This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...

Buckle up!

http://paulryan.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=9969

Saves Medicare for current and future generations, with no disruptions for those in and near retirement.

For younger workers, when they become eligible, Medicare will provide a premium-support payment and a list of guaranteed coverage options – including a traditional fee-for-service option – from which recipients can choose a plan that best suits their needs.

I'm thinking TRyancare.

With communication enabling faster communication with greater reach, there might be more noise, but is it worse in terms of percentage of communication?

In the past news sources had a reputation to protect, so crazy stories were confined to tabloids and some radio shows. Now all these stories just pop up in peoples streams, without anything to distinguish them from stories from reliable sources.

Couple that with the fact that, even with trustworthy sources, you can paint an inaccurate picture just by editing which stories you present (which Facebook is incentivised to do and actually does), and I think the problem is much worse now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

Yeah, but they were never shrugged off. Even the worst charlatans insisted they speak the truth; they didn't just go "meh, maybe it's not true after all, what is truth anyway".

Edited to add: /s

and

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

I envy your optimism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12975066

That's the frightening part. The financial incentives in the system are all screwed up. These kids are doing it purely for the easy dollars; they don't even care about the politics at all.

It's like schoolyard taunts, except the kids are getting paid for who can come up with the most viral rumour. Something seems deeply, deeply broken about this at a systemic level that's different than say, people spreading misinformation to others they know by word-of-mouth.

The only difference is that you need to pay lots of untrained people to lie on Facebook, while you needed to pay just a couple of highly trained people to lie on a newspaper.

Then there was an interview with Bill O'Reilly: Bill: "You tweeted out that whites killed by blacks - these are statistics you picked up from somewhere - at a rate of 81%. That's totally wrong; whites killed by blacks at a rate of 15%."

Trump: "Hey Bill. Am I going to check every statistic? I've got millions of people... you know what? Fine. But this came out of radio shows and everything else."

Anyway, worth watching the whole show. It's funny, in a painful way.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=14m45s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI#t=15m20s

We need a systemic approach to dealing with lies and untruths of the people who weild power. If you make it partisan, the liar/politican will just block you out, and so will their followers.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/...

http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/do...

There are numerous studies that also show significant selection bias, that is they cherry-pick statements they fact-check.

Politifact itself makes no attempt to evaluate and correct for their own bias. The newspaper that runs it is liberal leaning, and has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Because of the fact that Politifact tries to appear unbiased, their apparent bias is even more disappointing. Truly neutral fact-checking is something that would be very desirable. Perhaps the only way this will ever happen is by some sort of aggregation of left- and right-leaning “fact-checking.” Sort of like metacritic.

The following is a direct quote from The Nation interview linked in the very same Politifact article:

>  Do you know what real African-American youth unemployment is? It’s over 50 percent.

The fact is both Trump and Sanders were factually wrong. Their usage of the term “unemployment” was at best misleading.

Politifact is however willing to massage Sen. Sander’s statement to make it only “mostly true,” instead of false, which is a clear example of bias.

There are numerous examples of Politifact asserting editorial control in this manner, skewing the results on the Mostly-True–Mostly-False range of the “truthometer.”

I like multiple-award-winning journalist Clare Sambrook's idea of investigative comment:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/cla...

And stating that Trump made those statements is true, saying that others also make idiotic statements does not change that.

Focus on the topic is also the defining characteristic of a good article.

That question can't be answered. What do you think the topic of this piece was? The title was "President-Elect Trump". The piece was not about "let's talk about Trump as the future president". Rather, it was about, "things are going to get frighteningly bad under Trump".

Staying on topic and selective blindness are very different things. The latter was on bold display here, and is a defining characteristic of a hit piece.

I've seen a lot of critique for Clinton on Last Week Tonight, but even if I hadn't, why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?

But speaking of politifact [1] [2]:

Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies? I find it wholly unsurprising that all politicians lie more than "regular people", but I find it supremely horrifying the amount of Trumps lies that are swallowed whole to the extent that Hillary is the one portrayed as "crooked" when comparing these statistics.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/

[2] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/

It does, here.

> which by your statement would seem like we are of opposite convictions.

