Objective/Non-Biased content is great and essential, but I fear we're in the minority as people who consume content from both 'sides' of any given issue.
That makes me think if people naturally flow towards content which affirms their views/biases, how much blame can we put on sites for displaying 'relevant' content to such a users if they simply ignore content which goes against their views anyway?
Can you blame facebook that a hardcore trump supporter doesn't click on an article about how beneficial obamacare is simply because an algorithm knew they wouldn't have clicked on it anyway. for not showing it?
We're all going into little silos, I'm not really sure how to fix that.. Perhaps this is a natural evolution.. If it is, it seems we're being outnumbered by isolationists lately, though..
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
I have come to conclusion all this logical sophistication is fine cover when events were happening the way these people liked else the world is going to hell.
Reading only news which matches your views over a longer period seems to be making us all more aggressive/silo'd in our views..
It's pretty worrying, I'm not sure I can even have a reasonable discussion with someone who disagrees with me on any political topic which would end in a productive outcome anymore -- is it just me or does it seem that as a whole we're becoming more dismissive of others views and just shouting over each other, avoiding any challenges to the views we hold personally and then retreating back into our strongholds of those who agree with us?
edit: mef
I am just no longer interested in erudites who display such shallow understanding of human nature and world events but nonetheless whine whole day, whole year about how world is going to hell.
Nowadays I stick to tech, philosophy, Netflix etc. Though on netflix I notice how simplistic the social/political views of characters are even in shows with fantastic production values.
I come to the conclusion all this logical sophistication is fine cover when people don't bother you with their problems, else the world is unentertaining for you.
I mean I am no fan of any flavor of politicians or groups but I do not believe someone is 'uniquely evil', 'specially dangerous' but getting lot of public support.
Trump, for example, lost the popular vote and seems to anger many of the people who voted for him. The only voices of support we hear are from Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen.
People are afraid and feel the impulse to do what they can to counter what is happening right now.
On a tangential note, I would recommend the 1995 French (fiction) movie "La Haine" (Hate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Haine
You say:
> The only voices of support we hear are from Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen.
I imagine It is same thing that somehow who voted for Trump were more than who were claiming to be supporter of Trump. There will be more leaders who are neutral or agree with Trump but would prefer to just keep quiet.
For example I notice a lot of support for Trump in India apart from a small section of elite who are ideologically opposed or IT workers/companies who are hopeful or dependent on US visas.
If I write an article about global warming, is it biased to not present the "denial" angle? Is it biased to present the denial angle with the same weight as the "scientific" angle?
Everything is tainted by this to some degree.
Truth doesn't lie in the middle, nor does it care about politics.
For example, the Affordable Care Act is in place, but costs are still rising. Some people think that this is because it's not "enough socialism". Others think it's because of "too much socialism".
You could list facts, but people are not looking for raw data, they're looking for analysis. How do you analyze this "objectively"?
Even if the content is objective in the sense of reality, many people will say it's not objective. And public opinion of "objective" sources are usually those that play to the both sides fallacy.
Going back to GGP's thing, people read what they want to read. What if you just happen to be right? Like, what if the "liberal echo bubble" is "actually" the truth? does this problem go away?
I think objectivity is hard to maintain, but objectivity + belief of objectivity in the public eye is probably impossible.
At the very least, an acknowledgement of conflicting ideas would go a long way to gaining the trust of those who may have disagreeing opinions. Give me two partisan views of the same topic, and one author points out a summary of the conflicting ideas of their "opponent" while the other is silent, if I am on the fence on the issue I am going to have more trust in the opinions of the party who was transparently honest.
I'm not seeing much of this from anyone these days.
I personally can't feel confident in my views until I have heard and understood the motivation and arguments for all sides.
I doubt people will ever understand how to use social media properly, since there's no incentive or mechanisms to self-correct - "sharing" is much harder when you actually have to look at other people's reactions face to face. Sure, on social media you could get in a flame war with someone who shares fake news or has a different viewpoint than you, but it's extremely unlikely that it will have any effect.
For now the conclusion I've reached is that social media should be considered harmful, so I've deleted my Facebook account, and encourage everyone else to do the same. There are more than enough substitutes available for humans to communicate with each other.
The same phenomenon that causes these fake articles to go viral is the same thing that makes rumors and gossip travel so quickly through social circles. I think it comes from a need for self-preservation. Like 'ya that's probably not true, but I better pay attention just in case'.
The neat thing about social media is that it formalizes social circles such that they can become measured and analyzed. We might actually be able to get ahead of things like racist theories or fascist propaganda, but the technology is still in its adolescence.
My argument was that I go to the BBC of all places to get The News, not My News.
A Rotten Tomatoes for news!
I recently help but couldn't feel confused why 'fake news' is a new concept to people; why is everyone going on about it when (as you say) we've been subject to propaganda for as long as we can remember?
