Fake News - what it is, what it isn't....

[MisterBeale]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

You know what is more troubling to me?

The fact that they are tracking who is reading what, who is sharing what, and the fact that the intellectual, cultural, and political elites think it is any of their business to manipulate what Americans choose to read or not read.

What this is, is actually a ploy to soften the weak minded up to accept government and crony corporate infringements on the first amendment.



Do any of you KNOW about H.R. 5181? How about S. 2692? Isn't it just possible that this whole election was a sham to get liberals pissed off enough to accept restrictions on the First Amendment, and to have conservatives accept government control of the internet?

Well, it's happening. This stuff is all occurring right now, and the MSM propaganda is being rolled out to have folks believe this is a good idea. They think none of us can make up our own minds. CFR propaganda from the establishment is no better than independent journalists, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they have a nefarious agenda.

When independent journalists on the left, right, center and anarchists are all crying foul, you KNOW shit is getting real.

Either Coyote is in on their game, or he doesn't have two brain cells to rub together.

Senate Quietly Passes The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act"
Senate Quietly Passes The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act" | Zero Hedge
"While we wait to see if and when the Senate will pass (and president will sign) Bill "H.R. 6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017", which was passed by the House at the end of November with an overwhelming majority and which seeks to crack down on websites suspected of conducting Russian propaganda and calling for the US government to "counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly,” another, perhaps even more dangerous and limiting to civil rights and freedom of speech bill passed on December 8.


Recall that as we reported in early June, "a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth has been quietly introduced in Congress. As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information. Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

War on ‘Fake News’ Part of a War on Free Speech
War on ‘Fake News’ Part of a War on Free Speech

"The latest, and potentially most dangerous, threat to the First Amendment is the war on “fake news.” Those leading the war are using a few “viral” Internet hoaxes to justify increased government regulation — and even outright censorship — of Internet news sites. Some popular websites, such as Facebook, are not waiting for the government to force them to crack down on fake news.

Those calling for bans on “fake news” are not just trying to censor easily-disproved Internet hoaxes. They are working to create a government-sanctioned "gatekeeper" (to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase) with the power to censor any news or opinion displeasing to the political establishment. None of those wringing their hands over fake news have expressed any concern over the fake news stories that helped lead to the Iraq War. Those fake news stories led to the destabilizing of the Middle East, the rise of ISIS, and the deaths of millions.

The war on “fake news” has taken a chilling turn with efforts to label news and opinion sites of alternative news sources as peddlers of Russian propaganda. The main targets are critics of US interventionist foreign policy, proponents of a gold standard, critics of the US government’s skyrocketing debt, and even those working to end police militarization. All have been smeared as anti-American agents of Russia.

Just last week, Congress passed legislation creating a special committee, composed of key federal agencies, to counter foreign interference in US elections. There have also been calls for congressional investigations into Russian influence on the elections. Can anyone doubt that the goal of this is to discredit and silence those who question the mainstream media’s pro-welfare/warfare state propaganda?

The attempts to ban “fake news”; smear antiwar, anti-Federal Reserve, and other pro-liberty movements as Russian agents; and stop independent organizations from discussing a politician’s record before an election are all parts of an ongoing war on the First Amendment. All Americans, no matter their political persuasion, have a stake in defeating these efforts to limit free speech."

 

[Coyote]

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

You mean like, "Hands in the air, don't shoot?"

Possibly, but I'm not sure. I haven't followed that story closely.

How would you classify "The Daily Show?" Because, the network itself calls it a "fake news show" and Jon Stewart is acclaimed as "America's Favorite Fake Newsman!" But a recent poll found that something like 12% of online Americans say they get their news from The Daily Show. 45% of Liberals say they trust The Daily Show.

Can't give an opinion there either because I don't watch it.

So you know nothing about the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, which dominated the news for several months? Following the shooting, the black community promoted a claim that he had his hands in the ear yelling "don't shoot" when he was shot by police. This sparked rioting and protests for weeks and major news outlets promoted the "hands in the air, don't shoot" narrative, going so far as to begin a symbolic gesturing that swept the liberal media like a wildfire. The US Dept of Justice eventually concluded his hands were not in the air and he never yelled "don't shoot," and that he was, in fact, killed in self defense. To this day, there are still people who believe the FAKE news.

