
According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem - Yhippa
https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not-the-problem-4ca4852b1ff0#.juukjg5v3
======
mgiannopoulos
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12967630)

------
erdevs
This is a misleading title (both on Backchannel and here). I have no idea why
the author chose to use it (other than as clickbait) when it misrepresents the
content of the actual article. The article points out how much verifiably
false information there is on the internet and how quickly it can spread.
Clearly this is _not_ good. The article itself and Snopes' editor, the primary
source for of quotes in the article, both agree with that. And the actual
quote from Snopes' editor is that _social media_ isn't the problem. She does
not say that fake news isn't the problem.

What we should say is that all aspects mentioned in the article are
problematic: the decline in the media, the rampant levels of fake news on the
internet and the way social media can so quickly and pervasively spread
patently false information. None of them are necessarily _the_ problem alone,
but they are each serious problems and all the moreso when in tandem as they
are today.

~~~
T2_t2
Except... the election was super close. There wasn't really a clear trend of
much of anything when it comes to making people vote one way or tother.

The rise of the combination of third Party vote - Gary Johnson and Jill Stein
+ other was over 4%
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016)
\- and less overall votes says that, far from people seeing their own side,
people didn't like ANY side.

The question should really be "What made Blacks and Latinos turn out in lower
numbers, and what made so many people vote Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or other,
especially in swing states?" That doesn't seem to be the question anyone wants
to look at, and I reckon that's the real story here: how invested in the two
party system, and their own survival, the media is.

~~~
Mithaldu
> less overall votes

Those also came about due to stricter limits on how to id oneself for voting,
and ... well, either retarded or hostile (your choice) voting office setups
that forced people to wait far longer than reasonable to be able to vote.

Both of these very effectively keep particularly economically weaker voters
out of the game.

Completely my personal opinion: Until the US moves voting onto a weekend and
makes it a multi-day affair, and makes affordable unified country-wide id
available and usable, the US democracy doesn't deserve the label.

------
Lxr
This has probably been said before, but I feel the decline of quality
reporting and rise of clickbait is largely due to the SV business model of
"make everything free and support it via advertising". The only thing that
matters in this model is engagement, therefore reporters and publishers
optimize for engagement only, and clickbait is the natural consequence.

I am not quite sure why we can't operate like the rest of the world and charge
for services - as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to
advertisers.

~~~
edblarney
" as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers."

Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their
credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through.

Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away
with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else.

Arguably, some news outfits were designed as profit making entities, and
'news' was just a vehicle to that profit. CNN is a relatively latecomer in the
news world, and because they were formed primarily as a cable news channel ...
they went about their business very differently that more classical print
houses.

One thing we don't talk about enough: 'information consumption habits'.

People checked out the news every day to keep up. Now - they can read
FB/Instagram and keep up with things that are possibly more important to them
in their lives. So - the new social opportunity is literally grabbing 'waking
hours' from regular news sites. Bloggers - good or bad - can report on events
in some cases somewhat reliably - and so there are other outlets.

If you live in Toronto, you used to buy the 'Toronto Star' or 'Globe and
Mail'. Now you can read NYT, Guardian, Washington Post - so there's a degree
of consolidation as well.

Sadly, it's a mess and I hope someone can figure it out :)

~~~
coldtea
> _Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their
> credit card and buy a subscription - they don 't actually follow through.
> Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get
> away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else._

So maybe the problem is not bad news reporting, but the scarcity of highly
educated and/or conscientious readership?

