Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 181 posts

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

#141

Post by tracker1 »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #135
dmos62 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clocks are a great analogy. As pointed out, the problem is in verification. Say everyone has a clock and they're all showing different time. How do you actually get to the ground truth? Observe and measure planetary motion? That's too much hassle. This is where the analogy cracks a bit (or does it?). What you want is for your clock to show the same time as others' clocks do, so you join a group where you synchronize…

Truth is constant, lies are variable. With news, you need to look at stories that use different sources and find out the consistencies. The problem on the web is that so many articles are plagiarized or paraphrased from an original source like the AP.

Not to mention when falsified opinion then gets expressed as fact. A great example was a false Trump quote just a few days ago on Twitter.

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

#142

Post by hirundo »

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…

Also, as soon as two clocks are subject to different acceleration they can display different times that are equally accurate ... as the truth of a news story can depend on your path to it.

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

#143

Post by JudgeWapner »

astazangasta wrote: post #102
krapp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because you're literally just parroting Trump campaign and Republican establishment propaganda. The term "fake news" did not appear after Trump's election[0], nor was it created by "liberal capitalists and Washington," nor did any of the stories deemed fake news (ie, Pizzagate, Hillary Clinton's kill count, Hillary Clinton having some neurological disorder) represent any sort of hidden truths slipping thro…

It didn't appear then, but it became a grave concern at that point. Meanwhile conspiracy theories have existed for ever. Pizzagate is nuts, but so is belief in reptilian aliens controlling governments, etc. The energy to contain these stories escalated dramatically, with Zuckerberg being dragged in front of Congress, etc., after Trump's election. Meanwhile the biggest "fake news" item of the past few years was Russia…

> Pizzagate is nuts

I agree. But child abuse among elected officials does happen. A former Speaker of the house [1] was jailed for payoffs to admitted sex abuse victims. I'm not saying this in support of pizzagate, which I believe to be false. I'm saying this to call attention to another threat from "fake news", that legitimate and outrageous complaints can be swept under the rug by loudly exclaiming, "fake news again!" and people being conditioned to automatically dismiss claims when they hear it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Hastert

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

#144

Post by lioeters »

dmfdmf wrote: post #100
orpheline wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna play optimist and note Gates' "not for long" in his response. I think we're still early days in fake news, and I think society has been here before: broadsheets, polemics, and a lack of trust in news sources in the 19th century ultimately drove improvements in the 20th. Now in the 21st that's been destabilized; we'll ultimately craft mechanisms to winnow out the chaff, but it's a reactive process: the probl…

This is exactly right. We are (still) in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions since the invention of the printing press. The invention of the internet has changed the assumptions behind sources of reliable news, funding journalism and control of the political agenda. It is an open question how this revolution will play out but it is clear that the major newspapers such as NYT, WashPo, WSJ, etc. cannot…

That was a relevant and prescient article, especially drawing the parallel between our current uncertain news/media situation with the social changes that occurred after the invention of the printing press.

I guess it comes down to how big leaps in information technology act as catalyst for a disruptive reorganization process in society.

Interestingly, the transition from paper to digital media is turning out to have unexpectedly larger implications, disrupting institutional power, control of narrative, facts (and "facts"), knowledge, public awareness, intellectual property, ideologies..

---

Pithy lines I liked:

"If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?"

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Added to my reading list:

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Elizabeth Eisenstein)

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

#145

Post by Nasrudith »

smacktoward wrote: post #109
coldtea wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 problem is that we've gone beyond voicing criticism to constructing parallel, unconnected realities. It's not like there's one side praising the Vietnam War and another side criticizing it, it's like there's one side saying "hey, there's a war going on in Vietnam" and another side saying "no there isn't." And the "no there isn't" side can burrow comfortably into a huge mass of media telling them that their realit…

Really people living in parallel realities were always with us unfortunately. From moral panics to the "paranoid style" of politics which involves a vast conspiracy of their favored scapegoat which is impervious to evidence as counter evidence is more evidence of "their" control. Where "their" has been variously the Jews, the Catholics, Illuminati, and Marxists, cultural and otherwise, and more.

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

#146

Post by ghc »

“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”

“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle.

“Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis (1945)

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

#147

Post by kaybe »

krapp wrote: post #48
coldtea wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

We have a lot of fun (\s) in Germany right now:

A youtuber named Rezo ja lol ey made a video shortly before the elections (European and regional parliaments) about how one of the biggest parties CDU (and also SPD), the ones in the government for many many years now (Merkel's party), have been acting differently from what they said they'd do, and how they're massively messing up on climate action. He calls for viewers not to vote for them, (and of course not AfD, alternative for Germany, a newish right-wing party who denies climate change - their youth organization is starting to challenge that) and to vote for people with a better climate agenda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ (destruction of the CDU)

This video blew up very fast, and had a few million views before the elections (now at almost 14 million, Germany has 83 million inhabitants). The CDU actually made a response video but didn't publish it, and then published a 11-pages pdf. There was a support video of 70 more German youtubers too.

https://www.cdu.de/sites/default/files/media/dokumente/wie-w...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpg84NjCr9c

In the elections, both CDU and SPD lost a lot of votes, and the green party gained a lot. Some of the discussions and statements in the more official media are.. interesting.

Some CDU politicians seem to think that this video is the reason for their losses, and not their policies or the way they treated the young voters before (protests against internet upload filters on EU level have been called 'paid for', marginalized or laughed at, they tell the Fridays for Future protesters to go back to school and leave the climate to the pros etc).

Main CDU figures have mentioned Russian disinformation campaigns, said to review the guidelines for publishing ('If 70 publishing companies would have said not to vote for CDU, what then?'), said that the Green party had profited from a shift in public fear of climate change from terror and security etc. Now they're trying to set up a conversation with Rezo, offline. It's all quite weird.

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

#148

Post by vbuwivbiu »

ghc wrote: post #146

“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders.…

looks like the problem described in the last paragraph has been solved...

very weird book. Similarities with Cold Lazarus

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

#149

Post by spinach »

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…

Terry wasn't arguing that there wasn't fake news before the internet, but that it would be easier to create and make it seem legitimate. Harder to suss out the origins than you would something in real life. And it's not just biased news, like the way two clocks might give a slightly different time, but actual fake news and 'facts'.

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

#150

Post by reaperducer »

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…

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

The difference is, before the internet you had one or two or three clocks, and they were off by a minute or two.

With the internet, there are seven million clocks, and some show the time for days and places that don't exist.

Post reply on HN