There is a theory that says people will be inoculated against fake news, if only they're exposed to enough of it. That critical thinking skills, like immune systems and website security, are made strong by unrelenting attacks.

After all, it's unlikely we'll ever see a day where everyone agrees on everything so completely that no two humans disagree about anything! And as long as that's the case, we'd better know how to deal with people telling us things that are wrong.

The theory goes that seeing social media messages with obvious lies like "Put nails in your tyres for better winter traction" and "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets to build an immunity to larger bullets" teaches people scepticism and rational thought they can apply to much more complex statements like "inflation is caused by the fed printing money" and "the highest crime areas are those with a lot of immigrants"

Does it work? Have we seen it working hitherto? You be the judge!

Here in Brazil there is a very strong media monopoly, so most people are used to being fed only one side of the stories. It breaks critical thinking skills and leaves people completely vulnerable to trash content propagated within whatsapp and facebook.

The problem here is that these "propagandists" cater to people's emotions in a very persuasive manner. It's not that it will blatantly tell you "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets", but rather it will inseminate the thought that perhaps you should shoot your neighbor, out of fear. The message is so masterfully targeted and gamified that even if 1 person starts having more "critical thinking" and simply shrug off the information, there are 10 more people ready and willing.

> There is a theory that says people will be inoculated against fake news, if only they're exposed to enough of it.

Rwanda is possibly the best most recent counterpoint to this argument. Granted that the medium was radio as opposed to internet, and that there are therefore different regulatory mechanisms that can be applied (public airwaves vs TCP/IP) - but it shows the danger of getting people into a warped reality bubble.

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2013/05/10/radio-i...

Fake news is known only after the fact. (After verification.)

If you can accept only really verifiably sourced news, things become really inconvenient for both journalists and political opposition.

And where do you put the bar? No interpretation allowed dry facts? Court rulings?

News that turn out to be false are not fake news. News deliberately known to be false are fake news.

Example from the last US presidential election:

* The Pope endorses Bernie Sanders -> this is fake news

* The Pope endorses Trump -> this is fake news

* The Pope endorses Clinton -> this is fake news

All three spread on facebook, btw (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pope-francis-shocks-world-...)

Also, anonymous sources are not fake news, they're anonymous sources. If labelled as such, the are fine.

This is an insufficient definition of fake news since Due Diligence is a huge part of real journalism. I could email some news organization claiming to be an insider and offering some 'explosive revelation' about an issue or another. It would be absolutely fake news for them to simply run that story while attributing it to an anonymous source. It's their responsibility to ensure that what I say is true beyond any reasonable doubt. When dealing with anonymous and/or potentially biased sources this responsibility is exponentially more important.

There was a very recent example of this where Buzzfeed chose to publish an 'explosive' story about the Mueller investigation. So explosive was the story that the Mueller team took the completely unprecedented step of publicly clarifying that Buzzfeed's story was fake. [1] I doubt they simply made up the story. In reality they most likely simply failed to effectively carry out their due diligence, but this is in many ways no better because there is a major economic incentive to skip or engage in sloppy due diligence. When you run explosive stories you get substantial revenue gains due to the exclusive attention you gain. And there's also the risk that a story is true and, in the process of trying to validate it, you end up getting beat to the press by another media organization - once again hurting your revenue and visibility.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2019/...

I'd argue that sloppy reporting is not fake news, and shouldn't be censored. That story hurt Buzzfeed's credibility [even more], and increased Mueller's credibility. That is how it is supposed to work.

Turkey joining the EU was another example from the Brexit campaign - it was clearly nonsense (Turkey might want to join the EU but the chances of that happening any time soon is pretty much zero):

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-tu...

Indeed, here's another example:

'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.

Publishing Treasury analysis, he said a Leave vote would cause an "immediate and profound" economic shock, with growth between 3% and 6% lower.'

Well, the shock hasn't arrived yet, but we've not left yet either. Businesses have held off on action due to the lack of clarity but are starting to move out now.

Edit: Honda Swindon is the latest, just now.

Utterly immaterial to my post. Here's what he said: 'a Leave vote would cause an "immediate and profound" economic shock'

No mention of 'when we leave', is there?

Also if you have a special hotline to Honda management please enlighten us further, because as far as I'm aware nothing has been shared at this time pointing to it being caused by Brexit. Also there are significant global trends affecting the car industry that have nothing to do with Brexit. Please don't be disingenuous.

> Here's what he said: 'a Leave vote would cause an "immediate and profound" economic shock'

Did you even read your own post?

> 'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.

Leaving is not voting to leave. UK hasn't left yet. Note that I think that the statement is wrong, but it certainly hasn't been disproven yet.

The Facebook Ads, when those were revealed, were nothing more than racist lies. Trying to imply all of Turkey would be in the UK without Brexit.

Just like we had all of Greece, and all of Poland then, where there's naught but a wilderness now.

Of course, one thing that I hadn't realised until watching "Brexit: the Uncivil War" is that by using targetted ads in Facebook only the groups targetted get to see the ads - so the other side of the debate, the press and the general public are completely oblivious to what is actually being communicated.

Most of the things said about Brexit in both directions were predictions about the future. Many such predictions were obviously nonsense but could be justified on the grounds that it could happen, or rather, that the speakers believed strongly that the predictions were not nonsense.

A sibling post has already highlighted one of the most notorious examples (voting Leave will trigger an immediate and huge recession), which was promoted as totally the consensus and nobody intelligent could possibly disagree with this guaranteed-to-happen-by-experts prediction. But there were many others (£4300 worse off in 15 years or whatever it was). Did the government really believe these predictions? We can't really know if they were intentionally manipulative or earnestly believed.

The Turkey case is maybe a bit like that. How likely it is to happen depends a lot on your beliefs about what future EU leadership will do. Recall that Turkey joining has been official policy in the not too distant past. Recall also that the people who ultimately control the EU - men like Juncker - routinely say in public that all borders are bad and that the future of Europe is vast quantities of Islamic immigration, that there is a moral imperative to let that happen in fact. And Turkey is a huge and Islamic country on the border of the EU that wants to join the EU. You don't have to be particularly weird or paranoid to assume that whatever objections may currently exist might go away in future.

Or you could say it's evil and manipulative and fake news. Depends entirely on your perspective.

There's one difference - the economic prediction was short term and already proven false. Turkey joining the EU was a long term prediction with no particular attached timeline, I think. It's harder to falsify.

Trump ties with Russia -> this is fake news

That's just a bad headline. "Ties" is so vague that it can mean anything.

>The Pope endorses Bernie Sanders

If it was only things like these, no one would have a problem.

But in practice, anything other than "Hillary Clinton is completely healthy" and "Trump is a Russian puppet" is categorized as fake news.

This push against fake news is just the elites trying to hold onto the power of controlling the narrative.

> But in practice, anything other than "Hillary Clinton is completely healthy" and "Trump is a Russian puppet" is categorized as fake news.

By whom? No serious fact checking effort I've seen suffers from that problem.

Flat Earth is fake news, and thats not after the fact. Vaccines do not cause autism, it is also already known. Yet this deadly misinformation keeps spreading.

I’d guess he’d answer that it’s hard to be sure the people verifying the news are not just censoring what they don’t like.

> the people verifying [...]

There are opinion pieces thinly disguised as "fact checks".