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Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

blog.mass.gov

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Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#21

Post by kristianc »

jadedhacker wrote: post #15
kristianc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caitlyn Johnstone is a 9/11 truther, and not representative of any 'foreign policy establishment', imagined or otherwise.

Fwiw, she is criticizing someone advocating this policy if you read the article. EDIT: I should mention I do not necessarily endorse her views with respect to 9/11.

Her views on the Douma gas attack and the Skripal poisoning (she takes the Kremlin line on both), are also well outside the political mainstream.

As a UK citizen, the implication that Britain was involved in poisoning its own citizens is not unlike how many Americans feel about '9/11 was a false flag'.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#22

Post by trgv »

ralusek wrote: post #4

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

I don't think it was ridiculous to begin with (neither was "terrorism") but it's ridiculous now.

I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible.

You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#23

Post by protomyth »

EGreg wrote: post #11
ralusek wrote: post #4

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

Fake news used to refer to “Hillary Clinton has a body double” or stuff you’d find in the Enquirer. And now the term has been hijacked to mean any new you disagree with.

I was quite fond of the Weekly World News, particularly their article on how there was a gate to Hell in North Dakota and the Governor sending a tactical team to try to kill the devil.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#24

Post by wilsonnb »

lopmotr wrote: post #17

The term only became popular after Trump's win [1], not while it was happening, which is forever (I once read in a real paper newspaper about an amputee who had donkey's legs attached in place of his own). This suggests people don't like it because they went looking for something to blame for his winning. It's entirely a partisan political concern, not a fundamental one. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?d…

It became popular after he won because he started using the term incorrectly and labeling everything he disagrees with as fake news.

People weren't looking for something to blame his winning on. That's a loaded statement. They were looking for reasons that he won. That's a reasonable thing to do. We've never had a President like him. Our polling methods in the 2016 election didn't predict him winning. Obviously people missed something that was a factor in this election and fake news is one of the things they looked into.

Had Trump not butchered the term I doubt we would still be talking about it much in the public forum.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#26

Post by deadmetheny »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #19
ralusek wrote: post #4

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

>I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The right absolutely makes up stories: https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/ Lots and lots of false statements here.

Snopes isn't made up of experts and isn't an unbiased source. It mystifies me that so many people treat it as reliable, let alone infallible.

(sorry for pointing this out, but downvoting me doesn't change that it's true)

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#27

Post by craftyguy »

ralusek wrote: post #4

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

> I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect

Go look at donald trump's twitter feed. It's full of outright incorrect statements being presented as fact.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#28

Post by testvox »

da_chicken wrote: post #13
rsync wrote: post #5

"Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts" Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then and liberal (classic definition, not American definition), democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is. There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced…

Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature. That doesn't mean that we need a Ministry of Truth a la Brazil or 1984, but this isn't an either-or issue. The Fairness Doctrine[0] was a fairly nice compromise. We have long required advertisers to be tru…

How would you apply the fairness doctrine to the web though. Will I have to host opposing viewpoints on my blog or face fines? The fairness doctrine made sense back when your ability to broadcast your opinions was limited by the shared medium of the radio spectrum. But now that anyone with any viewpoint can broadcast to everyone via the Internet the fairness doctrine doesn't make sense.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#29

Post by jccalhoun »

ralusek wrote: post #4

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

There are certainly "facts" that I have heard people say or spread online that were clearly false like millions of illegals voted in the last election (when in reality one article claimed that and had lots of rebuttals and now has a disclaimer at the top of the article) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-el...

or that Hillary Clinton only won 57 counties in the 2016 election https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-cou...

However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#30

Post by wilsonnb »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #19
ralusek wrote: post #4

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

>I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The right absolutely makes up stories: https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/ Lots and lots of false statements here.

You don't even have to look past the current President, who is the most prominent member of the Republican party and to a degree the political rightwing in the US. He tells outright lies on a regular basis.

He lies about trivially verifiable things like the weather and number of people at his inauguration, past statements he has made, about whether any presidents between Reagan and himself have cut taxes, about peoples faces openly bleeding from a facelift, about CNN/WaPo/NYT "failing", about the murder rate, etc, etc, etc.

Here's a decent list to get started, for anyone interested. http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/stateme...

Note that not everything on that list is an outright lie. Many of them are, but not all of them.

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