Yes, I am aware of the Michael Brown shooting but not that the "don't shoot" was false.

The Daily Show is intended to be political satire from a distinctly liberal viewpoint. Much like Saturday Night Live's segment "Weekend Update" where news items are parodied. Most non-retarded thinking adults understand it is parody and satire. Like The Onion.

Ok.

 

[Coyote]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

You know what is more troubling to me?

The fact that they are tracking who is reading what, who is sharing what, and the fact that the intellectual, cultural, and political elites think it is any of their business to manipulate what Americans choose to read or not read.

What this is, is actually a ploy to soften the weak minded up to accept government and crony corporate infringements on the first amendment.



Do any of you KNOW about H.R. 5181? How about S. 2692? Isn't it just possible that this whole election was a shame to get liberals pissed off enough to accept restrictions on the First Amendment, and to have conservatives accept government control of the internet?

Well, it's happening. This stuff is all occurring right now, and the MSM propaganda is being rolled out to have folks believe this is a good idea. They think none of us can make up our own minds. CFR propaganda from the establishment is no better than independent journalists, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they have a nefarious agenda.

When independent journalists on the left, right, center and anarchists are all crying foul, you KNOW shit is getting real.

Either Coyote is in on their game, or he doesn't have two brain cells to rub together.

Senate Quietly Passes The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act"
Senate Quietly Passes The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act" | Zero Hedge
"While we wait to see if and when the Senate will pass (and president will sign) Bill "H.R. 6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017", which was passed by the House at the end of November with an overwhelming majority and which seeks to crack down on websites suspected of conducting Russian propaganda and calling for the US government to "counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly,” another, perhaps even more dangerous and limiting to civil rights and freedom of speech bill passed on December 8.


Recall that as we reported in early June, "a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth has been quietly introduced in Congress. As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information. Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

War on ‘Fake News’ Part of a War on Free Speech
War on ‘Fake News’ Part of a War on Free Speech

"The latest, and potentially most dangerous, threat to the First Amendment is the war on “fake news.” Those leading the war are using a few “viral” Internet hoaxes to justify increased government regulation — and even outright censorship — of Internet news sites. Some popular websites, such as Facebook, are not waiting for the government to force them to crack down on fake news.

Those calling for bans on “fake news” are not just trying to censor easily-disproved Internet hoaxes. They are working to create a government-sanctioned "gatekeeper" (to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase) with the power to censor any news or opinion displeasing to the political establishment. None of those wringing their hands over fake news have expressed any concern over the fake news stories that helped lead to the Iraq War. Those fake news stories led to the destabilizing of the Middle East, the rise of ISIS, and the deaths of millions.

The war on “fake news” has taken a chilling turn with efforts to label news and opinion sites of alternative news sources as peddlers of Russian propaganda. The main targets are critics of US interventionist foreign policy, proponents of a gold standard, critics of the US government’s skyrocketing debt, and even those working to end police militarization. All have been smeared as anti-American agents of Russia.

Just last week, Congress passed legislation creating a special committee, composed of key federal agencies, to counter foreign interference in US elections. There have also been calls for congressional investigations into Russian influence on the elections. Can anyone doubt that the goal of this is to discredit and silence those who question the mainstream media’s pro-welfare/warfare state propaganda?

The attempts to ban “fake news”; smear antiwar, anti-Federal Reserve, and other pro-liberty movements as Russian agents; and stop independent organizations from discussing a politician’s record before an election are all parts of an ongoing war on the First Amendment. All Americans, no matter their political persuasion, have a stake in defeating these efforts to limit free speech."

I think you're kind of mixing issues here. The first is the issue of fake news. The second is how to handle it. You've jumped straight into the second - which I have not commented on at all, and made some huge assumptions.

