44% of people get their news from Facebook. Combined with the sentiment that facts and news are increasingly diverting from each other, the ability to quickly identify bad facts and bad news is paramount. This most likely falls into the no-shit category for many of QT3’rs here, and the role this played in the recent 2016 presidential election is impossible to ignore.
I read a recent article on a Pew research study illustrating where a majority of people get their news and it probably is a surprise to no one that news sites are a dwindling resource.
Like exclusive restaurant concierge relegating a couple in jeans and t-shirts to a corner table next to the kitchen, the number of people dismissing facts with their so called news is showing an incredible lack of judgement. The number of people who I have confronted with Snopes facts who quickly claim they don’t believe Snopes is growing at an alarming rate.
This is not an easy problem to solve. Recently, CNET ran an article about a person who is trying to crowdsource how to fix fake news. It’s up to 27 pages of ideas as of Nov 20th.
Personally, I’m not interested in stopping fake news from happening, rather I want to stop it from spreading. So while I agree with their altruistic goals, it’s a bit like jack and the bean-stalk, hoping for a magic bean. There are a few comments on this throughout this article - obviously pointing out the Facebook problem that it’s not necessarily the fake news as much as it’s people sharing and spreading this fake news.
Using a programming analogy, I’d like to have a goal that one day someone who decides to share bad news is like the programmer breaking the build. Everyone points at them and tells them to fix their shit. Over time, you don’t want to be that guy.
Eric Tucker, a 35-year-old co-founder of a marketing company in Austin, Tex., had just about 40 Twitter followers. But his recent tweet about paid protesters being bused to demonstrations against President-elect Donald J. Trump fueled a nationwide conspiracy theory — one that Mr. Trump joined in promoting.
Mr. Tucker’s post was shared at least 16,000 times on Twitter and more than 350,000 times on Facebook. The problem is that Mr. Tucker got it wrong. There were no such buses packed with paid protesters.
But that didn’t matter.
I think we’re seeing what happens when a someone wants to believe something so desperately that any filters they might otherwise have is just bypassed. I start to wonder what it would take, how outrageous a story has to be before those filters kick back on.
That is so weird. I followed the referenced link on the tweet and it’s actually a very well written article about how snopes is fighting the good fight. It’s like the tweet is trying to slam snopes, but the link says otherwise. Probably just goes to show how many people just regurgitate links and a narrative without actually reading the content. Makes me wonder if that guy is trying to troll people into reading a positive story on snopes.
At this point it’s going to take a ham-handed solution, one that is a risk to these companies as they could piss off much of their product.
I think this may actually be the thing that dooms us as a country and society- it’s so easy for us to have news we can agree with that it may not even be fixable without massive internet censorship.
I’m actually starting to think the regressive left might even be necessary.
That’s just it, I think. Despite how well thought out an argument is, it is summarily dismissed solely because it offers a contrary viewpoint. The actual content doesn’t matter. The fact that they disagree with its premise is enough for it to not be true.
Along those lines, I’m not sure why I continue to read the comments posted by Trump’s supporter refuting any and all tweets of news story or events that they find objectionable. It just makes me have extremely dark thoughts like maybe we should get into another shooting war in Asia and bring back the draft to clear out some of our population. Or maybe we should have voted for the Sweet Meteor O’Death.
On the run up to the EU referendum I was posting quite a lot of really great stuff from FullFact, an independent UK based fact-checking charity (which, only last week, Google announced are supporting to work on automated fact-checking technology), investigating many of the claims being made by the Remain and Leave campaigns. The people I knew who were voting leave were either not paying attention to the links, willingly or otherwise, or ‘countering’ them with their own ‘facts’ (which were usually debunked in the FullFact articles themselves). It was absolutely infuriating.
It’s just farcical. I dunno, we’ve never had so much information at our fingertips and yet the truth, even a kernel of it, has never seemed so elusive to so many.
I’ve given up trying to argue facts against the fiction that so many people seem to believe is gospel truth these days. My Facebook friends list is about 40/40/20 liberals/conservatives/independents, and while there is the occasional eye-roll-inducing article from my left leaning friends (usually a hysterical over-reaction to something), my right leaning friends fire a constant barrage of obviously ridiculous nonsense framed as truth from a wide variety of sources. It’s come to the point where I’ve considered dropping many of my conservative friends from my social media entirely, but I still think they’re otherwise good people and I love being able to keep up with them and their kids through their non-political posts.
I’ve been bemoaning the rise of the conservative right’s media machine for years now. Even before it became such a huge internet presence, it was all over talk radio and I could see the effect it was having on many of my friends. These people would listen to Limbaugh, Beck and Ingraham daily and take anything they said at total face value. I think that was the root of what we see today with fake news online, these talk radio hosts who could literally make shit up from whole cloth and regurgitate it often enough across multiple shows to make listeners believe it was truth. This primed the conservative public for what was to come, so that now there is this whole mindset among conservatives that the “vast liberal conspiracy” has infiltrated mainstream media and you can’t believe anything you see on NBC/CBS/ABC/CNN or from large online news sources.
