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A comment on Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News You See. Parent comment

Re:Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News Yo... by mc32 on Sunday November 27, 2016 @12:41AM (#13047917)
It used to be these "reputable" organizations used to have reporters investigate, and do a story. Then came citizen news and they'd report on what someone reported to them without sending an actual journalist to establish basic facts. So you had these organizations trying to scoop each other without getting or trying to get any facts whatsoever just to get something up first. And now you have people essentially "news-swatting" them.

They brought these problems on to themselves by trying to play fast and loose with journalism in the first place, now they get played and are feeling a bit upset and want some payback.

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Re:Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News Yo... by visarga on Sunday November 27, 2016 @02:09AM (#13048128)
I don't think the problem is that "citizen news" are not fact checked, because generally, citizens don't create fake news, and when something is worth reporting, there are multiple distinct reports.

Fake news are created by news spammers and propaganda organizations. These guys do it on purpose, for cynical reasons. They won't stop, so we need to filter them out.

What is needed is a blacklist and a way to collaborate in fact-checking. I often seek Wikipedia for news for this reason - it tends to be more fact checked and complete.

After a news piece has been tested and found fake, then we need to apply machine learning to quickly identify all clones of that news floating around (this is easier that the original problem of detecting if they are fake).

So basically the internet needs an immune system.

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Re:Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News Yo... by inimino on Sunday November 27, 2016 @04:42AM (#13048487)
To summarize your argument: people lack critical thinking skills, therefore we need an Internet-wide censorship system.
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