial firewall. Anything it says is hopelessly self-interested.
I think it is time people stop pretending news companies are any different from any other media companies. The NYTimes was created by one of the wealthiest bankers for christ's sakes.
Just the fact that they've been criticizing Facebook since before most of these scandals broke is proof that they're a check.
They're not perfect or without an agenda, but no human organization is. But they do make money and earn prestige from muckraking, so they do it. FB earns money from harming us in unnoticeable doses.
Modern example: Jared Kushner's father Charles bought The New York Observer just to get good press about himself to counteract all the illegal stuff he was doing (and was convicted of).
Kushner is now running the Trump White House, and is married to Ivanka Trump.
That's the "free press" for you!
Now let's see…who owns the Washington Post again?
The subtext to all of this is "people are weak" and need protection from their own powers of free association (your network is curated by you). It's one thing to say that people can't put marijuana into their bodies, but it's another to say I can't even handle the speech of my peers because it'll delude my sense of reality. Then how do you have faith in democracy?
Yes, people can’t handle the speech of their peers because some of their peers are specialists in messaging.
They’ve been doing it before the internet. Heck, America taught the world that facts don’t matter by concocting the anti-vaxx movement and creationism.
Both were designed, or happened, to target weakness in human thinking.
It’s a brave new world out there now with the internet.
Verification is harder than content generation. If I flood the right network then it’s members will also be influenced because their trusted sources are also going to be repeating similar ideas.
And yes, the speech of their peers is deluding their sense of reality, literally.
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554
Hey, bread and circuses worked for Rome for a while didn’t it.
Edit: changed anti-vas’s to anti-vaxx
In today's age you cannot trust what a journalist says if they don't have proof that they can show you.
http://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM116_luntz.pdf
That is a reference document I would use to show people how to do messaging effectively.
While there may be people who can do that in the media as well, but in general this is a dark art suited to people who want to MAKE reality and not just report reality.