The godfather of fake news (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The godfather of fake news (2018)

bbc.co.uk

52 pointsColinWright40 comments

Anyone interested in a broader history of fake news might like the book This is Not Propaganda, by Peter Pomerantsev. Decent review in The Guardian here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-pr...

Pomerantsev bio etc on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pomerantsev

Also these three books are interesting:

Lippmann - Public Opinion

Bernays - The Engineering of Consent

Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent

It's no small task to create a program that can churn this stuff out automatically using algos and such. Such articles need sources, and this leads the way for fact-checkers. No source? Then you are immediately marked as disreputable.

Although a common tactic that has worked for years (especially on Wikipedia) is the act of linking to a source, only to find the page either doesn't exist, or the source relies on another source, and that source relies on another source, etc

nowadays people just link to twitter posts as some sort of reliable first hand source

I thought I hit the end of the article as scrolling came to an abrupt halt at the "The Birth of term fake news". Nope, there's scrolling resistance that you have to "break through" as it cycles like a powerpoint. Awful layout. Fake end of article

I already hated the design before that but persevered because the text was at least readable, but gave up bothering at the point you mention.

This is too funny -- pompous BBC with their "other people spread fake news" shtick.

All media outlets are guilty of bending the truth, often outright inventing stories to fit their preferred narratives. This is not "new", this has just been pearl-clutching since they've realised they no longer can control the narrative in society. Go look up how the majority of western media outlets were pushing "just the flu" about coronavirus as late as early March. (This is BOTH on the left and right, nobody is innocent in this).

If you want to see the real history of fake news, or "founder" as it may be, read up on Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

*Edit -- look, I don't take the downvotes personally, I get that this is a huge cognitive short-circuit for many folks who read this site -- a large part of your learning comes from reading and understanding from so-called authoritative sources. It is certainly very difficult to realise (in the most unpleasant way possible, ie your candidate lost an election, or your countrymen successfully voted against the EU, or that masks-dont-work-oh-wait-they-actually-do) that the sources you've learned some positive things in your life from have biases, are fallible, and with the rise of "measuring engagement", are all in huge race to the bottom for immense pandering and therefore carefully crafted narratives.

Feeling discombobulated is fine, but let's not lie to ourselves that any of that is "news" or "fair and balanced".

Wishing all of you a good day.

Dear fellow HN'ers, please don't downvote a comment as a reflex if you disagree with it and consider engaging a point on its merits. Hiding viewpoints you disagree with creates an echo chamber.

Please don't try to influence people how to vote with replies to the comment.

Outside of that, do you disagree with the rest of their statement?

I agree with your comment, but unfortunately HN guidelines suggest that we shouldn't discuss comment voting (outside of, perhaps, a larger meta-HN discussion). So I don't expect your comment to last long either. For what it's worth, I upvoted the originally-referenced comment.

The comment is getting downvoted because it claims the BBC spreads fake news but then gives no evidence for it, instead pointing to Hearst publications from more than a hundred years ago.

Hiding poorly argued viewpoints creates an echo chamber of well-reasoned arguments, which converges on the truth. Do you consider arithmetic textbooks an echo chamber for endlessly parroting that 2+2=4?

I think there's more nuance to that. Not all truths are as easily proven as 2+2=4. Usually an echo chamber is only considered as such when the people parroting a "fact" do so with confidence that far exceeds any proof that they can provide. The mask issue GP brings up is a great example. Before the COVID-19 outbreak most people generally regarded the practice of wearing face masks in Asia with scorn. If you asked them about it they would invariably bring up the same fact that "virii are too small and will pass through the mask". However, very few would be able to cite sources, and even fewer then would have an accurate enough understanding of how virii spread to know that most of the time the virus is a part of a much larger particle[1][2] that masks are effective at preventing to some extant[3].

It's not surprising that most people wouldn't have a perfect understanding of epidemiology, but it does become suspicious when a large group of people all become overconfidently wrong in exactly the same way. This is what I would consider to be an echo chamber.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... This source confirms that coronavirus spreads via droplet.

[2] https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/drugresist/WH... This source defines "droplet as being particles greater than μm in diameter on page 44.

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/#!po=35... This article measures a protection factor of ~4 for a surgical mask when measuring with a detector that detects particles ranging from 0.02 to 1㎛.

It's funny that you accuse mainstream media of bending the truth while linking to Wikipedia, a website actually known for its top editors having an political agenda.

Show me a mainstream news outlet that doesn’t have a political agenda ;)

It's too much. This comment is right on the money and graying out by the second. I think it's because both sets of morons think it goes against them.

A job well done, too bad at this rate nobody will see it.

Uh, no. No major media I consumed in the US was pushing "just a flu".

https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange/status/12426745374913208...

This link is kind of ironic.

And the top (for me) response:

they left off the word VACCINE. it is just the FLU VACCINE causing a hyper-immune reaction, a cytokeine storm that is triggered by pansy corona causing a body to attack itself; no one is dying from corona::

This world is lost.

'Fake news', 'yellow journalism', and 'public relations' are all just euphemisms for propaganda. At best they describe particular forms of propaganda.

> Just because it’s trending, doesn’t mean it’s true

Precisely. We simply shouldn't be too gullible to believe everything we see and here on the internet just because it is simply trending especially on social media which most of the time a tweet, video or article can also be taken out of context purposefully to create confusion, hype and obviously disinformation.