I have no idea what you mean.

> without leaving anything out, and I have yet to see anything hinting otherwise.

I don't share your belief. Haven't you seen his hit-piece on third-party candidates? You had two big candidates with little or no integrity, and yet, he paints the third party candidates as not even worthy of consideration because they said one or to silly things, or were unaware of some details.

> why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?

Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.

> Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies?

Not even remotely close to what I wrote.

> when comparing these statistics

The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.

I have. And I happened to agree. This could've been THE year for third party candidates, had they not been complete dullards. There was basically an open door. And I disagree with you about "both" third party candidates only saying one or two things wrong. They were fundamentally inequipped to respond to basic political issues.

> Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.

If it was true, yes. Where we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald. That seems to be the horrifying root to this entire election.

> The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.

Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think. [1]

[1] http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/15-023_e044cf...

Even if they were dullards, I'd prefer them to people who have shown tendencies to destroy countries. I think I saw this joke on 4chan: if Gary Johnson does not know where Aleppo is, that's one less place for him to bomb.

> Wehre we seem to disagree is that you believe that Hillary is worse than Donald.

Well, one of them is an egomaniac, talks garbage, has misbehaved with people, and has run shady charities and a university. The other one has received millions of dollars from banks and foreign powers, and has demonstrated that she will say exactly what her audience wants to hear. Not only has she threatened to up the ante against Syria, she has shown she can deliver, in Libya. I think the worst-case difference we are looking at here is a history of misdemeanor and fraud vs a history of fraud and felony. I prefer (peaceful) dullards to these.

> Wikipedia isn't as biased as you'd like to think.

Depends of the topic, I guess. Politifact is biased, and my recommenation for using both resources is the same.

"Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Victim by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Offender, 2015"

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

According to the FBI, in single-victim, single-offender homicides in 2015, 3,167 white people were slain and 500 of those murders were committed by black/African-American people. In the same year, 2,664 black/African-American people were slain and 229 of those murders were committed by white people.

Simple division: 15.8% of whites who were murdered were killed by blacks/African-Americans while only 8.6% of blacks who were murdered were killed by whites. The percentage of whites-killed-by-blacks is about 83.7% higher than vice versa.

So maybe O'Reilly may have garbled his delivery of this factoid?

    "Blacks killed by whites -- 2%"

    "Blacks killed by police -- 1%"

    "Whites killed by police -- 3%"

    "Whites killed by whites -- 16%"

    "Whites killed by blacks -- 81%"

    "Blacks killed by blacks -- 97%’

Edit: I'm sure there are screenshots of the initial image so you don't have to rely on politifact.. here, this includes the image and a transcript of the O'Reilly interview: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/trump-retweets-bogus-crime-...

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

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

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

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

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

However, there's a difference. People often had these discussions face to face with other views visible or at least some consequences for bullshitting. Now, the like-minded naturally group together with Facebook making the others (esp moderates) largely disappear from the feed. Showing them what they wanted to see with convenience of scrolling past opposing beliefs reinforced the echo chambers and false beliefs. That few counterpoints are displayed reinforces it further by creating illusion of false consensus for their side. All the resulting upvotes and shares reinforce the algorithm's effect.

I speculate such things are why the divide seemed so much stronger in this election than before. They need to bump into each other more for the necessary conversations to occur. The tech increases isolation instead. The effects will only get worse over time.

"The effects will only get worse over time."

I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. My imagination (and knowledge of history) are too limited. Anyone have some good examples? Or know of projects that are working on similar topics?

Lol. Believe me, a few people on social media agreed and I can't see their stuff any more. ;)

"I'm trying to think of comparable societal changes that we've been able to reverse at least sufficiently ameliorate. "

Similarly having a hard time. This particular one got reversed temporarily each time new mediums were invented. Then, the people using such tactics mastered them for the new mediums. Helps when the start rolling in money then use it to ensure the dominance. The social media has more potential to counter this than ever if they just adjust the algorithm to bridge the groups a certain percentage of time. They can mostly create a comfortable experience for the ad revenue but should make sure articles citing at least half-ass sources float into opposing feeds while letting bullshit stuff Snopes counters fall lower. That simple change, applied to everyone, might have a significant effect on the situation at least for moderates or rational people likely to effect change.

