The rise and future of fake news

[denstorebog]

So, it's all pretty jumbled together right now. We're discussing the election, we're discussing the American neo-nazism, and the 'fake news' phenomenon is all a part of that. But let's take a moment to discuss it separately.

First, an article to kick-start it all, from Charles Sykes, an anti-Trump conservative: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-conservative-media-charlie-sykes-214483. He talks about the insanity of the alt-right news bubble, and how it will now likely evolve into a tool to defame and silence dissenters against the government. A pretty sobering read.

I can't help but feel that a lot of commentators aren't yet seeing the full scope and nature of the problem we're facing. There's a lot of talk about what the 'proper' news outlets can do to regain the trust of the people. But in my view, the real problem is that the budding fake news industry is selling a product that people will prefer to the actual truth. Why would anyone choose a factual reality over the one that confirms their biases, their antagonisms and desires?

And thus, my real question: What will it take for the pendulum to (ever?) swing back on this development? What would make people want to leave the bubble once they're in it? Are we seeing the beginning of a downwards spiral that can never really be undone, and which will increasingly be a part of Western democracy and politics?

Bonus story: Adobe is now previewing "VoCo", a tool that lets anyone type a sequence of words, and the program will convert it to speech ... in anyone's voice, provided you have recordings of up to 20 minutes of that person speaking. Let yourr imagination and nightmares run wild. Yes, this is real, and according to the demos, it actually seems to work really well. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37899902

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

I think part of the problem is that 'real news' is just as difficult to find and differentiate from the fake stuff. I stick generally to well known news outlets. But I know some friends who worked for big websites who openly admit that often news items are stolen from other websites, reworded and pumped out quickly, with zero fact checking going on. In a world where this is where much of our information comes from, how can you believe anything. 

Add to that, its impossible to read 'neutral' news any more, everything is a form of propaganda in one form or another, very few new pieces come from a middle group point of view, mainly because it doesn't sell, and also because people group themselves into their bubbles and only want to read whatever they agree with. 

[Free Northman Reborn]

This seems to be a particular problem for people who get much of their news from Facebook. Since I don't participate in the Facebook cult, it is quite easy for me to verify that the news I am getting is from a trustworthy source. To those who rely on Facebook for their information of the real world, well, they deserve what they get.

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

29 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

This seems to be a particular problem for people who get much of their news from Facebook. Since I don't participate in the Facebook cult, it is quite easy for me to verify that the news I am getting is from a trustworthy source. To those who rely on Facebook for their information of the real world, well, they deserve what they get.

Who does that though. It blows my mind that people don't look at the website a piece of news came from before getting riled up by it.

[sologdin]

ZOMG fake news is not new.  see chomsky & herman's manufacturing consent, kids.  also: bagdikian's media monopoly.  and mcchesney's rich media, poor democracy.

[Commodore]

the left is perpetually concerned with controlling/limiting what speech people are hearing, because certain people (not them mind you) are incapable of discernment

they tried "fact-checkers" as a way to designate themselves arbiters of truth, but that wasn't enough

now they want social media sites to perform that function (instead of being neutral facilitators of communication)

[Lordsteve666]

Our local area has a Facebook news site, well more a sort of community page i guess where people post traffic updates or stuff warning of break-ins etc. It's actually been really helpful to the area, especially with really bad flooding last winter, it helped people find if relatives were safe and allowed organisation of help to clean up affected areas.
On more than one occasion I've seen stuff mentioned on there pop up in well known respectable news channels often several days or weeks after the fact, so i'm fairly certain even the big organisations are not adverse to stealing stories and passing it off as their own journalism. I'm all for a news getting passed on to bigger parties to get good coverage of important events but I think often the true nature is lost because it's just another story to the news guys, with no real feeling behind it. Plus it's often out of context, which leads to the whole confusion and fake side of things.

[Reny of Storms End]

22 minutes ago, Commodore said:

the left is perpetually concerned with controlling/limiting what speech people are hearing, because certain people (not them mind you) are incapable of discernment

they tried "fact-checkers" as a way to designate themselves arbiters of truth, but that wasn't enough

now they want social media sites to perform that function (instead of being neutral facilitators of communication)

Certain people are incapable of discernment. I have cousins who believe Clinton lost the popular vote based off of an article on InfoWars. The only evidence the article provides to prove this? A random tweet from some guy who claims he has personally reviewed the entire voter database and found over three million cases of illegal immigrants voting. When I countered with an article that featured real information that can be double checked and proven true, it was brushed off as being from a liberal biased news source. 

