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Re:Things You Notice When You Quit the News by justinlaster on Sunday December 11, 2016 @11:43PM (#13155606)
>So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly?

Do you honestly not see the difference between creating fake stories about celebrities and then creating fake stories about people in the government, stories that end up having far reaching real world effects?

>of an outdated and superfluous institution.

Oh brother. If anything this last year has proven exactly why the publication and editing model should flourish for quite some time. Because as of this year, I guess whatever makes you feel better is clearly more valued over what is actually true (see all the reports from Breitbart and company, especially in regards to the Clinton emails, or even global warming), especially with people who believe that "fake news" is just some kind of conspiracy theory accessory for the "MSM" to keep their grip on the industry.

"Fake news" is just yellow journalism by another name, and "fake news" is "uniformly" being talked about because it became readily apparent over the course of this last year that people believe and act on the information presented from yellow journalism. And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. Truth is not oppression.

Re:Things You Notice When You Quit the News by soft_dev_person on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @06:50AM (#13175315)
> And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship.

No, but automatic removal of fake news is censorship, since all of us in here should know that determining truth by algorithms is really an unsolvable problem in _very many important cases_.

It could/would probably be reduced to a source credibility score, but credibility is subjective.

Re:Things You Notice When You Quit the News by justinlaster on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @10:44AM (#13176782)
Using facebook as an example, Facebook had editors and then got slammed with the completely useless "bias" label because they sought stories from actual, reasonably credible sources. Their algorithm was not responsible for removing content, their editors were. Until they got rid of those editors because of "bias" and "censorship." Then fake stories/yellow journalism flourished on Facebook's trending news feed for quite some time during the election.
Re:Things You Notice When You Quit the News by soft_dev_person on Friday December 16, 2016 @10:24AM (#13193843)
True, but by using "external fact checkers" they are more or less reverting to the old system. Similar, anyway.