
Inside a Fake News Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’ - my_first_acct
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html
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wallace_f
This whole war on fake news thing bothers me. It leads to giving unprecedented
power to private corporations in controlling what people are able to see and
hear.

The other thing is that the US media is far from perfect as well. I can point
to plenty of articles in the BBC, NYT, the Economist and WaPo that are
classified as News--not OpEds--that ignore science, are politically motivated,
and would loosely qualify as "fake news," or at least OpEds.

During the election cycle, I know a lot of people that were personally very
turned off by the DNC corruption, yet US media coverage was scarce. When I
type "DNC corruption" into Google and DuckDuckGo, there are no results on the
first page from major media outlets. When I search site:nytimes.com "DNC
Corruption" the first result is from 1860. The second is "Can we trust Julian
Assange...?" I could keep going, but the point is, this is terrifying.

Censorship by private corporations and government is not the answer.

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augustt
1860? What are you talking about?

> site:nytimes.com DNC Corruption

> Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign DNC Post - The New York Times (Jul 24,
> 2016)

> D.N.C. Hack Raises a Frightening Question: What's Next? - The New ... (Jul
> 29, 2016)

> Released Emails Suggest the D.N.C. Derided the Sanders Campaign ... (Jul 22,
> 2016)

> After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore ... (Jul
> 28, 2016)

~~~
jklinger410
Just because they play both sides of the field doesn't add credulity to the
objectivity of their coverage.

I am so jaded to believe that both sides pay them for coverage. Either in
money or political favors.

~~~
candiodari
The weird thing is, it doesn't seem to have affected the election at all. From
the article:

> He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited
> for ad sales to soar. “I don’t know why, but it did not work,” said the
> student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he
> realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump
> that mixed real — and completely fake — news in a stew of anti-Clinton
> fervor.

> But he, too, discovered that writing about Mr. Trump was a “gold mine.”

> “It’s all Trump,” Mr. Egan said by telephone. “People go nuts for it.”

Is it possible fake Trump news was the result, and not the cause, of Trump's
appeal to the American people ? There's more in the paragraphs below that
makes one think this is the case.

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nickff
This may be a cynical take on things, but it seems to me that the 'fake news
factories' figured out that the core product of a political website is
confirmation of existing beliefs, then 'unbundled' it from everything else.

~~~
astrodust
Unbundled from reality. Tied to profit.

It's an environment where they can rapidly iterate on what the most "click-
worthy" stories are and dial in the content to meet audience expectations.

This is worse than the pure sugar being fed by useless news organizations like
CNN where their coverage has almost zero informational value. This is like
heroin where it's actively feeding wild misconceptions.

~~~
tombone12
I find it funny how globalism is leaking back into the US in unexpected ways;
who would have thought twenty years ago that a Georgian citizen would take
flak for derailing a US election by producing pulp news? It was always
supposed to be the American eagle spreading its freedom to the world who
gratefully welcomed it with praise, they weren't actually supposed to
influence the US back!

~~~
my_first_acct
Some geopolitical irony here. Georgia has been trying join NATO; President
Trump will quite possibly recognize Georgia as being in the Russian sphere of
influence.

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harlanji
Surprise! All for-profit companies exist with making money as the highest
priority. As idealistic software engineers we're programmed to think of
everything as a mission, but as soon as you look higher at most post-
investment companies you'll see it's about money even if leadership doesn't
believe that itself. There may be an ideological honey moon period but as soon
as there's a bump/loss in confidence cash is king without fail. One counter
example is a bootstrapped solo entity because there is no external
authority/commitment to maximize shareholder value for anyone else, so they
can burn money if they want.

A good way to confirm this in job interviews is to bring up B Corps in
response to the founding/mission part of the pitch and watch them say it just
hasn't been a priority. A B Corp is a certified for-profit company with a
mission built in beyond quarter-over-quarter growth. If they really believe in
their mission they should certify as a B Corp, if they're not and they're
hiring with recruiters--implies some level of cash on hand, readiness to grow
--it's lip service. I should note this isn't a deal breaker if they can pay, I
just like to know who I am working with. In time I'd like to prefer employment
from B Corps.

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generic_user
It looks like the 'real news' is going to go down with the ship because the
only response they have to discretization of there reporting is to double down
on there false narrative.

I stopped reading mainstream media and watching TV many years ago because I
consider 80% of what they report to be misleading, misinformation and yes
'fake news'.

The corporate media has finally lost the ability to control the public
discourse. That was the only real value they still had to the handful of
oligarchs that own them.

Nazi Frogs, Russian hackers, Fake news factories and what ever else they come
up with next is not going to save them.

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andrewclunn
So how is this different from say SNL perpetuating the false notion that Sarah
Palin said she could see Russia from her house? Call it satire and you're free
to propagandize all you want. Only after the anointed candidate of the power
lost, must we examine the means by which propaganda (specifically that we find
unfavorable) is disseminated. Fake news is the crop you reap when you show
mass censorship. Trying to double down on the censorship will only hasten your
irrelevance.

~~~
eropple
It's almost as if satire isn't propaganda at all. Weird, that.

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pryelluw
Well, how is this different from the old supermarket tabloids? I vividly
remember bat boy.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_(character)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_\(character\))

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yyhhsj0521
So, real-world Onion News?

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visarga
Just a different kind of spammers. News spammers.

~~~
tombone12
True enough, but the damage is more nebulous and potentially greater. Also,
will bag of words work well for news?

~~~
visarga
No, no, today we use bidirectional LSTMs with word embeddings. They work so
much better.

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icomefromreddit
'Fake News' took our jobs!