My view in countering fake news is to educate people on how to critically think. Not make things illegal or infringe on free speech. How individual business' choose to deal with it is up to them.

Also....your claim: Senate Quietly Passes The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act" - not something I was familiar with, so I looked it up.

Here is the actual act: Senate Passes Major Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill as Part of NDAA - Press Releases - Newsroom - Rob Portman It doesn't seem to be calling for banning anything or creating new LAWS. Seems to be a counter-propoganda propoganda thing.

Other than that - what is wrong with investigating Russian hacking and possible influencing of our electoral system? Make more sense then spending more money investigating Benghazi.

 

[Shrimpbox]

"Fake news is a story that is completely false". So the woman who claimed she was groped on the airplane, which turned out to be completely false and was constantly repeated by the media, along with 15 other women's stories, which was constantly repeated by the mainstream media, and which has disappeared completely off the radar since the election, is fake news. So that just blows up your op opening. Coyote, you're ok, but you have to come up with stuff that stands up to scrutiny better than this.

This is where I discount the whole interview
Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook

I have never ever gotten ANY news from Facebook. Have you? Talk about an oxymoron.

 

[Boss]

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

You mean like, "Hands in the air, don't shoot?"

Possibly, but I'm not sure. I haven't followed that story closely.

How would you classify "The Daily Show?" Because, the network itself calls it a "fake news show" and Jon Stewart is acclaimed as "America's Favorite Fake Newsman!" But a recent poll found that something like 12% of online Americans say they get their news from The Daily Show. 45% of Liberals say they trust The Daily Show.

Can't give an opinion there either because I don't watch it.

So you know nothing about the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, which dominated the news for several months? Following the shooting, the black community promoted a claim that he had his hands in the ear yelling "don't shoot" when he was shot by police. This sparked rioting and protests for weeks and major news outlets promoted the "hands in the air, don't shoot" narrative, going so far as to begin a symbolic gesturing that swept the liberal media like a wildfire. The US Dept of Justice eventually concluded his hands were not in the air and he never yelled "don't shoot," and that he was, in fact, killed in self defense. To this day, there are still people who believe the FAKE news.

Yes, I am aware of the Michael Brown shooting but not that the "don't shoot" was false.

The Daily Show is intended to be political satire from a distinctly liberal viewpoint. Much like Saturday Night Live's segment "Weekend Update" where news items are parodied. Most non-retarded thinking adults understand it is parody and satire. Like The Onion.

Ok.

Yes... it was false. The US Justice Dept. did an extensive investigation and they concluded he was shot in self defense. Turns out, there were no eyewitnesses who saw hands in the air or heard "don't shoot." There WERE witnesses who saw him charging the officer who acted in self defense.

But the point is, the "fake news story" circulated all across the country for weeks as if it were true. News reporters and journalists were symbolically holding their hands in the air. Congressmen were doing it. Celebrities were doing it. All of this was happening as emergency personnel in Ferguson were trying to keep protesters and rioters from burning their city to the ground.

So if we're now going to get all uptight about the integrity and honesty of the news.... this kind of shit needs to be addressed FIRST! Then, we need to deal with where we draw the line between satire and news and who gets to decide that. I'd hate to think liberals are about to ax 90% of their entertainment and perhaps 45% of their "trusted news sources."

 

[Coyote]

"Fake news is a story that is completely false". So the woman who claimed she was groped on the airplane, which turned out to be completely false and was constantly repeated by the media, along with 15 other women's stories, which was constantly repeated by the mainstream media, and which has disappeared completely off the radar since the election, is fake news. So that just blows up your op opening. Coyote, you're ok, but you have to come up with stuff that stands up to scrutiny better than this.

This is where I discount the whole interview
Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook

I have never ever gotten ANY news from Facebook. Have you? Talk about an oxymoron.

All those women's claims were "completely false"? Do tell...

No, I don't get my news from FB, but apparently many people do. Just not us.

 

[Coyote]

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

You mean like, "Hands in the air, don't shoot?"

Possibly, but I'm not sure. I haven't followed that story closely.

