Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

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It's not me I'm worried about - it's the 50% [1] of people who get their news from social media and "entertainment" news platforms. These people vote, and can get manipulated into performing quite extreme acts.

At the moment a lot of people seem to have trouble engaging with reality, and that seems to be caused by relatively small disinformation campaigns and viral rumours. How much worse could it get when there's a vast number of realistic-sounding news articles appearing, accompanied by realistic AI-generated photos and videos?

And that might not even be the biggest problem. If these things can be generated automatically and easily, it's going to be very easy to dismiss real information as fake. The labelling of real news as "fake news" phenomenon is going to get bigger.

It's going to be more work to distinguish what is real from what is fake. If it's possible to find articles supporting any position and a suspicion that any contrary new is then a lot of people are going to find it easier to just believe what they prefer to believe... even more than they do now.

[1] made-up number, but doesn't feel far off.

The majority of "fake news" are factual news described from a partial point of view and with a political spin.

Even fact checkers are not immune to this and brand other news as true or false not based on facts but based on the political spin they favour.

Fake news is a vastly overstated problem. Thanks to internet, we now have a wider breadth of political news and opinions and it's easy to label everything-but-your-side as fake news.

There are a few patently false lies on the internet which are taken as examples of fake news - but they have very few supporters.

> Even fact checkers are not immune to this and brand other news as true or false not based on facts but based on the political spin they favour.

Could you give an example?

> There are a few patently false lies on the internet which are taken as examples of fake news - but they have very few supporters.

How many do you consider "few"?

I can go to my local news site and read a story about the novel coronavirus and the majority of comments below the article are stating objectively false facts.

"It's just a flu" "Hospitals are empty" "The survival rate is 99.9%" "Vaccines alter your DNA"

...and so on.

There is the conspiracy theory or cult called QAnon, which "includes in its belief system that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media."

One QAnon Gab group has more than 165,000 users. I don't think these are small numbers.

> made-up number, but doesn't feel far off.

Pew Research says 18% report getting news primarily from social media (fielded 10/19-6/20)[0]. November 2019 research said 41% among 18-29 year olds, which was the peak age group. Older folks largely watch news on TV[1].

[0] https://www.journalism.org/2020/07/30/americans-who-mainly-g... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/pathways-2020/NEWS_MOST/age/us_a...

Thanks for providing data. Evidence is better than making up numbers.

That fact that you made up that number is extremely funny in this context.

I don't think so - I was aware that it was a made-up number, and highlighted the fact that it was. It's the lack of awareness of what is backed up by data that is the problem I think.

Or am I missing your point?

Right, it's definitely goof that you cited it being fake, but I think the parent was pointing out the subtle (and likely unintentional) irony of discussing fake news while providing _fake_ numbers to support your opinion.

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