False information is saturating political debate worldwide and undermining an already weak level of trust in the media and institutions, spreading further than ever on powerful social networks.
US President Donald Trump has popularised the term "fake news", using it mainly as an accusation levelled at the media, and it is increasingly used by politicians from Spain to China, Myanmar or Russia.
"Fake news" has been generalised to mean anything from a mistake to a parody or a deliberate misinterpretation of facts.
At the same time, the proliferation of false online information is increasingly visible in attempts to manipulate elections, notoriously surrounding Trump's 2016 victory.
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WNU Editor: Truth be told the news media has always presented news that supported an agenda or a specific political view. It is done by focusing on news stories that promote this agenda, while avoiding those stories that do not. What is also different now is that the proliferation of numerous sources of news has broken the old monopolies that controlled the news in the past. Social media has also presented a platform where news media's reports can be either promoted or deciphered and disproved. From my view point I believe we are entering a new era on how we obtain information, and how this information is spread and shared. My concern/fear is that these new platforms will only replace the news monopolies of old and become no different than how they operated. Will Facebook's news feed and Google's search results be manipulated to promote what they believe is important, while downgrading and/or minimizing viewpoints and news that they disagree with or does not fit into their agenda. My gut tells me that they will .... because they are already doing it.
Update: Here is a commentary from last year by Sheryl Atkinson that I think illustrates what is wrong with the news media of today .... Americans Have Just Cause To Not Trust The Media (August 21, 2017)
12 comments:
Fake news is that which you do not want to accept
Fake news likely to come from social media and NOT responsible journalism
Fake news from MSM? challenge: skim through this site for today and count the number of links to MSM Is this site posting lots of fake news?
President Donald Trump has dismissed his controversial interview with The Sun newspaper, in which he criticized British Prime Minister Theresa May’s handling of Brexit and praised her Conservative rival Boris Johnson, as “fake news.”
Trump and May were speaking to reporters at a press conference after bilateral talks at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence. The president suggested not all of his comments about May were printed by The Sun, and that the newspaper had omitted the positive things he said about the prime minister. In fact, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid had included positive comments made by Trump about May.
Truth
Truth like Crowdstrike is as big of a fraud as Theranos?
If you sift through multiple fake news stories and triangulate, you can find the truth.
In statistics you learn how to take a biased estimator and correct it.
You should not have to do all that work, but life is not fair.
$667 million startup Crowdstrike just lost an ugly public spat with a company that tests software
If you have family, friends or businesses associates travel somewhere, you can talk to them to see what they saw in a foreign country.
You can visit places yourself.
You look for revisions by news agencies or the historical record that tell you about certain news organizations or people.
You become competent in your job and in general and that allows you to see through a lie.
Become proficient at statistics. You can use it for work and also to see when some shyster reporter is lying to you.
Some idiot I know is visiting Africa. They should be okay. They will be visiting a country that although it has no Al Qaeda, has Al Qaeda & ISIS operating to the north, west, and south of them. They also speak several languages and pick up languages that they didn't study through the means of recognizing cognates in other languages.
Of course I will query them when they get back and do a 1/2 ass job of it.
Deep down, your comment very shallow
Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein announces indictments: Russian Military Intel hacked DNC, DCCC, others
Anon,
You may want to insert a verb into your comment.
You might come across as a native speaker then. Just saying.
DNC got hacked by a foreign nation and then won't let the FBI investigate?
What sense does that make?
A lot actually. Assuming that the DNC were hackled by the Russians, the DNC did not want the FBI to uncover their highly illegal activities of rigging the primary against socialist Bernie Sanders.
Tens of hundreds of Democrat Party officials might go to jail.
What is really laughable and what really makes you look like a schmuck is that how can the government indict, try and convict Russians for hacking the DNC when the government has not been able to look at the DNC servers?
So the goobers in the government like Rosenstein will indict people based on forensic evidence, which has been withheld from them.
There are good people in the government, but Rosenstein, Comey, McCAbe, Strzok etc are not among them. They deserve the appellation goobers.
Aizino,
Comments 4 and 7 are essentially spot on. There is little to nothing I can add. This is what I try to do. Even still sometimes I still make mistakes and am always trying to learn. I would add that we or at least I will need to make every effort to correct for our biases. This can be the hardest part. Some will cling to an ideological belief even to the point of death or so it would seem.
In comment 7, you make the point of mentioning your acquaintance who is visiting Africa. There is nothing like a someone who has firsthand knowledge of something assuming they are trustworthy. Sometimes it comes down to whom do we trust. For example do we trust a media pundit with known biases who has a less than stellar track record or do we trust the actions and words of someone whom we may not know or have experience with? Do we trust a pundit without real time knowledge of a situation or do we trust someone who is on the ground experiencing the situation in real time?
As a real world example, the pundit class continues to insist that "nothing happened" in the negotiations between the US and NK. Meaning no disrespect to anyone but the parrots and poorly trained seals are coming in full force to try and reinforce the narrative that "nothing happened."
Meanwhile the South Koreans support these efforts by about 80% to the point that the ruling party won a landslide election victory. Keep in mind that 33% of SK military officers view the US as the main enemy. Since such officers are drawn from the population, it is reasonable to infer this is the position of the SK population as well. In other words, this has the support pretty much everyone in SK across all walks of life in SK.
Additionally, the Japanese recently stood down their alert with regards to NK. Keeping in mind that SK and Japan are on the front lines of this and will know what is happening and will act accordingly in their national interest AND it gets worse for those who say "nothing happened." For meetings such as this, the "big stuff" will likely be agreed to in advance as humans aren't in the habit of humiliating themselves for no good reason. During the meetings Kim and his team received rock star like treatment. This would NOT have occurred if "nothing happened."
I could go on but the only reasonable conclusion would be that something very positive did in fact happen. Can it be derailed? Of course it can.
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