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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

The problem with fighting "fake news" is that I've not seen a coherent definition of what "fake news" even is, much less a consistent definition among the media of what "truth" is or if it's an objective or relative standard. "News" sources these days have to get ratings/views/clicks/engagement in order to sell advertising which is an inherent conflict of interest against the idea of simply informing the reader/listener/viewer. As dependent as news outlets are on advertising do you think they are going to run afoul of their biggest buyers of ads (Big Pharma and the defense industry)?

"Fake news" cannot be fixed until the funding model for news is fixed.

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Especially problematic are so-called "fact-checking" services which often rely on technicalities to declare something true or false. "It was so hot everyone went to the beach" False, there are reports a few grandparents did not go to the beach. "Not everyone received the reimbursement" False, although not everyone received the re-imbursements, you can re-apply for the re-imbursements in order to receive them.

And this is why few people use them to change their minds and either serve to reinforce what they believe or reinforce their belief to not believe their conclusions.

While I don't disagree, the paper defines fake news in the context of the paper in section 1 :

"“Fake news” has become a term that is used to denote very different things: it is employed to discredit political opponents or the respectability of particular news outlets, and it is used colloquially to simply refer to untruths in any given context. However, the phenomenon that public institutions like the European Commission and the British Parliament are concerned about most plausibly entails at least three features:

1. Fake news contains false information.

2. Fake news is created with deceptive intent.

3. Fake news is presented as resembling traditional news items (even though it is not produced in accordance with editorial standards)."

and they list three examples of 'fake news' which are stories that are demonstrably false and created intentionally with the sole purpose to mislead.

This isn't true. "Fake news" is an imitation of news. News is what we all know news is. A product that presents information. There is entertainment news, celebrity news, movie news, music news. But "the news" is usually current events or politics.

Everyone knows "fake news" means fake political news. An imitation of a format we all recognize.

Pretending you cant tell the difference is "fake commenting". You are pretending to discuss coherence and truth and objectivity. But really you dont care. You aren't defending fake news on the merits. You are saying, "there isn't any such thing as news, so how can this other stuff be fake." Its crap and not a real comment. It isn't even an original thought.

Simply having a scoop before everyone else can get you labeled as fake news. Happens almost daily in the world of sports news where some journalist reports on a tip that such-and-such player is going to be traded or is injured or going to be suspended but the official team PR people will deny it -- not because they are lying but because they simply don't know (yet). So in this case the team's official PR person denying the story causes the reported tip to be deemed "fake news" until the truth of the matter comes out later. My point in this example is that the accusation of fake news is by no means limited to politics or hard-news per se: it can apply to any situation where the speed at which people learn something happens at different speeds, especially before the official news/PR people for an organization even know.

Why is that relevant? Why is the misapplication of a descriptive label somehow invalidating the aptness of the label in the correct context.

Some ugly people are described as beautiful by some other people. Does that mean beauty doesn't exist?

Yes some news is like gossip, why does that matter?

Because whether something is deemed to be "fake" can depend entirely on a subjective point of view. In fact it could be argued that it's more the rule than the exception that a subjective point of view determines what is fake.

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