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The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#81

Post by 3825 »

kelnos wrote: post #49
aanm1988 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't need these cheap media that just reprint propaganda-style sponsored stories. What's destroying journalism is people like you calling out media as propaganda, fake news, etc...

Well, yes and no. Does the media sometimes present propaganda and fake news as fact? Sure. Not always, but sure, it happens. Calling out specific media outlets when they do this is absolutely necessary. Of course, labeling media as fake news simply because the facts they report disagree with your ideology is dishonest and reprehensible.

Also syndication is probably not as important online when you could just link to the article source.

Also negative "news" sells better. Humans just respond to fear and hatred. It is just so much easier to fear and to hate. I'll admit to it. I feel suspicious when I see something positive in the news: is this a sponsored post?

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#82

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

vinhboy wrote: post #2

> It’s also not Zuckerberg’s responsibility to solve a broken business model in journalism. (One could argue he has a moral imperative to do so, given his position of power, but that’s not the same thing.) That line is pretty much all you need to know about the article, despite what the title is claiming. In my opinion. If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact…

> If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction.

(You sure stirred it up with this one.)

But it's not really true, is it? The better way to describe the situation would be to say that the ~35% at BOTH ends of the political spectrum only wants to hear and read "news" that confirms their biases. And "journalism," as a business, has given them that.

What I'm saying is that we don't have a "facts" OR a "news" problem. We have an ideological division/superiority problem, and I don't know if anything can fix that.

Well, short of splitting the country into 3 parts: the 2 coasts, and flyover country, and letting them all go hard towards their biases, and checking back in on the results in about 50 years, and see which experiment worked better.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#83

Post by Drumlin »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #79
ykler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that "fake news" refers to stories fabricated, often by small-time entrepreneurs, to make money off of Internet ads and typically spread through social media. Propaganda, on the other hand, is biased or fabricated stories promulgated to forward a political agenda, especially by a government or other entity in a position of power. However, the term "fake news" has rapidly been politicized, and a lo…

I don't think this is it. The very concept of fake news is, fundamentally, propaganda. The mainstream media's privileged position of controlling the narrative is under threat, both from within the media (e.g. Breitbart) and without (random guys on the internet creating narratives). The idea of "fake news" is propaganda, created in order to push Facebook/Twitter/etc into shutting down the media and random guys that ar…

Yes, news outlets that use terms like 'fake news' to shut down competitors should be treated with suspicion. The term went mainstream over a period of a few weeks due to it being pushed relentlessly by the media. It has the hallmarks of propaganda.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#84

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

fmoralesc wrote: post #23
RyanZAG wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion. If anything is destroying journalism, it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction. Why is this a problem that needs to be solved though? A big part of being free is being able to choose what you get to care about, being able to choose what you get to read, and being able to have your own opinions. Remove that, and you're no longer free. Would it be better to not be a free p…

You get to choose what you care about, but you don't get to chose whether it is right to to care about it. You are free to have whatever opinion you want, but you don't get to choose whether those opinions are correct. This matters practically because the "tribunal of facts" stabilizes collective action: when responsive to it, people can count on certain strategies to solve problems. If you cease to care about what i…

> You are free to have whatever opinion you want, but you don't get to choose whether those opinions are correct.

What kind of nonsense is that? My OPINION is that Snowden is a hero, and NOT a traitor, and I absolutely choose to consider that opinion is correct. What are the FACTS about that? He broke the law. But he broke an immoral law? What about the actions he divulged? Were they not unconstitutional? Of course, there are "laws" on the books that make what the CIA/NSA did "legal." So where does all this leave us?

Forums like this keep discussion fake news in the light of "fact," as though fact were enough. It's not. You can go back and forth and back and forth with arguments about Snowden, and get nowhere. It all depends on your bias about how the Constitution should regard your personal liberty and privacy versus the concern for national safety. Lots of people fall on both sides. I use this example because it's a good, clear one, but the same thing is going on in most other stories. There's at least 2 ways of looking at everything. A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.

Now that the country is well and truly removed from the halcyon post-war era, we have to figure out how to live with each other, and differences of opinion. That's the real issue here. The same way that social norms had to react and catch up with the emergence of Facebook itself, we have to settle into new norms about living with people who don't think like we do, and that goes for both sides.

It's not going to stop me from thinking that someone is "wrong" when they call Snowden a traitor, but it doesn't mean I need to get in their face about it, or put signs in their yard, or tear down their signs, or picket their business. You see what I'm saying.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#85

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

rampage101 wrote: post #62

The media is not needed anymore to tell us what to think. We are able to research anything now with the internet, so it's much harder for the media to spread falsehoods now.

If there's one "fake news" story that tops the list, in my opinion, it's the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. When the ACTUAL facts came to light, via autopsy, it was clear he had not been an innocent victim of a racist cop with a grudge. He had just robbed a store, and then fought with the cop, and tried to take his gun. He was shot while CHARGING the officer, head down, hands at his sides. NONE of that was immediately available on the internet, yet millions and millions of people seized on that opportunity to fill in the blanks. The actual report took weeks to generate, as it should, and by the time it came out, there was an entire national movement ("hands up; don't shoot") that was based on a fantastical lie.

How do "we," as a society, function and thrive when there are people like those leading the BLM movement, who are willing to seize on fake news, and create entire polemical fictions, well aware of their specious basis, trying to extract what personal benefit they can from the situation until the truth comes to light?