How would you classify "The Daily Show?" Because, the network itself calls it a "fake news show" and Jon Stewart is acclaimed as "America's Favorite Fake Newsman!" But a recent poll found that something like 12% of online Americans say they get their news from The Daily Show. 45% of Liberals say they trust The Daily Show.

Can't give an opinion there either because I don't watch it.

So you know nothing about the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, which dominated the news for several months? Following the shooting, the black community promoted a claim that he had his hands in the ear yelling "don't shoot" when he was shot by police. This sparked rioting and protests for weeks and major news outlets promoted the "hands in the air, don't shoot" narrative, going so far as to begin a symbolic gesturing that swept the liberal media like a wildfire. The US Dept of Justice eventually concluded his hands were not in the air and he never yelled "don't shoot," and that he was, in fact, killed in self defense. To this day, there are still people who believe the FAKE news.

Yes, I am aware of the Michael Brown shooting but not that the "don't shoot" was false.

The Daily Show is intended to be political satire from a distinctly liberal viewpoint. Much like Saturday Night Live's segment "Weekend Update" where news items are parodied. Most non-retarded thinking adults understand it is parody and satire. Like The Onion.

Ok.

Yes... it was false. The US Justice Dept. did an extensive investigation and they concluded he was shot in self defense. Turns out, there were no eyewitnesses who saw hands in the air or heard "don't shoot." There WERE witnesses who saw him charging the officer who acted in self defense.

But the point is, the "fake news story" circulated all across the country for weeks as if it were true. News reporters and journalists were symbolically holding their hands in the air. Congressmen were doing it. Celebrities were doing it. All of this was happening as emergency personnel in Ferguson were trying to keep protesters and rioters from burning their city to the ground.

So if we're now going to get all uptight about the integrity and honesty of the news.... this kind of shit needs to be addressed FIRST! Then, we need to deal with where we draw the line between satire and news and who gets to decide that. I'd hate to think liberals are about to ax 90% of their entertainment and perhaps 45% of their "trusted news sources."

Actually, I think this is the kind of shit that is being addressed - NOT satire. We're not talking about satire. The examples given in the articles I quoted were NOT satire but actual fake news.

 

[Boss]

Other than that - what is wrong with investigating Russian hacking and possible influencing of our electoral system? Make more sense then spending more money investigating Benghazi.

Because ALL the Russians have done is to release emails that were hacked from unsecured servers. They did not hack voting machines and change Hillary votes to Trump votes. THAT is the "fake news" liberals want to imply and promote. Did their releasing emails have an influence? Possibly, but did Obama not have and influence on the elections in Israel or the Brexit vote? There is no law against outside sources influencing elections and votes.

 

[Boss]

Actually, I think this is the kind of shit that is being addressed - NOT satire. We're not talking about satire. The examples given in the articles I quoted were NOT satire but actual fake news.

Again... WHO gets to determine what is satire and what is "fake news"?

 

[Coyote]

Actually, I think this is the kind of shit that is being addressed - NOT satire. We're not talking about satire. The examples given in the articles I quoted were NOT satire but actual fake news.

Again... WHO gets to determine what is satire and what is "fake news"?

Seems satire is usually labeled as such. For example, The Onion, states up front what it is. It's up to the readers to do due diligence.

 

[MisterBeale]

Mmm. How do you label the media co ordinating with a political party to plant news items that turn out to be false such as the situation with Michelle Fields and the lie that Corey almost dragged her down?

WAS it a lie? Evidence seems to support it. I wouldn't call it "false news". Contestable maybe, but not false news.

Or Miss Universe aka Miss Piggy who's story was blown out of the water but Hillary used her in the campaign and the very next day Miss Universe was on every talk show going.

Again, not false news. Even if Miss Universe (and I don't know why you have to demean her with "Miss Piggy" simply because she had the audacity to speak out against the Donald) - falsified her claim, that would make HER a liar, but the news story about her claim isn't false.

Or how about the fake groping stories that the media was all over. Everyone of those women got busted.

