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Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

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Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#41

Post by burner831234 »

metalchianti wrote: post #22
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

This is a fantastic analogy. With so many sources available--mainstream and other--we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.

Actually its the continued extreme pressure to commercialize this.

Technology can enable a diversity of content or it can reinforce you staying on the website by serving up continuously sensationalized or aligned content. It chooses the latter to provide more advertising.

This is a serious case for the release of advertising and generation of new revenue models for internet products and presences.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#42

Post by ljf »

moomin wrote: post #30

I remember many years ago a journalist at The Register asking Tim Berners-Lee how his semantic web proposals were going to deal with spam. TBL again, just didn’t get it, because he didn’t see the world through a social lens. The problem of “tag spam” was already pretty prevalent when the question was asked. Same article has Bill Gates completely correctly predict the death of VHS and DVD and them being supplanted by…

I read years ago - that Bills Gates/Microsoft backed HD-DVD as a disrupter for Blu-ray - betting in the long term that video streaming would win out - but not wanting Blu-ray to get too much of a handhold.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#43

Post by kps »

vanderZwan wrote: post #18

Terry Pratchett was a news reporter before he turned writer[0], and IIRC the latter partially happened out of frustration with how little people seemed to care about the truth (of course, the UK tabloids have a particularly notorious reputation here). Although I may have interpreted that last part based on Neil Gaiman's memory of Pratchett as being a very angry man, in a good way[1] In that light it's not that surpri…

Sir Terry Pratchett (OBE, GNU) was also active on Usenet. He knew ‘social media’ first hand.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#44

Post by batty_alex »

metalchianti wrote: post #22
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

This is a fantastic analogy. With so many sources available--mainstream and other--we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.

> However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.

I just want to point out that the problem is fake news, not biased news. And I also want to point out that people are generally not seeking out these sources, they come to their "News" feeds and are targeted at them because they generate an emotional response.

> we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives.

I'd argue there's so many narratives online and easy discovery of fake, or down-right misleading, narratives that are intended to deceive which has become far easier to come across. Sometimes, I'd rather hear the Fox News spin than about the newest conspiracy theory floating around Facebook when I go to dinner with my folks.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#45

Post by imtringued »

Fake news has always existed. The only difference between today and hundreds of years ago is who had the most reach. Back in the past only the church and royalty had the power to spread (fake) news. Nowadays anyone can go on social media and do the same.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#46

Post by inflatableDodo »

chongli wrote: post #28
inflatableDodo wrote: post #2

Terry Pratchett - > 'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of in…

children's comedy novelist Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis. Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHa…

I do not underestimate the level that Pratchett's comedy can operate at. It took me maybe 15 years for the penny to drop between first reading 'Unseen University' and connecting it to the Invisible College of Robert Boyle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College

May I note that being brilliant does not stop someone from being a children's comedy novelist. If people are annoyed by this, perhaps they should think better of children's novelists, rather than insisting I call Pratchett something different so as not to injure the egos of adults who enjoy his writing.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#47

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

gregmac wrote: post #31
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is if it's correct . If you take the time to verify and/or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem. However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to fi…

The Internet has the problem that it has many easily available untrustworthy sources and the information needed to verify what they say is harder to find or not there at all. We have a world of shallow information at our fingertips, but deeper learning and research is still in the realm of paywalls and undigitised content.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#48

Post by krapp »

coldtea wrote: post #33
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

> Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks. It's also that those in power would love it for their opinions to be the "authoritative" ones and only ones permitted to be heard. Same…

The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites.

The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#49

Post by harry8 »

metalchianti wrote: post #22
hirundo wrote: post #7

> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news” It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks. Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along wi…

This is a fantastic analogy. With so many sources available--mainstream and other--we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.

Really? You have clocks you know to be right and clocks you know aren't. Sadly the same can't be said of news sources. The New York Times is probably the best newspaper in the world. And sometimes they do fake news. Do it regularly. And they bitch about the internet being the problem. It isn't. The problem for them is they get caught out in ways that we find out about now. We used not to.

When a big story breaks, set up a twitter a/c. Follow people who are involved in the story and the reporting of it. Read the links that come up. Use your intelligence and education to assess sources, look for corroborating evidence etc and see how far your opinion strays from what you thought of the quality of the nyt reports.

No time? Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, The Donald (may fleas infest his toupee) being an actual russian agent. You can't make this stuff up. But it was made up. And not in supermarket tabloids and faked facebrick screenshots. Anonymous government sources, insiders, reputable news sources.

The NYT is better because sometimes, not always, but sometimes the do correct and do the right thing, however late. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...

Fox is entirely fake news. MSNBC is entirely fake news. They should be prosecuted for fraudulently having the word "news" in their advertising. Uncle George's Racist Blog on facebrick is no better or worse but nobody with half a dozen firing neurones takes the latter at all seriously the way some seem to with the excrement that is MSNBC, Fox and their high-school cheerleaders impersonating tv journalists.

It's like complaining you found out someone lies to you when it suits them and you preferred life when you didn't know that. Nixon was a war criminal, J. Edgar Hoover was psychotic criminal at best, JFK tried to set records for the number of women he bedded and had the FBI and secret service cruise chicks for him. People knew who weren't beholden to a political side (eg NYT, Wash Post, WSJ etc) and didn't publish, instead they published fake news. All Zuckerberg's fault of course.

Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

#50

Post by jordigh »

I think it's extremely important to remember what "fake news" is. It's not misleading reporting, it's not yellow journalism, it's not honest errors in reporting, it's not rumours.

Fake news is fraudulent websites passing themselves as other news sources reporting the craziest Onion-like fabrications out of whole cloth with the hopes of swaying public opinion. Fake news is about a site with a domain name like cnnews.com or abcnewstoday.com with the same logo as ABC news or CNN, making up stories, with no pretense of reality, with hopes of getting shared on Facebook. The term was coined in 2016 to refer to all of the fake news websites that were popping up during the US election cycle.

But by the time people recognised these fake news websites and Trump got a hold of them, he didn't bother trying to understand what fake news was and nobody else did. He said, no fake news, no fake news, you're fake news, and now everyone thinks that fake news is something we've had forever.

No, fake news is a very recent phenomenon, requiring domain squatting and social media to proliferate. It's not the same kind of problem as before. We already had names and discussions of things like slant, editorial oversight, propaganda, gossip, and errata. Fake news should not be lumped with all of those.

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

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