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#86

Post by fmoralesc »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #84
fmoralesc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get to choose what you care about, but you don't get to chose whether it is right to to care about it. You are free to have whatever opinion you want, but you don't get to choose whether those opinions are correct. This matters practically because the "tribunal of facts" stabilizes collective action: when responsive to it, people can count on certain strategies to solve problems. If you cease to care about what i…

> You are free to have whatever opinion you want, but you don't get to choose whether those opinions are correct. What kind of nonsense is that? My OPINION is that Snowden is a hero, and NOT a traitor, and I absolutely choose to consider that opinion is correct. What are the FACTS about that? He broke the law. But he broke an immoral law? What about the actions he divulged? Were they not unconstitutional? Of course,…

Sure, but at the end of it, your opinion that Snowden is a hero or not is either grounded in fact or not. As you point out, "hero" as a concept is sensitive to perspectival factors, but it is possible to make those explicit, no? (likewise, If I feel cold, then that is a fact, despite it being inescapably subjective). The issue is, then, why are we inclined to assert that he is (or not) a hero "simpliciter", when the truth is more complicated than that? We might not be entitled to claim as much as we want.

> A person's bias and moral compass determines which way is the one they choose to care about. And who are you to tell them that their opinion -- based on the same set of data -- is "wrong?" That's just called having a difference of opinion.

Somebody's moral compass is not just an irreducibly subjective element, but it is also normatively sensitive to facts. Our weighting of the data might have biases, but those biases are surely appropriate or not as well? (I don't mean to imply that we can resolve in principle the issue of whether our biases are correct or not, which we might not; see the problem of Deep Disagreement [1])

So yes, I agree with you when you say that the problem is how to live with each other given our limitations to resolve disagreements. However, I think underplaying the role of facts in this needlessly perpetuates them. The sort of disagreements we face is not just of the kind you just gave an example of: people disagree in ways in which they don't even agree on the same set of data. See the case of climate change denial, for example. Those are not simply having a "difference of opinion".

[1]: https://www.academia.edu/2592706/What_is_the_Problem_of_Deep...

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#87

Post by RileyKyeden »

cerved wrote: post #70

"One analyst told The New York Times last year that 85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over." I stopped reading here since the author obviously doesn't know what he/she is talking about and didn't bother looking it up.

The article in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/business/media-websites-b...

> Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst.

I don't know if it's accurate, but New York Times citing an analyst at a major financial services firm seems more credible than user "cerved" on Hacker News. Do you have better information?

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#88

Post by haltandsleep »

ykler wrote: post #72
r3bl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's the fact that half this country does not care for fact vs fiction. I know Facebook is a US-based product and everything, but I'm really getting sick and tired of products that are used all over the world getting adjusted just because they are a problem now in the US. First we had "fake news" (which used to be called just propaganda), which we have dealt with long before Internet was even a big thing in our reg…

My understanding is that "fake news" refers to stories fabricated, often by small-time entrepreneurs, to make money off of Internet ads and typically spread through social media. Propaganda, on the other hand, is biased or fabricated stories promulgated to forward a political agenda, especially by a government or other entity in a position of power. However, the term "fake news" has rapidly been politicized, and a lo…

I think you had to be pretty dialed-in to daily news to get the "fake news" origin story, and then how it turned to be something else.

In the beginning there were articles and there was fact-checking. Specific articles that failed checks (failed QA) were fake. A rush of those in 2016 were found to be for-clicks and for-profit.

One might have really hoped that more checking (better QA) would come out of that, but perversely the opposite happened. "Fake news" became a blanket condemnation not just for unchecked stories, but often unread ones. "The headline says that? Fake news!"

This is kind of a critical juncture, but I worry that it is becoming a wrong turn.

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#89

Post by badkungfu »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #79
ykler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that "fake news" refers to stories fabricated, often by small-time entrepreneurs, to make money off of Internet ads and typically spread through social media. Propaganda, on the other hand, is biased or fabricated stories promulgated to forward a political agenda, especially by a government or other entity in a position of power. However, the term "fake news" has rapidly been politicized, and a lo…

I don't think this is it. The very concept of fake news is, fundamentally, propaganda. The mainstream media's privileged position of controlling the narrative is under threat, both from within the media (e.g. Breitbart) and without (random guys on the internet creating narratives). The idea of "fake news" is propaganda, created in order to push Facebook/Twitter/etc into shutting down the media and random guys that ar…

> The idea of "fake news" is propaganda

What do you call information that is produced to resemble reputable news sources but contains very little true information?

Is there any support for the claim that it was reported, and a term was coined for it, in order to limit competition?

Why should we think it's that vs genuine reporting on a trend where people profit from producing this material AND a complimentary trend for Americans (trending toward conservative views) to believe anything that fits their preferred narrative without question?

I think this is absolutely different from propaganda because it's done first and foremost from a profit motive. It did not generally (as far as we actually know) come from powerful groups who want to control a political narrative. [0] I'm sure that has already started to change- Russia and other countries will certainly use this attack vector. The material they produce would be fake news used as propaganda.

[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

Re: The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism

#90

Post by philipov »

makapuf wrote: post #56
arjie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what being the little guy is. If you want different results you have to be the big guy. Can't be helped.

Well you know sometimes many little guys can join together and get the/some power cause they can be sufficiently damaging/deathly to the big guy. Democracy, multipolar world...

> Well you know sometimes many little guys can join together and get the/some power cause they can be sufficiently damaging/deathly to the big guy.

Have no fear, citizen, that bug will be solved soon.

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