Fake news has been with us for a long time.. Along with various religions/churches and superstition/customs, humans had always believed in various level of fake things.
Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
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Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#122> 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…
I am grateful to the internet for exposing how deeply our social consensus was dependent on a particular culture and ruling class owning the means of disseminating information, ie newspapers and tv channels. With the means to distribute ideas more openly available there has come both a broader range of views across the population and a noticeable weakening of the ruling class’s ability to direct public attention and…
Agreed. There are tons of important stories that only came out because the internet democratised the media and let independent voices get heard, and it's brought just as many reliable sources as it has fake news sites.
That's not always been a good thing sure, but it's at least shown the world that no, not everything was 'fine' and that the political and social systems in play now have failed a lot of people.
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting comparison. Roald Dahl has in his oeuvre many stories that are far less intended for children than anything I have ever read by Pratchett. Pratchett keeps pretty much all of his stories accessable by at least teenagers. You cannot say the same for Dahl.
That’s fair, yes. I merely meant that Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolatw Factory, Esio Trot and many others are much more deliberately children’s books than just about anything by Pratchett Dahl definitely has decidedly non-children appropriate work. Fancy some roast leg of lamb for dinner?
>Fancy some roast leg of lamb for dinner?
After I've finished my cup of tea. It has a bit of an odd flavour though. Did you add almonds or something?
I'd say that while Pratchett's books are wider in intended audience than Dahl, there does seem to be care taken with pretty much all of them not to include anything that would cause an adult to tell a child not to read them. As a child, I never had any adults tell me that I should not be reading Pratchett at my age, which was a fairly common occurence with much of what I was reading.
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#124Fake news has always existed, and society builds up an immunity whenever it evolves into a new medium. I don't see the illegitimate Wordpress-based sites that peddle lies as any different than the National Enquirer-esque print tabloids or radio conspiracy theorists of yesteryear. Folks who didn't grow up with the internet may have trouble telling the difference, and even Millennials constantly fall for biased social…
Do you have evidence that historical forms of fake news and propaganda became less effective over time?
Outside of looking at history and saying "everything seems to work out", I don't have much. However, there is the phenomenon of Banner Blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness) in frequent web users.
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#125> 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 internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions.
I think the real enabler isn't the internet, but the ubiquity of recording devices. Now that a significant slice of the population is carrying around near-professional-quality cameras at all times, we no longer "need" to trust established media sources. For many newsworthy events, someone will have uploaded phone footage to YouTube, or an indie publication will have covered it with a camera they dropped a grand on, and video proof is better than any journalistic credentials.
Of course, that last part is rapidly ceasing to be true as we get better at doctoring video, heralding the end of this brief era of democratized journalism. Over the coming decades we as a society are going to have to re-learn what it means to have trustworthy media sources.
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#126Fake news isn't real.
And by that, I mean, it is not influential, and never has been. No one buys fake news. No one crafts a decision based on tripe.
It's laughable to believe that there's any clout in nonsense.
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#127Earlier 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…
>Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.
Let's suppose, hypothetically, that I find my way to an "alternative", non-mainstream site. This fictional site specifically claims that they found the student records of the brother of a prominent (fictional) Congressional representative, and also found the divorce certificate of that representative and her former husband. This fictional site claims to have found embarrassing information about the representative from cross-referencing those two legal documents. The Congressperson and the mainstream media immediately dismisses this as a crazy conspiracy theory[0].
My question, then, is:
1) If this fictional site is lying, how would I verify that if no other media organization will verify or disprove this information?
2) If this fictional site is telling the truth, what grounds would I have to believe this if all the mainstream sites are calling it a conspiracy theory?
3) If someone were to go on an major investigative journey to uncover something that goes against all major media biases, how would he be able to present his case without being immediately dismissed as a conspiracy theorist?
4) If someone- mainstream or alternative- were to go on the internet and simply tell lies, how would we be able to fact-check them if they were the only news organization covering that particular story?
[0] ROT13: uggcf://cwzrqvn.pbz/qnivqfgrvaoret/bssvpvny-fpubby-erpbeqf-fhccbeg-pynvzf-gung-erc-vyuna-bzne-q-za-zneevrq-ure-oebgure/
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
In attempting to dismiss the point Bill Gates gets it partly right. 'you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says "Hey go read this"...', and says so as though it is some arbiter of quality as they would have verified first. Not that people generally verified that much anyway, but if it comes from people we trust and like we probably don't engage natural scepticism. Not like…
not really. I migth have dozen of friends who did read, and did figure out it was BS. But the systems optimize for positive interactions (which generates eyeballs/pageview/ad impressions). So even if a dozen friends dismissed something, correctly, that one dumb Shitposter will get the word accross and the sytem will benefit the thumbs up with a zero effort propagation (one click) versus the critic (time to sit down,…
Relatedly, a big problem with Twitter/FB was showing the friend dismissed content as well as the verified content, because dismissed content eyeballs is still eyeballs on content, then making it sometimes hard to tell which was which.
A friend might retweet on Twitter content they were dismissive about, but that retweet would sometimes accidentally legitimize that content by removing the dismissive context (spreading it away in readers' timelines).
Similar with FB showing you stuff friends react to or comment on; their reactions might be Anger and their comments critical, but that context also is still partly lost if you weren't looking for it, and sometimes intentionally whitewashed ("x friends reacted to this" instead of "10 friends hate this, but one kind of liked it"), in the maelstrom of the FB timeline algorithm. (Obviously the worst case on FB up until recently was how easy it was for people to whitewash paid ads by resharing them, losing the context of who paid to promote that content in the first place.)
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#129I 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.
They were also worried about Sony holding all the cards in video manufacturing with Blu-Ray. DVD was primarily "owned" by Toshiba with a variety of patents spread around a consortium of manufacturers. Sony had all the tech and patents and DRM control in Blu-Ray and were at risk of a dominating monopoly. HD-DVD did at least push Sony to spread more of the patent rights and DRM controls around to other manufacturers and create a (slightly) more open consortium than if there hadn't been a fight at all.
Re: Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
In attempting to dismiss the point Bill Gates gets it partly right. 'you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says "Hey go read this"...', and says so as though it is some arbiter of quality as they would have verified first. Not that people generally verified that much anyway, but if it comes from people we trust and like we probably don't engage natural scepticism. Not like…
not really. I migth have dozen of friends who did read, and did figure out it was BS. But the systems optimize for positive interactions (which generates eyeballs/pageview/ad impressions). So even if a dozen friends dismissed something, correctly, that one dumb Shitposter will get the word accross and the sytem will benefit the thumbs up with a zero effort propagation (one click) versus the critic (time to sit down,…
There's some serious congnitive dissonance you're broadcasting.
You say dozens of friends figure it out, but one idiot pushes it forward.
Sounds like most people think rationally. The idiots are a small minority, however loud.
When it comes time to tally up, the votes won't favor the one idiot. The court of public opinion won't swing in favor of lone wolves. It never has.
The lowest common denominator is precisely that. Common. It's not the crackpot opinion.
The megaphone of a crackpot doesn't sway opinion. Public opinion dilutes to neutral apathy. It rarely charges up to high polarity, and only when there are solid, verifiable facts in play.
If a large base is charged up, they have a core set of real values. It's not a base founded on fiction. They haven't been swindled. It's dismissive to believe that.