People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds • Hacker News Board

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#361

Post by AgentME » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

aero142 wrote: post #270

dkarl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad was similar, but he thought it was all a joke. He thought sites like rense and infowars were today's equivalent of the counterculture political satire from when he was young. He knew there were people on those sites who weren't in on the joke, and people with mental illness, but I think he thought it was maybe 5% or 10%, and it just added to the fun for him. He got reverse-pwned by Poe's Law. Yet still he foun…

I'm pretty sure /r/the_donald started out as a joke and slowly turned real at some point. I still don't quite understand what happened. It would make an interesting investigation.

I love the Kurt Vonnegut quote "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." I think people who decide to like a thing "ironically" generally progress to liking it unironically without realizing it. Some continue to claim it's ironic, but when all their actions (including voting) are fully consistent with someone that likes the thing unironically, you have to wonder if the word "ironic" still has any meaning.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#362

Post by jmcgough » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #343

pcwalton wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with 4chan, from what I've heard. There's a lesson here about social media: if you tolerate people pretending to be Nazis "as a joke", then you will soon become overrun with actual Nazis.

I can confirm. I was on 4chan a lot as a teenager (some ten years ago, now), and the Nazism was generally more a joke about how nasty and intolerant the board was. There were even 'raids' (essentially cyber-bullying) on racists. I can only guess that things must have gone downhill when the site was taken over by Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has some pretty right-wing political views. That said, there's also a kind of natu…

4chan hasn't really changed much, /pol/ (where most of the right-wing memery and conspiracy posts are) was always awful; it was created years ago to keep those kinds of posts away from other boards.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#363

Post by octernion » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 10:35 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #358

octernion wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"positive discrimination" is not racism, sorry. unfortunately, the only way to change the future is to enable the groups that were historically disenfranchised, which we can enable through diversity quotas/affirmative action/etc. it doesn't just magically happen through everyone agreeing that "racism is over." i know that you feel uncomfortable because you do not feel that you were responsible with the current situat…

What do you define as "enabling"? As far as I'm concerned, they have been enabled for years, through legislature which prevents discrimination in hiring. I'm in favor of due process, and if somebody had a real grievance with my hiring decision, then I will see them in court, where I can present my case. Social justice is actively harmful to due process, because it makes social media the jury and throws away any chanc…

i'm not going to keep responding because it's clear you haven't understood any of the above comments around the structural and generational concerns.

there is plentiful literature to better educate yourself and be less ignorant about this.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#364

Post by porpoisely » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

infradig wrote: post #353

A day after an article about fake-news research being retracted and here are people commenting enthusiasticly and gullibly about another piece of fake-news research being promulgated. It's like no one has heard of the social sciences reproducibility crisis. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

No less from theverge. It's amazing that people take theverge seriously after their "how to build a pc" fiasco.

The one thing about the "fake news" hysteria is that one side consuming the fake news is accusing the other side consuming the fake news.

As far as I can tell, it's all fake news and propaganda.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#365

Post by gumby » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

mcbuilder wrote: post #302

aero142 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure /r/the_donald started out as a joke and slowly turned real at some point. I still don't quite understand what happened. It would make an interesting investigation.

/r/T_D was such a strange mix of Russian bots, trolls, true believing incels, and meme spitting grandpas that I'm sure it could be studied for years by social scientists.

It alway felt to me like an enormous, manually-computed Markov chain.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#366

Post by mcculley » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #352

JKCalhoun wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The part I fear most is that healthy dose of skepticism that most people used to have is being turned against those people. That is my fear as well. "Believe nothing," would be the wrong takeaway from all this, but I'm afraid a cynical population of our youth might very well be following that course. Be skeptical of skepticism too I tell my daughters.

I think that "Believe extremely skeptical of anything you are forwarded--especially if it is virally interesting" is probably closer to actionable.

This is close to the point I was trying to make about memetics and evolutionary psychology: "Is this post triggering in me some irrational behavior to which humans are commonly susceptible?"

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#367

Post by ThomPete » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #359

ThomPete wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some evidence of what though? What is the actual consequence? This is exactly the problem i have with that articles claims. Not a single attempt at digging in just a rush to make it about Trump. There is zero evidence that them spreading more fake news have any actual measurable effect beyond the fact that they spread more. Thats not how conclusions are made like those the articly tries to make.

The article I linked talks about a study that has nothing to do with Trump. It just happens to show that older Americans have a harder time telling apart opinion from factual statements. It makes no claim towards conservatives vs liberals. But if you’re talking about the original article: if older Americans are more likely to spread fake news, and older Americans are more likely to be conservative, it stands to reaso…

Thats not evidence of anything though.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#368

Post by sparkie » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

octernion wrote: post #363

sparkie wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you define as "enabling"? As far as I'm concerned, they have been enabled for years, through legislature which prevents discrimination in hiring. I'm in favor of due process, and if somebody had a real grievance with my hiring decision, then I will see them in court, where I can present my case. Social justice is actively harmful to due process, because it makes social media the jury and throws away any chanc…

i'm not going to keep responding because it's clear you haven't understood any of the above comments around the structural and generational concerns. there is plentiful literature to better educate yourself and be less ignorant about this.

I understand the concerns, but your "solutions" are deeply flawed and faith based. Your idea that whites won't be discriminated is a joke, because it's already reality. Whites are actively discriminated against. This is what "positive discrimination" is. It means that if you have 9 white candidates and 1 non-white candate apply for 2 jobs, and you have a diversity quota to fill, then the non-white candidate has a 100% chance, and the white candidates have an 11% chance. Remove the racism quota and everyone has a 20% chance, as it should be.

The systems in placed are already abused by assholes who try to game it. I've lost count of the number of threats of lawsuits I've had from "unprivileged" people who can barely string together an English sentence, because I refuse to hire or interview them. There are people who will play the system if it favors them. These are a minority of the minorities, but they're significant in that they waste resources (and actively harm people who are legitimately discriminated against).

Anyone can have an opinion when they have no skin in the game. Spend a few years recruiting and all of the literature in the world is worth garbage - it's written mostly be people who have never interviewed, probably never had an interview or even a proper job in their lives because they've been sheltered by the academy.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#369

Post by smileysteve » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 11:07 PM UTC

sanmon3186 wrote: post #137

My hypothesis is that they grew with a notion that "if it is on a newspaper, magazine or a book, it must be true", which was indeed the case when compared to digital content in today's world. It took me a long discussion to convince my Indian uncle that image of certificate (signed by director general of UNESCO) that he forwarded on WhatsApp, declaring Indian national anthem as the best national anthem in the world,…

> which was indeed the case when compared to digital content in today's world.

World War 1, World War 2, Cuba, Mexico, the civil war, the Boston masacre, the boston tea party are just a few things we can point some fake and incomplete news to in America.

Re: People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

#370

Post by zozbot123 » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

infradig wrote: post #353

A day after an article about fake-news research being retracted and here are people commenting enthusiasticly and gullibly about another piece of fake-news research being promulgated. It's like no one has heard of the social sciences reproducibility crisis. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

> fake-news research

Says who? A voluntarily-retracted study is not "fake news" anyway. People are allowed to make mistakes.