I think it largely comes down to social media and how (as other commenters have pointed out) its utterly widespread use only now warrants the spread of misinformation as 'propaganda' — because it reaches so many people these days. The Internet™ was — to a layman — seen as ubiquitous with truth and objectivity... and now that it suddenly (well, duh) transpires that our social network feeds are chock-full of misleading content from untrustworthy sources — everyone's going nuts about it.
[0] - http://www.salon.com/2017/01/03/noam-chomsky-you-cant-educat...
--Edit, added Chomsky source, as proof-of-cringe
See "Yellow Journalism" for the late 1890s as an example. This country has literally been dealing with "fake news" since the invention of the printing press.
It seems to have been rapidly adopted as a term to also include "opinions/interpretations I disagree with" - or in some cases "accurate things I wish weren't true".
I think lies, misinformation and propaganda underplay the essentially chaotic nature of a lot of this stuff. An evil mastermind at work is seductive as an idea because the solution is just punching. I don't see any evidence that that is the truth though.
Kind of. Before it became (for lack of a better word) a meme, it essentially meant literally what it says: news website that published fake articles. This is what the British tabloids have been doing for decades, for what it's worth.
After the US presidential election, it quickly became a buzzword referring to the sorts of websites that posted articles that aren't just misleading but are actively made up and are presented as being true. These were mostly very, very right-wing Trump-supporting websites.
>It seems to have been rapidly adopted as a term to also include "opinions/interpretations I disagree with" - or in some cases "accurate things I wish weren't true".
By the alt-right, yes. Trump and his supporters immediately co-opted the term to mean 'things I don't like', which Trump regularly applies to CNN, which is certainly not fake news by any reasonable definition.
I don't really think that fake news is particularly chaotic. It's intentionally misleading, intentionally biased, intentionally targeted towards peoples' rasher emotions.
When I was growing up my parents would take 'weekend drives'. They would look at architecture, comment on things from tree species to historical events in the area. And they would listen to talk radio. Most of the time, I'd be fighting nausea in the back seat. For a very long time I had a very strong association between talk radio and actual nausea.
About a decade ago a friend introduced me to Car Talk on NPR. Car Talk isn't jornalism or news, but it was very entertaining. It became my 'gateway drug' to NPR. I added Wait, Wait, Donn't Tell Me to the my list (again, not journalism, but definitely newsy), and now NPR's morning line-up, including actual journalism) is a regular part of my workday routine.
So, sometimes the clickbaity, not really news pieces can gently introduce people to the real deal.
(apologies for any typos: phone response)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlbMuv-jix8#t=12m50s
Many/most of the general population seem to think "propaganda" only happens to other people, somewhere else, under a dictatorship, in Russia or North Korea for example. In contrast, many/most think the TV/media outlets they watch/consume (and most closely identify with) are the real news -- the true/fair/balanced/accurate news -- while the "other news" channels are "extreme" (MSNBC vs FOX NEWS) or "fake" (now ascribed to CNN).
It's supposed to be illegal for the USG to use propaganda against its own citizens. Curiously the "Lobbying Restriction" in the US tax code for IRS 501(c)(3) describes lobbying as "carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation": http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/501.shtml.
Call it propaganda, lies, manipulation, population control, fake news, the matrix, whatever -- I think the significance here is the general population now has a name for it. It resonates. It's gone viral. And now that it's entered the general lexicon and has become a real, legitimate topic of conversation, people will begin to see what's been hiding in plain sight. As the idea propagates through the system and gains strength, the veil will lose power as the curtain fades away.
The question to ask is: What happens next?
You're overlooking a phenomenon in living language where people want to label something specific and the existing term is too general. People want the extra connotations[1] in the more specific term.
- too general: "lies" (could mean anything from a child's "fib" about eating a cookie or advertiser's false claims about their product)
- more specific: "fake news" (which is a subset of "lies") The "fake news" has extra connotation of transmission via media (news, social websites, etc).
If we all decided to always use the word "lies" to describe every variation of lies, we'd end up with cumbersome noun phrases and/or hyphenated combinations. E.g. "social-newsfeed-lies" or "news media for profit lies". Maybe some people really prefer to have the taxonomy of language embedded in the noun phrases (a linguistic form of Hungarian Notation?!?).
Consider the wiki page on "fake news"[2]. Should the wiki editors delete that entire page and simply redirect all search queries of "fake news" to the main page titled "Lie"?[3] If so, a shade of meaning that was embedded in the term "fake news" would be lost in the process. (If you move the "fake news" from having it's own separate wiki to a subordinate heading within "Lie" article, that still acknowledges that "fake news" is a term with wide currency.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connotation
It's scary how, as social networks' power gains more influence and accuracy, the lens through which we view content on the web will be narrowed and focussed. So much so, that coupled with the above 'fake news', is responsible for members of the public 'only seeing what they would want to see' - and not questioning the credibility of the source material.
We, as technologists, must work hard to strive towards an objective web. I think that fake news is just the beginning of a veil of blurriness that will flow over internet content.
It therefore strikes me as surprising that Facebook has started a 'flagging' system for fake content[0] — when it relies on the above positive feedback loops of users with shared interests.
[0] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38827101/how-facebook-...