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A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
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Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#92Something similar seemed to happen recently during the NCAA tournament, when the St Peters Peacocks won a major upset over Purdue on March 25. News outlets from NBC to the WSJ all reported that March 25 was "National Peacock Day", and a Google search for "When is national peacock day" seems to confirm this with a knowledge panel. If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first refere…
I think the thing Google is falsely keying in on is actualy "Everyday Angels: national Day Journal" by Linda Finstad published in late 2020. She made a Pinterest post about the March 25th page being national peacock day which is what Google picked up which someone somehow noticed resulting in the coverage.
Of course nationally peacock day isn't actually a thing, even in Canada where Linda seems to be from, so I wonder where she got the idea! She has a website with a contact form so I sent her a short backstory on how I came to be contacting her and asked if she knew where she got March 25th as national peacock day. At the very least she'll probably be amused.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely not. Should The Onion be considered fake news? It was a parody account, which was labeled as such. Journalists who can't even be bothered to tap through to the profile don't get my sympathy.
Ten years ago I would have agreed with you. These days I know that humans are too gullible to be able to understand obvious satire, and the consequences are deleterious for society. As someone who has long appreciated The Onion, I am now of the opinion that they should not legally be allowed to call themselves a news source, in the same way that someone cannot legally claim to be an expert in an accredited field. We…
It must really suck to be gullible.
But how would they know?
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone in practice confuse books from the fiction section with news? People do in practice confuse Tweets every second of every day.
For the past few years, the best selling books on Amazon have been misinformation about the pandemic, virology, and "critical race theory" (if that even means anything anymore). Your reasoning is tortured at best.
Are they sold in the fiction section?
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#95This has been a problem for a long time. Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though…
There's a popular myth that Windows 10 was named so because there's tons of proprietary code checking for '95' and '98' by looking for just the '9', and that would have caused applications to break. There was no evidence of this except the Reddit comment by a user pretending to work at MS - their post history very quickly showed that was a lie. But that was taken at face value and it become part of news cycles and ev…
Another similar one was the "Nuclear Gandhi" thing[1]. Just believable enough for programmers to think it must be true.
My theory on Windows 10 would be wanting version number parity with Mac OS. Don't make a news story out of this though. Evidence:
- Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360 instead of calling it Xbox 2. "360" cleverly aligned it with both competing consoles of the same generation, the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution (later renamed the Wii).
- Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10 indefinitely[2]. Who wants to be forever one version behind the competition?
- After Mac OS bumped their version version up to 11, Microsoft abandoned the above and went to 11 as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/mi...
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#96The lesson is mainly that few news sources these days do anything like fact checking, with bothering to care at all if what they are reporting may be true or not. If you can accidentally plant a false, story imagine doing so intentionally. Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get important things wrong just through the game of telephon…
I don’t know how true that is. I look at old news from the Victorian era and there was a lot of bullshit then too.
The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation? You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the evidence was your Tweet, and it was really your Tweet that had zero evidence behind it.
Absolutely not. Should The Onion be considered fake news? It was a parody account, which was labeled as such. Journalists who can't even be bothered to tap through to the profile don't get my sympathy.
"It was a parody account, which was labeled as such."
I'm looking at the page now and you use the Mountain View California city crest as the image, "MV Police Blotter" as the title, and it is described as "Keeping tabs on crime in Mountain View, Ca. Not affiliated with MVPD, see @MountainViewPD. Report all emergencies to 911."
That does not read as "this is parody" to me. You may not have intended to deceive but I would bet most people visiting would expect this to be actual police blotter information.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jokes on the internet are great when people are in on them. Positioning yourself as someone that has inside information when it's false falls closer to "it was just a prank bro". The author should be able to say whatever they want, though the ability doesn't make the action not shitty.
No jokes are great when people are in on them. That's why the punchline doesn't come first.
That’s a different type of joke.
It’s why we laugh at “it’s behind you” in a pantomime. We’re in on the joke that the actor knows it’s behind them.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#99Speaking of unique identifiers: when I was like 13, my parents bought new ethernet cards so that all the kids would have their own computer. Two adjacent ones on the shelf that happened to have the same MAC address. Not sure how they figured it out (probably just looking for anything wrong and noticing the MAC addresses were identical), but the network behavior was interesting. Basically if you mashed F5 on a webpage the router would think you were the proper owner of all the network traffic for both computers, and it would disconnect your sibling from whatever they were playing at the time.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#100Something similar seemed to happen recently during the NCAA tournament, when the St Peters Peacocks won a major upset over Purdue on March 25. News outlets from NBC to the WSJ all reported that March 25 was "National Peacock Day", and a Google search for "When is national peacock day" seems to confirm this with a knowledge panel. If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first refere…
This kind of thing is why I think Google's answers (not search results, the snippets with big bolded answers to questions) are dangerous. They're automatically generated from some pretty naive parsing of text from sources of dubious quality. I have found several pretty serious errors in these snippets when Googling for gardening advice.