101–110 of 177 posts
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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?
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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?
The 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…
If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
Of course "journalists" sometimes spread "stories" based on random social media posts. What is really interesting is that the posts were there first, and the internet amplifies them on its own.
To any reader who's not in on it, the original comment about the Roku crashes sounds plausible enough by itself. It is then upvoted organically to a broader audience.
The author didn't write misinformation for ad views, sponsorships, or even Reddit karma. He just released it for his own pleasure, as an "obvious" joke.
Millions of similarly motivated posts are being blasted out every minute, with content such as: memes with humorous but false descriptions of the content, selfies painting false pictures of people's lives, anecdotes with implied messages, creative writing of what-if scenarios or "head canon", compelling but baseless theories about complex topics, true statements cherry-picked to make false points, etc.
These are created not for sales, propaganda, or even internet points, but simply to share half-formed idle thoughts. That is: jokes, guesses, hot takes, wishful fantasy.
It may be obvious bullshit to the authors, but the medium presents it all as fact. None of us are capable of passing careful judgement on the sheer volume of content, so most is absorbed at face value.
This environment is also a fertile breeding ground for deliberate, malicious misinformation, but that's beside the point.
Ultimately, the only solutions are to stop consuming social media altogether, or accept that falsehood is now inseparable from actual facts.
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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 wo…
I can grant that it doesn't actually say "parody" in it's description, but we should still be expecting more effort from reporters.
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Are they sold in the fiction section?
I feel like the actual answer really undermines your point more than you think
Are people confused by the fiction section?
> Well people publish weird stuff in the non-fiction section as well.
Ok... what's that got to do with the fiction section you were talking about?
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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…
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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 PlayStat…
This 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…