The rise and future of fake news

[rocksniffer]

On 11/28/2016 at 10:41 AM, TerraPrime said:

In my experience of arguing with people about creationism on the internet, one phenomenon I observed is that it takes 10 times more effort and resource to debunk a falsehood than it does to propagate one.

If someone claims that the human eye is an example of irreducible complexity and thus, refutes evolutionary theory, the effort it takes to dismantle it will take a whole page, or more. People who are new to the topic will have a near-insurmountable amount of work to do to sift through the published articles and find the truth. By the time they are done, hours later, they will face yet another false claim, this time maybe on the complexity of the bacterial flagella apparatus.

Disinformation in the news serves the same function - it overwhelms people's ability to sift and winnow. It's not that people are inherently incapable of discerning truth from falsehood, it's that in an environment where half of what you encounter may be false, it takes an unrealistic amount of effort to verify each claim. In any standard news reporting, there might be 3 to 4 claims that need to be verified. Most people won't have the time, even if they are motivated to do the fact-checking.

So, if you're inclined to have the populace not scrutinize your platforms and ideas too closely, you'd do well to flood the market with distractingly false information and wear people out to the point where even legitimate and valid news are given a skeptical look because, well, who can tell the difference any more?

well said, Terra...and i applaud your efforts my friend, to enlighten the chronically delusional ...i have no such patience to suffer fools to whom logic is as palatable as a dose of castor oil ...

...which i hear will help you regrow hair and give you a raging hard on...sadly McAfee says i can't link these gems for you due to the fact that they are bullshit... 

 

 

[Egalitarianism Always]

People are scared shitless of people with power, and rightly so, how some of those scared people react: being silent and joining the side of the powerful as a lickspittle is capitalized on by those with power,their subserviance magnified and cultivated through terror and small rewards while they hold the levers of power controlling lives and giving themselves immense wealth.  For oligarchs divide and rule has always been their tactic.

Through the net I've exposed political scandals an example comes to mind here: a police chief constable resigned the next day after the corrupt practices of her officers were caught on video, the officers clearly lie contradicting the video evidence of a motorcyclist as they try to bring doubt into their victim's recollection, any doubt on his part and their lying would have seen the motorcylist arrested and charged of that I am sure.  Doubt is a natural and good attribute it allows our minds to remain agile and adaptible, allowing our imagination to be able to see things in new ways to bring new data in.  The alternative is false omniscience, where memories are one way and no other, except everyone is a being within time, and the law of entropy means data loss over time is guaranteed.  For the false omniscient their very limited knowledge creation ability and denial of the law of entropy leads to a perversion of the creative power of the mind, that power surpressed comes out as bizarre lies and false confidence.

Liars often win the day because doubt hamstrings good people, but doubt is a natural and good thing for it allows for new data creation, allows the epiphenomenon of thoughts to influence the phenomenon of the brain.  Epiphenomenon means from and above the material world, some say such a thing cannot influence the material world but it's still part of the material world just as earthquake epicentres and evolutionary epigenetics are still part of the material world and have immense affect on the material world.

[Cubarey]

Fake News is not new. in 1898 William Randolph Hearst sent a columnist to Cuba to cover the Second Cuban Revolution. A few days after Arrival the columnist telegraphed Hearst with "Arrived in Cuba, no war here" to Which Hearst replied, "You provide the stories, I'll provide the war."

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

2 minutes ago, Cubarey said:

Fake News is not new. in 1898 William Randolph Hearst sent a columnist to Cuba to cover the Second Cuban Revolution. A few days after Arrival the columnist telegraphed Hearst with "Arrived in Cuba, no war here" to Which Hearst replied, "You provide the stories, I'll provide the war."

That's not Fake News, that's creating news. 

[Altherion]

28 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

That's not Fake News, that's creating news. 

It was both. Hearst & Co. differed from modern media only in that they sometimes interfered in events to create a more interesting story (example). This did not mean that they refrain from exaggeration, misdirection and the occasional outright falsehood -- they did all of those things too.

[TerraPrime]

1 hour ago, Cubarey said:

Fake News is not new. in 1898 William Randolph Hearst sent a columnist to Cuba to cover the Second Cuban Revolution. A few days after Arrival the columnist telegraphed Hearst with "Arrived in Cuba, no war here" to Which Hearst replied, "You provide the stories, I'll provide the war."

Neither is celebrity gossip. But it'd be foolish to say that today's technology of twitter and FB and instagram have done nothing to change the landscape of celebrity gossip.

[Arkhangel]

Not sure if it's been posted, but this interview with a registered Democrat creating fake pro-Trump news was fascinating. Maybe the most interesting thing about it is the financial side; it's alarming and yet makes perfect sense that fake news might be one of the few media models capable of turning an easy profit these days - after all, creative writing is much cheaper than journalism.

[Cubarey]

8 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

That's not Fake News, that's creating news. 

When you write story after story and editorial after editorial about the savage Spanish atrocities against the Cuban population in a civil war, and there is no fighting at all in any of the major parts of Cuba. Then yes, what you are doing is reporting fake news.