But on the other hand, I'm not sure if this article is also talking about the BBC here, since the dreadful Newsbeat and entertainment sections has lots of this clickbait and fake-news level nonsense which look as if it were imported from Buzzfeed.

Got any examples of fake news in the Newsbeat section?

It takes 2 things for a news to be believable: it needs authority, that is to come from sources you're inclined to believe or to be repeated many times, but it also has to fit well with your own existing narrative. The 2nd is absolutely necessary, you will never believe into something that goes against your world views (even if it's true, often). We only buy into stories that fit into the patterns that we're already susceptible to, and world views that we already have.

I think this idea is a bit paradoxical - how then, do we ever change our views? I think people simply reject isolated facts that are inconsistent with the paradigm that explains the greater body of facts. Which is reasonable. Einstein refused to accept that god plays dice, for instance.

Usually we change views in many very small steps, slowly turning from one direction to another. Also sometimes when confronted with a paradox in our existing model of the world that invalidates our previous believes, but that's extremely stressful event and also rare... fake news can't do that to you. They just push the buttons that already exist. I'll never buy a fake news promoting say anti-vaxxers' ideas, but give me something that proves something I already believe in and I'll be sharing it all over (ok, not, by now I've learned to be careful, but I'll have a strong impulse to do it)

"Bill Gates" was trending on Twitter yesterday. I looked at the tweets and many many tweets were claiming he wants to implement population control and the Covid-19 vaccine will implant an ID in each recipient, which will be the mark of the beast. I saw a Twitterer retweeting this stuff whose bio said "Critical thinker". I thought of engaging, but then thought, "What's the point?".

Depressing how far gone much of the other inhabitants of this planet are...

If you call him on it, he might use more scrutiny next time. We definitely don't win by not trying.

Sadly, it is more likely, you'll get in a mudslinging contest with a troll paid to spread desinformatsiya.

You'll make sensible responses, then get back either some whataboutism with a supposedly supporting but irrelevant article link, insulting meme, or some other technique designed to destroy good-faith discussion or the concept of truth.

Repeat a few cycles and then lookup the account and find that it is either new w/few followers or has a history of troll/bot activity that as analyzed by sites like Bot Sentinel [1]. Then, you report as fake and block.

The only exceptions I've found were not to people posting articles, but making comments, where you can sometimes wind up in a discussion.

They are professionals (of varying skill), you are the person who can't tell he is the mark.

This is almost always a game where the only winning move is to not play.

[1] https://botsentinel.com/

It'd be more comforting if they're being paid or they're bots, but the depressing truth is, many many people probably believe the conspiracy theories they believe.

Too many of both

edit:

tl;dr: Don't try to argue with conspiracy theorists - they are already immunized against evidence and reason.

Yeah, Twitter is a boon to crazy people, and it probably can't be fixed. The best thing you can do is convince everyone you know to walk away from it and never look back.

Is it true, that Orwell's Ministry of Truth in his book 1984, was based on the BBC?

Seems like discussion of what is true in news has been going on for a while, yes?

It’s somewhat true, but not really in the way it’s used. He worked there for two years during WWII and didn’t like the language required in BBC news reports. I don’t think that says anything about what content was allowed out, which was restricted even after the war ended. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/d3a46264-89b...

The influence of fake news mills is overstated by corporate news media who benefit by attempting to legitimize their own reporting. Russian collusion turned out to be a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads. Bloomberg spent more than 900 million dollars and couldn't sway the election, yet we're supposed to believe that some fake news stories on Facebook got Trump elected.

Dont forget the tens of thousands of fake Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. accounts that were so pivotal in spreading misinformation!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...

I feel that this paranoia of bots has become a modern Red Scare. It becomes impossible online to express certain unpopular opinions without being instantly labeled a bot or shill no matter how well backed your argument is. In fact I've seen people comment that "you should be afraid of the smart ones" when it comes to bots. It seems that "bots" have simply become an intellectual cop-out for most. On the other hand, I can find plenty of accounts on Reddit that post endlessly with the same (popular) political agenda using shoddy sources (think screenshots of headlines) that are invariably highly upvoted. Despite this, you will not find accusations of shilling towards these accounts.

We know that those accounts exist, and that they were created and deployed by numerous governments when opportunity struck. We can see their activity: what countries they came from, what they were saying, and what hashtags they made up. My understanding of the data is that they were pervasive and influencial in the 2016 US President Elections and in many other socially sensitive events such as the protests in Hong Kong. So I dont think the word paranoia is really fair. It's a real, known problem. (Edit: and now there's evidence[1] that they are spreading climate denialism as well).

Anyone calling someone a bot when they are clearly not a bot is probably just being intellectually lazy, dishonest, or arguing in bad faith. But that's just another flavor of the issues with political (or any rational) discourse we had already. If it weren't bots, it would be something else.

And yes, shilling (and failure to recognize shilling) is endemic on that platform. One of the many reasons I try to stay away from it now.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-t...

> “I’m not some monster. I’m a liberal,” he says. “The goal isn’t money.”

proceeds to fabricate articles damaging to liberals because the money is good

He also claims his intention is to troll people.

> Once his stories go viral, the Facebook comments burst forth. And that’s when Christopher Blair the fake news writer becomes Christopher Blair the crusading left-wing troll.

> “The mission with the trolling first and foremost is we pull them into the comments [section underneath each fake article],” he says.

> It's then that he starts on the offensive. The faker becomes the exposer, weeding out and reporting the most extreme users among his fans.

Since Trump got elected, I would say that he ended up trolling himself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com