Who says they are fake? Or got busted? At this point - the best you can say is he said/she said. I'll point out - you believed all of Clinton's accusers, right?

How about the lying story of the Trump raping the 13 year old girl?

Still not a fake news story. Whether or not it happened is unverified. The lawsuit occurred. Hasn't gone to court. The events are true: a girl "claimed" she was raped by Trump. That is true. Was she? We don't know.

Any retractions? Any apologies? Only one I know of was the Daily Mail retracting the story that Melania had acted as an escort and apologized.

At this point, nothing has been disproven in the above, that needs a retraction. For example, the MSM stories usually make it clear that the women are claiming that Trump did X,Y and Z. Not that he DID it.

Thank you for proving what that Counter Punch article essentially was saying. Unless the piece is satire, there is no such thing as fake news.

In your OP, I saw that Buzz Feed referred to a piece about Hillary "selling weapons" to ISIS.

Well, depending on you POV, that could be taken as true. That State department DID deliver weapons to ISIS, multiple times. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh PROVED that there was a concerted effort to move weapons from Libya to Syrian rebels. Some rebels later formed ISIS.

The Red Line and the Rat Line
Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
LRB · Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line: Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding.

This squares with what Hillary said herself in Wikileaks emails to Podesta, which your "fake news" led readers to.
WikiLeaks - Hillary Clinton Email Archive
"At the same time, the fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commaders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies."

Also, there are reports that the US had air dropped weapons to ISIS. Of course, there are official denials that these were meant for the Kurds. . . But, what ever, who are we kidding? You are what you pretend to be as Vonnegut says. Actions speak louder than words.


That MSM bullshit doesn't fool anyone. What Buzzfeed says is as much fake news, or has their own perspective, as much as what you claim you have your own perspective.

So get a grip already.

 

[Coyote]

Other than that - what is wrong with investigating Russian hacking and possible influencing of our electoral system? Make more sense then spending more money investigating Benghazi.

Because ALL the Russians have done is to release emails that were hacked from unsecured servers. They did not hack voting machines and change Hillary votes to Trump votes. THAT is the "fake news" liberals want to imply and promote. Did their releasing emails have an influence? Possibly, but did Obama not have and influence on the elections in Israel or the Brexit vote? There is no law against outside sources influencing elections and votes.

I agree - claiming THAT would be a Conspiracy Theory and fake news.

But - it's totally appropriate for us to investigate what the Russians did and what their intent was. There IS a law against hacking you know. And we, as Americans should all - regardless of our ideologies - be rightfully pissed at foreign attempts to affect our election.

 

[Dot Com]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

Whomever gets their *cough* "news" off of FB is an idiot. I also heard that interview.

 

[Coyote]

Mmm. How do you label the media co ordinating with a political party to plant news items that turn out to be false such as the situation with Michelle Fields and the lie that Corey almost dragged her down?

WAS it a lie? Evidence seems to support it. I wouldn't call it "false news". Contestable maybe, but not false news.

Or Miss Universe aka Miss Piggy who's story was blown out of the water but Hillary used her in the campaign and the very next day Miss Universe was on every talk show going.

Again, not false news. Even if Miss Universe (and I don't know why you have to demean her with "Miss Piggy" simply because she had the audacity to speak out against the Donald) - falsified her claim, that would make HER a liar, but the news story about her claim isn't false.

Or how about the fake groping stories that the media was all over. Everyone of those women got busted.

Who says they are fake? Or got busted? At this point - the best you can say is he said/she said. I'll point out - you believed all of Clinton's accusers, right?

How about the lying story of the Trump raping the 13 year old girl?

Still not a fake news story. Whether or not it happened is unverified. The lawsuit occurred. Hasn't gone to court. The events are true: a girl "claimed" she was raped by Trump. That is true. Was she? We don't know.

Any retractions? Any apologies? Only one I know of was the Daily Mail retracting the story that Melania had acted as an escort and apologized.

At this point, nothing has been disproven in the above, that needs a retraction. For example, the MSM stories usually make it clear that the women are claiming that Trump did X,Y and Z. Not that he DID it.