Usually, even for HN comments, I'm a little better at editing before anyone else sees it, though.

I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not.

So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us.

(Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.)

[1]: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushn...

That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.

Or take the somewhat analogous history of torture in USA. Of course that shit has been going on in this country (and elsewhere) from day one, but it is one thing for individuals or units or even communities to lose it, or do it out of sight, and another thing entirely for the state to officially adopt it as a tool of state craft.

Those lies were as much in support of the system as they were ways to deal with it. The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.

(Their neighbor should have lied too.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think a lot of people develop acceptance of fake news from their camp because they just assume the other camp is doing it as well and see it as leveling the playing field.

   how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it

No. Simply that the barrier to featured publication of rumors on national press is supposed to be somewhat more demanding than 4chan et al.

I imagine NBC has a process for using unnamed sources; I know the NYT has one and has written about it in the past.

Thus, I recognize your frustration but do not see the link between 4Chan and a well-known news organization. You might raise the issue of the Vanity Fair reporter's lawsuit, to which I would suggest not reading VF if you no longer believe in their integrity.

We have always been pretty irrational and easy to manipulate.

I'd argue a lot of our best inventions required a certain amount of irrationality to create.

WeChat did provide a process to flag inappropriate articles, but people around the age of my parents just won't stop forwarding.

Engaging in refuting online garbage constantly is a painful waste of time, and keeping silent or blocking it just allows it to fester.

I'm hoping that this makes a difference, and I've used a trivial and non-threatening example of fakery (fake supermoon pics) to plant the idea that nothing online can be trusted, within my social circles.

This is my standard line for those that spend too long on Facebook and believe that nothing in the mainstream media should be read under any circumstances whatsoever lest the propaganda lead to brainwashing.

My snarky response to someone's effort at being funny by repeating some drivel they read on one of their friend's pages is a bit miserable but it condenses everything I feel about how Facebook is a waste of time and quite dangerous for one's personality makeup. There is no need to have the discussion about why I am not on such things, opportunities arise for me to use the 'Is that a Facebook joke?' expression of sentiment.

This is not to say that the opinion landscape in other decades didn't have problems; but they were somewhat different in nature.

The idea that it was my job to screen the bullshit...

I didn't delete my facebook but I did unfollow every person and group on the app and it has been quite pleasurable to have an empty newsfeed.

Same. Now its just a messaging platform now, its great

Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.

Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart.

…

"Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values."

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...

During the summarization process we also strip out all the commentary and bias, resulting in what we hope will be an unbiased news archive of the topic. We have had good results so far, for example, our newsline of "Mattress Girl" [1] is the most unbiased account of her case on the web, despite being curated made from exceptionally biased sources. If you like what we are doing please join us.

[1]http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/

http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07...

It's just that since that time we've become more aware of the "replication crisis" in science generally, and it'd be nice to see independent researchers confirm Nyhan's findings.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%...

Facebook could probably give people a public rating based on the accuracy of the information they shared, and shame the worst offenders, but neither they nor their users would have an interest in this being established.

I don't like the idea that you can play a straight bat but be overrun by hustlers.

I'm on the fence about that one. On the flip-side:

1. If they don't police it, then Facebook as a whole gets a reputation for disinformation. (When I look at Facebook, I personally ignore most shared articles because they're mostly crap, and I don't want to look at them. I only care about the personal goings-on of friends, and the signal-to-noise gets worse over time.)

2. If you take someone who doesn't care about truth, they're not going to introspectively seek-out a metric which might report "You're misinformed and stupid!" BUT If you're self-righteous about the truth, then you might want some objective metrics which say, "Look I don't spread misinformation or live in an echo chamber! But Cheryl does! Look, Cheryl, I'm smarter than you!" That might provide some basis for a viral dynamic.

Remember on your first point though that it might not be a factor for the majority of people. Can also reach people through ad networks, or social networks, etc.

America went from a melting pot to a tossed salad to a powder keg.

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

Self-selection bias greatly reduces the efficacy of such an extension.

Those who know better, do better.