21–30 of 85 posts
already submitted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981
And this one already has 15x as many points, so deal with it.
"Fake News" is a Orwellian double-speak for alternative news. Mainstream media lost its grip on propaganda and now they're trying to push for censorship of opposing views (this past election is the proof of that). Read this interview with the founder of Snopes for the background of this [0]. Never mind the fact that "real news" organizations have been caught lying so many times and have collaborated, behind the close…
The article is specifically about an event which was a mistake. Perhaps they are making a larger statement about alternative media by posting that, but that wasn't the point of the article.
"Fake News" is a Orwellian double-speak for alternative news. Mainstream media lost its grip on propaganda and now they're trying to push for censorship of opposing views (this past election is the proof of that). Read this interview with the founder of Snopes for the background of this [0]. Never mind the fact that "real news" organizations have been caught lying so many times and have collaborated, behind the close…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this one already has 15x as many points, so deal with it.
Actually, it's normal in HN historically to post links to previous discussions on the same link. There's no reason to get upset about such a comment.
There's a number of ways that state narration becomes viral. The contacts that officials have with the media (the DNC leaks about media contacts pales in comparison to how the industry and government function together on a larger scale) coordinate messages, themes and ideas across distribution outlets - enabling large bodies of the American public to receive the same information (however fake it is or is not) in roughly the same time span.
This messaging is able to set the boundaries for the ideological debate. For instance, the Snowden Documents were reported across media outlets under the terminology "Bulk Collection" rather than Mass Surveillance, and they all made the same arguments provided to them by the state for what was going on, what was and was not legal and what data was and was not collected. Almost all of this was fake information that went viral immediately. American citizens had discussions about whether or not Merkle and Obama were upset with one another - rather than discuss the actual contents of the leaks, which the media broadly did no technical reporting on.
"Should we set up safe zones in Syria, or should we put boots on the ground?" is a safe ideological spectrum to coordinate for the American public, but it's difficult to see private-public partnership on messaging the American people to include, for example, criticism of American regime change, the US led coalitions' support of al Qaeda/Nusra/Fatah/Sham and the Islamic State Group. Both context and opinion are narrowly scoped to present particular fake perspectives that ultimately leave the American public uninformed and anxious.
Virality in general, of course, is studied by the Department of Defense, and it's Strategic Communication in Social Media (SMISC) research effort has sought to create the operating conditions and strategies to control virality of information in populations (strategic communication or "stratcom" is a DoD term for propaganda, replacing the older terminology psyops).
I think we're going to see evolving threats and technologies to detect, thwart and control virality more and more in the future - and people volunteering to be part of those networks of controlled information because its default, cheaper, has a better user experience, or just plain has all the other people.
It's why professional historians try to stick with original sources, for example.
The amount of attention that fake news are receiving from traditional media _AFTER_ the elections is astonishing... almost as if they wanted to blame fake news for the results of the election and the failure of their own forecast Why were they not so active about this phenomenon during elections? I doubt they were unaware of it since even I saw many tweets that were obviously fake
Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really, this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim Hunt?)
Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's obvious why.)
I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social media during Arab Spring.
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Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you want to count every blog post and every comment as such.
Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so either.
At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is.
The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true. No one in the pipeline is a journalist or an editor with incentives to do fact-checking. And everyone can always link to the original post, say "Joe Shmoe posted such and such on Twitter" and thus completely relegate responsibility for the content. (Modern mainstream media pulls these kinds of stunts all the time: http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-co...)