Thank you for proving what that Counter Punch article essentially was saying. Unless the piece is satire, there is no such thing as fake news.

In your OP, I saw that Buzz Feed referred to a piece about Hillary "selling weapons" to ISIS.

Well, depending on you POV, that could be taken as true. That State department DID deliver weapons to ISIS, multiple times. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh PROVED that there was a concerted effort to move weapons from Libya to Syrian rebels. Some rebels later formed ISIS.

The Red Line and the Rat Line
Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
LRB · Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line: Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding.

This squares with what Hillary said herself in Wikileaks emails to Podesta, which your "fake news" led readers to.
WikiLeaks - Hillary Clinton Email Archive
"At the same time, the fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commaders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies."

Also, there are reports that the US had air dropped weapons to ISIS. Of course, there are official denials that these were meant for the Kurds. . . But, what ever, who are we kidding? You are what you pretend to be as Vonnegut says. Actions speak louder than words.


That MSM bullshit doesn't fool anyone. What Buzzfeed says is as much fake news, or has their own perspective, as much as what you claim you have your own perspective.

So get a grip already.

Did Clinton sell weapons to ISIS? Did the State Department sell weapons to ISIS? What you are talking about is - at MOST - CIA activities selling arms to rebel groups that MIGHT eventually end up in ISIS hands.

Hillary Clinton Sold Weapons to ISIS-Fiction!
WikiLeaks Confirms Hillary Clinton Sold Weapons to ISIS?

 

[Coyote]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

Whomever gets their *cough* "news" off of FB is an idiot. I also heard that interview.

What did you think of it?

 

[Dot Com]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

Whomever gets their *cough* "news" off of FB is an idiot. I also heard that interview.

What did you think of it?

I thought it was more wasting time because of my previous comment- anyone who gets their news off of FB is an intellectual cripple. My local NPR is 88.5 FM. I listen to that or CSpan radio

 

[MisterBeale]

Other than that - what is wrong with investigating Russian hacking and possible influencing of our electoral system? Make more sense then spending more money investigating Benghazi.

Because ALL the Russians have done is to release emails that were hacked from unsecured servers. They did not hack voting machines and change Hillary votes to Trump votes. THAT is the "fake news" liberals want to imply and promote. Did their releasing emails have an influence? Possibly, but did Obama not have and influence on the elections in Israel or the Brexit vote? There is no law against outside sources influencing elections and votes.

I agree - claiming THAT would be a Conspiracy Theory and fake news.

But - it's totally appropriate for us to investigate what the Russians did and what their intent was. There IS a law against hacking you know. And we, as Americans should all - regardless of our ideologies - be rightfully pissed at foreign attempts to affect our election.

Why?

Why is it okay for us to do it, but when it is done to us, we have to be self-righteous and pissed?

 

[MisterBeale]

Mmm. How do you label the media co ordinating with a political party to plant news items that turn out to be false such as the situation with Michelle Fields and the lie that Corey almost dragged her down?

WAS it a lie? Evidence seems to support it. I wouldn't call it "false news". Contestable maybe, but not false news.

Or Miss Universe aka Miss Piggy who's story was blown out of the water but Hillary used her in the campaign and the very next day Miss Universe was on every talk show going.

Again, not false news. Even if Miss Universe (and I don't know why you have to demean her with "Miss Piggy" simply because she had the audacity to speak out against the Donald) - falsified her claim, that would make HER a liar, but the news story about her claim isn't false.

Or how about the fake groping stories that the media was all over. Everyone of those women got busted.

Who says they are fake? Or got busted? At this point - the best you can say is he said/she said. I'll point out - you believed all of Clinton's accusers, right?

How about the lying story of the Trump raping the 13 year old girl?

Still not a fake news story. Whether or not it happened is unverified. The lawsuit occurred. Hasn't gone to court. The events are true: a girl "claimed" she was raped by Trump. That is true. Was she? We don't know.

Any retractions? Any apologies? Only one I know of was the Daily Mail retracting the story that Melania had acted as an escort and apologized.

