Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

Yes, I have written about this in my later comments.

> The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.

(Their neighbor should have lied too.)

I tend to view societies as non-linear and catastrophic systems. The system above was trying to maintain a social order and it wasn't attempting a 100% conformity to rule x. There is a threshold of violating rule x that would destabilize the social order and the governing social rules are optimized to keep violations well below that threshold. By lying about a violation event, both the fact of the violation is leaked (because the lies are transparent), and, a family unit is protected from suffering the consequences of publicly breaking rule x. But if a family of daughters repeatedly had presented daughters with cases of 'eating disorder', then you can be certain that family would be subject to social scrutiny.

Every culture develops a variant of this mechanism. For some it is a first class device (e.g. Ta'arof in Iranian culture) and for others it is an implicit device.

The key issue is always "where is that threshold" and not that these mechanisms exist. They exist for a reason, since as every school child knows:

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the king's horses and all the king's men
    Couldn't put Humpty together again.

[p.s. to be clear, imo, the contemporary lies we're discussing have crossed those thresholds and are destabilizing and we can possibly trace the seminal event to Watergate and Deepthroat and acceptance of anonymous sources.

Here is a very interesting example of a key leader discussing transparency in the press. It is interesting in the sense that it both addresses this issue and is itself the source of a fairly prevalent disinformation.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speech...

(The disinfo bit is where an edited version of above audio is promoted as Kennedy warning us about the NWO and Illuminati. /G)]

that's an interesting definition of propaganda.

It's certainly not an unbiased publication, it's an opinion paper. From their "about us" page:

> The same page describes the Economist as “a Friday viewspaper, where the readers, with higher than average incomes, better than average minds but with less than average time, can test their opinions against ours. We try to tell the world about the world, to persuade the expert and reach the amateur, with an injection of opinion and argument.”

From the same page:

> "What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage."

So you are certainly not going to get "unbiased news reporting". It's a "viewspaper" that takes declared, informed editorial stances. You will get extremely well thought out and researched opinions and analysis.

"Propaganda" is a word usually reserved for intentionally contorting facts to favor a specific political entity. One can have an opinion without spouting propaganda. That's more the MSNBCs, Pravdas, and Fox Newses of the world. If you've ever read an economist article, the difference is obvious.

And yet while fake news is prevalent on Facebook, I think the big lesson we all should have learned this election cycle is that mainstream media peddles fake news as well. We learned most major media outlets were in the pocket of the HRC campaign from the beginning of the primaries onward. Major media outlets would happily broadcast an empty podium where Trump was waiting to speak for hours during the primaries during primetime while other candidates were giving passionate speeches to a room of cameras which were turned off. News anchors and pundits were essentially stenographers for the HRC campaign team. The news media televised 'debates' in which one candidate was leaked the questions early. On facebook you get fake news from your little bubble of friends, but if you turn on the news on TV or open the New York Times or Washington Post you get fake news as well, news curated by a tiny group of elites who have their own bias -- generally liberal, but first and foremost in favor of continuing the status quo, which is responsible for their positions of respect and power. I'm more likely to get a facebook post from a different viewpoint that I am reading/watching corporate media. I have mainstream liberal and conservative, pro-trump, pro-sanders, pro-johnson, and pro-stein Facebook friends. The media lied constantly this cycle, sometimes blatantly, sometimes not so much, and much more important than the statement of actual facts is curating the facts and subjects you choose to cover -- they shape the zeitgeist. If you run a hundred pieces called "Does Trump support the KKK?" it doesn't really matter that the answer to that question is factually "no". http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...

John Oliver split from doing opinionated, issue-oriented informational pieces with plenty of research to hackish hit pieces near the end of the cycle. Look at what he said about third parties: instead of bringing thoughtful attention to an often-dismissed issue, his sole purpose was to destroy support for third party candidates without regard for fairness, honesty, or truth and it was pretty clear to anyone who'd actually looked at them honestly before watching it.

If you ask any Sanders supporter (or Trump supporter I'd imagine) what they learned this cycle, it's that corporate media is not honest, not objective, and not to be trusted or even given the benefit of the doubt. Even NPR lied through their teeth.

I agree fake news on facebook is bad. But I'm not sure fake news from other sources is better. I don't know what the solution is.

Your rude and dismissive tone aside, you are incorrect.

The difference is not significant. Reporting the news /is/ what the news becomes. A slant like the kind I'm discussing is exactly a lie: taking a story, and instead of telling it, saying what you want.

And I'm also talking about explicit lies: the Oliver hit piece on third parties contains some, and if you want to look for explicit lies from MSM they are easy to come by. For example consider the Nevada Democratic primary "chair-throwing" incident, reported as such by every pundit and agency in the media although objective fact is that no chairs were ever thrown. The reports of the incident devoid of context are actually even worse here than misstating the actual fact (why were people angry? crickets), but the lie is still there. Retractions were offered days later in fine print by ombudsmen and ignored by journalists (at the same organizations) presenting the actual story.