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Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

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Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#281
post #149

Why is social media getting all the flak? What about all the fake news on Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, Fox News, et al?

All of the organizations you listed employ fact checkers who are responsible for checking articles for accuracy and facts. Sure, they make mistakes from time to time, they're human. Disagreeing with the slant of an article doesn't mean it's fake news.

How far can "slant" go before the news is "fake"? "Fake" isn't exactly a scientific definition. It's not like paragraphs of text have a binary value of "true" or "false".

Have you seen this?

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/washington-post...

In fact, "fake" news from these big outlets is even more insidious, because they have agendas from their powerful owners (Bezos in this case), a huge audience, and they have people's (like you) trust, because they supposedly employee fact checkers.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#282

I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true. However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments." I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times…

It's time for startup to develop a Chrome Extension to detect fake news on Facebook.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bs-detector/dlcgke...

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that when confronted about false stories (which were sourced from white aupremacist propaganda) he retweeted, the President-elect, while still a candidate, responded fairly similarly, so, yeah, it's definitely an attitude that is becoming quite normalized.

Just wondering, was this sentence intentionally written in an extremely complicated way? It took me a while to figure out what it was saying.

6 commas in one sentence is indeed a lot. I'm still unsure what it means.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#284
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the most recent Last Week tonight. Features clips of President Elect Trump making almost identical comments. In March he claimed a man who rushed the stage at one of his rallies had ties to ISIS. When confronted with the fact that the source he'd linked to was a hoax, his response was, "What do I know about it? All I know is it was on the internet." [1] Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly: Bill:…

This extreme partisanship is one of the reasons I'm wary of John Oliver. For example, Politifact, despite its biases or subjectivity, has documented examples of practically every major politian making untrue statements. Including the current POTUS. We need a systemic approach to dealing with lies and untruths of the people who weild power. If you make it partisan, the liar/politican will just block you out, and so wi…

While I agree that exposing untruths (and reporting facts) is important, I welcome obvious partisanship. I believe that all journalists and news organisations have biases, but feel they ought to conceal them. Having an opinion doesn't prevent anyone from telling the truth. All news reporting is selective, even if it is somehow unbiased.

I like multiple-award-winning journalist Clare Sambrook's idea of investigative comment:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/cla...

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#285

I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true. However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments." I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times…

If you get angry enough or you feel threatened enough the facts don't matter, all that matters is winning.

America went from a melting pot to a tossed salad to a powder keg.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#286
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the organizations you listed employ fact checkers who are responsible for checking articles for accuracy and facts. Sure, they make mistakes from time to time, they're human. Disagreeing with the slant of an article doesn't mean it's fake news.

How far can "slant" go before the news is "fake"? "Fake" isn't exactly a scientific definition. It's not like paragraphs of text have a binary value of "true" or "false". Have you seen this? http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/washington-post... In fact, "fake" news from these big outlets is even more insidious, because they have agendas from their powerful owners (Bezos in this case), a huge audience, and t…

In my mind fake news and biased news are two different concepts. All news should be taken with skepticism, because every bit of it from every news outlet is subject to potential bias. I'm aware that many news outlets published biased news against Sanders (and Trump and Clinton), and I'm aware that Bezos owns media outlets that may be biased. But organizations that employ fact checkers don't make up news stories out of thin air.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#287
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. I was just talking to some Swiss journalists last night. You know what Swiss news organizations are using those technologies for? To make their writing more "engaging", i.e. more sensationalist, not for fact-checking.

> I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. How so? Deciding whether news is fake or not seems like a textbook application of natural language classification and search.

AI has not advanced to the point where it can go out into the real world and verify whether or not events actually took place.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#288

I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true. However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments." I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times…

From "How politics makes us stupid":

Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.

Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart.

"Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values."

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a reflection of real world behavior. Before Facebook, people spread similarly wild rumors via word of mouth.

Were they PAID at scale to do so in the past though? That's the frightening part. The financial incentives in the system are all screwed up. These kids are doing it purely for the easy dollars; they don't even care about the politics at all. It's like schoolyard taunts, except the kids are getting paid for who can come up with the most viral rumour. Something seems deeply, deeply broken about this at a systemic level…

Paid for media is also not a new phenomenon.

The only difference is that you need to pay lots of untrained people to lie on Facebook, while you needed to pay just a couple of highly trained people to lie on a newspaper.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just lying about different things. Back then you were absolutely supposed to lie about things like having sex before marriage, where your teenage daughter went for six months just after she started dating that guy and putting on weight, how much you love being a housewife, the attraction you have for your own sex, your interest in non-gender-conforming behaviour, what your creepy uncle did when he babysat you...

I agree with you that humans are prone to lie, and that cultures have developed protocols around that, but we can distinguish here on both degrees and categories of lies. If your daughter became pregnant in school in the 50s, something terribly had gone off socially acceptable script. (It is irrelevant how we view that script today.) All of your examples are specimens of social remedies to deal with these social hot…

Not quite so.

Those lies were as much in support of the system as they were ways to deal with it. The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.

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