[maarsen]

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

ZOMG fake news is not new.  see chomsky & herman's manufacturing consent, kids.  also: bagdikian's media monopoly.  and mcchesney's rich media, poor democracy.

Personally if I wish to imbibe fake news, there is always the National Enquirer.

[Commodore]

5 hours ago, Reny of Storms End said:

Certain people are incapable of discernment. 

Agreed. Also, Russia hacked the election results. 

[Rippounet]

The problem is much bigger than fake news.
The original problem is that in many of our Western democracies the media has abandoned its role as a "fourth estate" or counter-power. Some might argue it never really embraced it, but in the past decades, the trend has visibly worsened. In a nutshell, the original problem is that "fake news" have become difficult to distinguish from "real news" not just in content but also in the way the information is presented.

For once on this forum, I will use the argument of authority. I have done research on media and perception in the US in the eighties and am starting to work on the nineties while keeping an eye on what's happening today. As @sologdin wrote, nothing is new. Whatever you think of his political views, Chomsky, with Herman, identified and described some biases in the media in Manufacturing Consent. But Chomsky always accused the media of supporting the dominant political ideologies. Paradoxically, today things are much worse because in the name of neutrality the media appears reluctant to attack some kinds of discourses. The well-known news outlets are part of the problem not just because they don't always perform fact-checking, but also because of the way they format the news, contenting themselves with reporting specific types of information (for instance, what politicians say) without necessarily providing the readers or viewers with in-depth critical perspective.

For example it is easy to attack a candidate for their alleged xenophobia or sexism, but it can prevent everyone from focusing on their program (or lack thereof). In the long-run it matters little whether a candidate seems xenophobic or sexist ; what matters is whether their proposed policies are realistic, and what their consequences will be. A political campaign should be a battle of ideas rather than a battle of declarations and accusations, and in order to improve the democratic process the media should always focus on the former rather than the latter, even if it means showing how bad the candidates of all sides are. If the reputable media doesn't do that, then whatever it shows or publishes becomes impossible to distinguish from what amateurs do.

A different way to put it would be that ideally, the role of the media is to allow the readers or viewers not to lose sight of the greater picture, to explain a modicum of economic or political theory so that the current events take on meaning beyond spontaneous emotional reactions. I guess I believe the media has a duty to educate as much as to inform. Of course, because the media indulges in sensationalism to seduce its audience, it does the very opposite of that. And because it indulges in mere "reporting" with little analysis, anyone can do the same.

[Altherion]

There's an interesting article (for some reason at Ars Technica) about this. The idea of fake news is of course even much older than our civilization, but the modern iteration is strongly influenced by academia:

Quote

But this interpretation blatantly disregards the actual origins of "post-truth." These lie neither with those deemed under-educated nor with their new-found champions. Instead, the groundbreaking work on "post-truth" was performed by academics, with further contributions from an extensive roster of middle-class professionals. Left-leaning, self-confessed liberals, they sought freedom from state-sponsored truth; instead they built a new form of cognitive confinement—"post-truth."

More than 30 years ago, academics started to discredit "truth" as one of the "grand narratives" which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of "the truth," which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new intellectual orthodoxy permitted only "truths"—always plural, frequently personalised, inevitably relativised.

It's pretty ironic that the right (which, for the most part, despises this sector of academia or even the whole of it) has now turned this creation against its creators.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

13 hours ago, sologdin said:

ZOMG fake news is not new.  see chomsky & herman's manufacturing consent, kids.  also: bagdikian's media monopoly.  and mcchesney's rich media, poor democracy.

But it has never been as popular or prevalent as it is right now, doncha think?  

[Knight ofthe Laughing Tree]

15 hours ago, denstorebog said:

Why would anyone choose a factual reality over the one that confirms their biases, their antagonisms and desires?

yuppers.  Why don't more people see that the harder and brighter their righteous indignation, they might be contributing to more bloated extremist thought and action from the alt-right, and definitely the alt-left (?) as well, which is to say, mainstream left these days.  

 

[Knight ofthe Laughing Tree]

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

The problem is much bigger than fake news.
The original problem is that in many of our Western democracies the media has abandoned its role as a "fourth estate" or counter-power. Some might argue it never really embraced it, but in the past decades, the trend has visibly worsened. In a nutshell, the original problem is that "fake news" have become difficult to distinguish from "real news" not just in content but also in the way the information is presented.

For example it is easy to attack a candidate for their alleged xenophobia or sexism, but it can prevent everyone from focusing on their program (or lack thereof). . . . If the reputable media doesn't do that, then whatever it shows or publishes becomes impossible to distinguish from what amateurs do.