At this point, nothing has been disproven in the above, that needs a retraction. For example, the MSM stories usually make it clear that the women are claiming that Trump did X,Y and Z. Not that he DID it.

Thank you for proving what that Counter Punch article essentially was saying. Unless the piece is satire, there is no such thing as fake news.

In your OP, I saw that Buzz Feed referred to a piece about Hillary "selling weapons" to ISIS.

Well, depending on you POV, that could be taken as true. That State department DID deliver weapons to ISIS, multiple times. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh PROVED that there was a concerted effort to move weapons from Libya to Syrian rebels. Some rebels later formed ISIS.

The Red Line and the Rat Line
Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
LRB · Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line: Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding.

This squares with what Hillary said herself in Wikileaks emails to Podesta, which your "fake news" led readers to.
WikiLeaks - Hillary Clinton Email Archive
"At the same time, the fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commaders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies."

Also, there are reports that the US had air dropped weapons to ISIS. Of course, there are official denials that these were meant for the Kurds. . . But, what ever, who are we kidding? You are what you pretend to be as Vonnegut says. Actions speak louder than words.


That MSM bullshit doesn't fool anyone. What Buzzfeed says is as much fake news, or has their own perspective, as much as what you claim you have your own perspective.

So get a grip already.

Did Clinton sell weapons to ISIS? Did the State Department sell weapons to ISIS? What you are talking about is - at MOST - CIA activities selling arms to rebel groups that MIGHT eventually end up in ISIS hands.

Hillary Clinton Sold Weapons to ISIS-Fiction!
WikiLeaks Confirms Hillary Clinton Sold Weapons to ISIS?

Again, it's a matter of perspective. I'll take a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and Hillary's own words over those sources. She knew what she was doing when she helped set up the Rat Line. It was authorized in 2012, she stepped down in 2013, it was her baby, and her policy.

And if you don't think CFR journalism, and STATE media, aka, NPR is trying to soften up your malleable mind to be in favor of eliminating independent media, then you aren't using critical thought.

This is a legitimate disagreement we should be able to have in a Democratic Republic. The establishment would like for those on the other side of this debate to not have the story or POV we have.

Don't you see? Buzz Feed even labeled it, FAKE NEWS, and you agree with them, you don't even see it as a disagreement of POV. Yet when Tiny dancer has a disagreement with you, you just tell her it is a matter of perspective.


I think you are being totalitarian.

I'm will to let you have your POV, you just want to label others POV "fake news."


Nice.

 

[Shrimpbox]

Ok, let's all agree that foreign interference in the election, if true, is serious business, not fake news. So why did intel refuse to show up in congress today? Something stinks in Denmark.

 

[Boss]

Actually, I think this is the kind of shit that is being addressed - NOT satire. We're not talking about satire. The examples given in the articles I quoted were NOT satire but actual fake news.

Again... WHO gets to determine what is satire and what is "fake news"?

Seems satire is usually labeled as such. For example, The Onion, states up front what it is. It's up to the readers to do due diligence.

The Onion

The ONLY disclaimer I see on their home page is:
The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.
© Copyright 2016 Onion Inc. All rights reserved

So, no sir... they most certainly do NOT state they are a satire site or that the stories are fake. Nor does The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. That's why I am asking you... WHO gets to determine what is satire and what is "fake news?"

So we have TWO fundamental problems here. First is the actual integrity and honesty in reporting factual information as news... a real problem because every news outlet has a biased editorial viewpoint and often gives a slanted or one-sided representation. And second, the issue of political satire which has a long-standing history as being a protected freedom of expression since Mark Twain.

This is ONLY an issue because Hillary Clinton, reeling from an emotional loss in the election, blamed it on "fake news" instead of admitting she was just a crappy candidate. Never mind that Trump had just as many "fake news" stories about him. As soon as the words left her lips, the lefties went in meltdown mode with this idiotic knee-jerk reaction as if there is some sort of legislation or regulation we can pass to prevent "fake news" ...and the truth is, we can't!

As you correctly stated-- it's up to citizens to do due diligence.