At first it was so easy to dismiss. “Oh, did you hear that on Fox News? LOL!”. But conservative media quickly caught on to that, and created dozens of other “news outlets” so that now fake news is “corroborated” by sources on television, radio and online. If Fox News, Brietbart, Limbaugh and all your friends on Facebook are all saying that if Hillary Clinton wins she has promised to round up all white men who didn’t vote for her and have them castrated, well then it simply must be true!
How do you counter that? I don’t think there is a way. I think the only way this juggernaut of fake news gets stopped is if it eventually crushes itself under it’s own weight. I am hopeful that with Trump being President he and his cronies he appoints to his administration will screw up early and often, leading to outcry from more moderate Republicans and causing the conservative media machine to turn inward on itself, churning out ridiculous stories about Trump and/or Ryan/Kasich/etc. in an effort to feed the beast. Maybe when it turns on itself many of the followers will begin to see the cracks in the logic and start to question the legitimacy of their sources…
So a developing story right now is that during Argentina President’s congratulatory call, Trump asked him to deal with issues that are holding up construction of a building that Trump and his partners have planned for downtown Buenos Aires.
Trumpkins’ comments range from outright denial of the story to asking for sources. Oh, so now they’re looking for sources. When one was pointed out (original story appearing from an Argentine news source), I actually read a comment attempting to discredit this source by asking whose side this source was on during the Falklands Campaign. What?
Another story I’m curious to see develop is Trump’s reaction to Russia’s deployment of SAM and other nuclear-capable missiles to Kaliningrad, which borders the Baltic Sea and is located right on the border of northern Poland. This is in reaction to NATO’s military buildup on Russia’s western borders. Trump has, in the past, questioned the cost of US support for its NATO allies. I could see Trumpkins claiming that this will lessen tensions and could prevent further conflict with Russia while glossing over the fact that this comes at the cost of abandoning our NATO allies.
I think it might be worth paying more attention to the press in the Baltic States because these countries are hearing the sabre rattling quite clearly right now.
It’s not a problem to get your news links from Facebook, as long as you check the source and know the author, who paid them to write the piece, etc.
Obviously a huge number of people don’t don’t that, I assume. But I think Pew saying “44% of people get their news off social media” leaves a lot of details of how it’s sourced and consumed. 90% of people can get their news off social media, I don’t care. As long as they fact check and link sources.
Also, I don’t know if it’s the same study, but I’ve seen the 44% number before and it was described as people getting at least some of their news from Facebook, which is a very different proposition.
What these big tech oligarchies have been trying to sell is the idea of direct democracy and access. What they fail to realize is that there is a difference between democracy and mobocracy. A democracy takes an educated electorate to look at the issues before they decide. A mob is just someone hitting the buttons. Someone had the utopian fantasy that crowd opinion is better than an individual opinion and that leads to a lynch mob, not individual conscience. What we have now is crowdsourcing of justice. That way you get more clicks and more money. Journalism is clickbait. Music is clickbait. You need journalism for democracy and we don’t have it.
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It is absolutely worse now. And the culprit is the Internet and social media. There was a great article in The Atlantic on the original sins of the Internet. But even they didn’t get into how the Internet has destroyed professionalism. The New York Times got rid of their ecology writers and global warming is one of our biggest issues. But they couldn’t afford it because no one was interested.
I’m a cord cutter. I get most my local news from Facebook, as in I follow the local TV stations and the police departments. I find out about some of the national or not local news from there too but try to validate the source.
Let’s be honest here though; sometimes it’s very hard to validate these sources. Hell even our news outlets will run with an Onion article now and then. The problem is if you see something that says black people are evil and out to get you, you shouldn’t need a source to to invalidate that. My right wing associates, many of which are no-longer a part of my social media, just passes that stuff on. That’s a human thought problem, not a source problem.
True. Even CNN/CBS/NBC/ABC have fallen for fake news now and then. One of the more infamous is the whole “chocolate prevent heart disease” social experiment. All the major news stations reported it, to the point that my wife still says “chocolate is good for you” now and then and will argue with me when I tell her it was faked to prove how easily news stations could be manipulated.
For major news sources, the “faked” news is the exception though. For a lot of the sites that show up in Facebook feeds, however, the “faked” news is the rule rather than the exception.
The country is in trouble when Infowars is seen as a legitimate news source.
That’s a great article that will be dismissed because NPR ran it.
I have so many right leaning friends who don’t like NPR. I think NPR is one of the most balanced news out there, but due to the fact they’re funded partially by the government and because of all the “liberals own NPR” chants that have been shouted so frequently, it’s really a shame.
How is it that people so easily dismiss a news site? I guess I could look internally at myself and say I’ve largely dismissed Fox News - and I have a really hard time even trying to read their site. If there is not hope for me, can we hope to turn people around to read / listen to NPR that are conservatives?