. . .  I guess I believe the media has a duty to educate as much as to inform. Of course, because the media indulges in sensationalism to seduce its audience, it does the very opposite of that. And because it indulges in mere "reporting" with little analysis, anyone can do the same.

well said-- and basically, you're just speaking about ad-hominem attacks, yes?  Unfortunately, logic 101 is not required at university any longer.  *It's very interesting for me to note these days that the ad-hominem attacks seem to come from college educated folks, or uneducated folks who are addicted to passing memes on social media.  It's the grossest form of entertainment imo these days-- just perpetuation of ignorance, and can be very depressing if you hang out in the mire too long.  *I have finally quite trying to respond to the hate all over FB these days from BOTH sides.  People don't seem to want a discussion-- even my otherwise well-spoken friends-- they don't want to discuss.  They want the modern version of pitchforks and tar and feathering without getting their fingers dirty.  

[ThinkerX]

'Fake News' is nothing new.

 

Get right down to it, the majority of history is arguably 'self-serving propaganda written by the victors' rather than 'impartial accounts' or 'truth.'  Severe bias is the norm. 

The Far Right has been attempting to rewrite the US history books for a while now.  The goal, imagine, is the Rush Limbaugh/Hannity versions of history and social science being taught in the public school system.

[Altherion]

16 hours ago, denstorebog said:

And thus, my real question: What will it take for the pendulum to (ever?) swing back on this development? What would make people want to leave the bubble once they're in it? Are we seeing the beginning of a downwards spiral that can never really be undone, and which will increasingly be a part of Western democracy and politics?

The problem with post-truth propaganda (whether outright lies or deceit through misdirection and half-truths) is that it eventually bumps into the truth and the latter is a lot more powerful. As the Strugatsky brothers put it, not even the best propaganda can convince a starving man that he is satiated.

For example, take the narrative that the US economy is doing great: the GDP is the highest it has ever been and so is the stock market, unemployment is below 5%. Things have never been better... except that for a whole lot of people, this narrative is in direct conflict with their personal situation. They as well as most of their families are either unemployed or stuck in jobs that have neither status nor a decent salary nor a viable path upwards. Their children have student loans which they have no hope of repaying any time soon. And there's no prospect of changes in their area -- the only option for somebody ambitious is to abandon their community and go somewhere else. These people may not understand how exactly they're being swindled (in this case, it requires more math than most Americans have), but the story they're being told is inconsistent with their everyday life and so they reject it. Of course, there's no guarantee that in doing so, they'll arrive at the truth. It is entirely possible that they will latch on to a different set of lies instead -- but if that happens, those lies will eventually conflict with the truth too.

[DireWolfSpirit]

The Failure of the Fourth Estate (the Spirit of I.F. Stone)

w/ Amy Goodman and others- 

 

[Jo498]

6 hours ago, Altherion said:

There's an interesting article (for some reason at Ars Technica) about this. The idea of fake news is of course even much older than our civilization, but the modern iteration is strongly influenced by academia:

It's pretty ironic that the right (which, for the most part, despises this sector of academia or even the whole of it) has now turned this creation against its creators.

"It defines "post-truth" as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.""

I'd say "post-truth" (as a political weapon) had been very clearly recognized by Socrates (or at least Plato's portrayal of him) about 2400 years ago. The main difference is that Platon thought that truth and logic were weapons against "post-truth" whereas late 20th and 21st century's "post-isms" cannot bring themselves to believe in phallologocentric Truth anymore, so it is just one -ism or deep power structure against the other. And of course Gorgias, Kallikles, Thrasymachos and their fellow sophists did not have the modern media at their command so their impact was limited (but sufficient for the political structures of 5th/4th cent BC Greece). But we now also have the worldwide agora of the internet, so we can apply socratic retorsions and maieutics as well.

[Clueless Northman]

So, the same outlets who kept telling us Saddam had huge stocks of WMDs are now complaining about "fake news"?
Or is this about the USS Maine and the Spanish-American War? You know, that bit Pulitzer published about - that should tell you everything you need to know about modern and current US journalism that their most precious price is named after a lying warmongering hack.

So, I won't shed a tears about allegedly "mainstream media" getting a taste of their own fucking medicine. They and everyone else have always dealt with propaganda, it's just that it's more blatant and in-your-face nowadays, and even the supposedly respectable ones have to follow on this path - which only sinks their reputation a bit more, while their more blatant competition never had any reputation to preserve.