That is, maybe we should fix the education and the citizenry -- else people
won't make much out of well written news anyway, if not for anything else,
because they wont be able to evaluate them...

~~~
pdkl95
Sagan's warning in "The Demon-Haunted World"[1]:

    
    
        I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time --
        when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all
        the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome
        technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing
        the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the
        ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority;
        when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our
        critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good
        and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition
        and darkness...
    

Until the public has a "baloney detection kit"[2] (and uses it regularly),
trying to convince them to follow "The Truth" instead of the latest scam or
wishful thinking is a waste of time.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-
Haunted_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World)

[2] [https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-
detection-k...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-
kit-carl-sagan/)

------
rdtsc
> the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet
> is considered credible any longer.

Mass media has mostly lost their grip on manufacturing consent.

It was effectively used in the past for that. The Democrats have relied on it
too heavily. That was the old school strategy - those who control the media,
control the outcome. In this case it backfired on them.

The more money, manipulation and control they poured into it, the more
insiders they had, the less trustworthy they became. Instead of stopping and
re-evaluating, they doubled down on lies, which made them even less credible.

One thing they missed is that to be effective, they had to keep up appearances
of some nominal impartiality.

In a way they are one of the primary reason this election was lost. They
manufactured Kool-Aid, which is fine, that's their job, but then instead of
giving it to the Trump supporters, they gave it to Hillary supporters. They
were showing all blue maps with a Hillary landslide. There was no other
choice, of course, after endorsing her openly for months, they'd never show an
all red map. Even if somehow they had one projected. (They didn't. USC / LA
Times poll predicted a win for Trump, and it is an interesting reason why, but
that for another discussion...)

The idea perhaps was to discourage undecided/Trump voters by showing that
candidate has 1% chance of winning, so why bother voting. In the end it had
the exact opposite effect. They showed a Hillary landslide and so Hillary
supporters stayed home. Why bother putting your shoes on or staying in line if
it is landslide anyway.

So then last week everyone started talking about "Fake News" almost overnight.
All was good, nobody likes lizard people, everyone thinks that's crazy. But
then it quickly turned into a label that gets thrown at "news I don't agree
with". Just a few days ago, a story about an oil field and Texas and it seems
they got the estimates wrong or the model for the cost was off and it
immediately got slapped with the label of "Fake News".

In a certain way it is not surprising. Throwing labels around is basically the
new way of conducting discourse. One can blame Twitter for it (I am sure there
is some study already on how Twitter affects discussion and exchange of
ideas). You can say so much in a 140 characters so what you do is throw a
label at the end "Fake News" / "Soros" / "Sexism" and you're done, point
proven.

~~~
fryguy
Wait, are you seriously suggesting that all of the polls that were done
([http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-
forecast/n...](http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-
forecast/national-polls/)) were manufactured by leftist media? Seriously? Look
at all of them. Up until the final week when it seemed like many republicans
decided they could stomach Trump and changed from undecided to Trump, Hilary
was indeed an 80% favorite on 538. Sure, some of the other models on other
websites had Hilary with a higher percentage chance, but isn't that the whole
idea behind data journalism that you build a model and feed data to it? 538
had a good podcast on this topic: [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/model-
talk-debriefs-the-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/model-talk-
debriefs-the-2016-results/)

And besides, having a poor model is not at all fake news. Fake news is
completely making things up.

~~~
seertaak
> Wait, are you seriously suggesting that all of the polls that were done
> ([http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-
> forecast/n...](http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-
> forecast/n...)) were manufactured by leftist media? Seriously?

In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, some hedge funds did private polls,
rather than relying on the publicly disseminated ones (which of course
predicted a Remain victory). Those same hedge funds bet on Brexit and made a
lot of money. What does this tell you about the quality of the public polls?

Fact is, polls can be used as a tool to bludgeon a minority opposition, by
sowing disunity amongst the opposition, and by demoralizing them through the
strong suggestion that victory is impossible (NYT: 15% chance Trump victory).

We have evidence that the Clinton campaign aggressively pressured a multitude
of actors into bending the rules. (See Wasserstein-Schulz and Donna Brazile
scandals.) We have strong evidence of quasi-universal, vehement opposition to
Trump in the mainstream media, and therefore of the willingness of those
actors to succumb to such pressures.

In addition, if you understand how stratified sampling works, you can convince
yourself that it is not so difficult to skew the results in one direction
while still maintaining plausible deniability.

So why do you think the proposition that polls were systematically biased is
so unserious?

> Fake news is completely making things up.

Sure, but the professor who typed up the widely-shared hit-list of "fake" news
sites included Breitbart and Drudge Report, which are manifestly not fake news
sites.

~~~
fryguy
> So why do you think the proposition that polls were systematically biased is
> so unserious?

Two reasons. One, and the most obvious one is that the polls _weren 't_ very
far off. They had the average amount of polling error that there has been
(according to what 538 said on their podcast). The polls indicated a 3-4 point
national lead, and she ended up with a ~1 point national lead. The second is
that polling agencies have their reputations and there hasn't been any
indication from wikileaks that there was any tampering or attempted tampering.

~~~
seertaak
I think we're pretty close to agreeing. I would agree, for example, to the
statement that it is "unlikely" that the polls were systematically biased, for
the reasons you've given. If I wanted to, I could of course pick holes in your
reasons, but I think to first order you're probably right. However, please
recall that the parent comment adopted an almost mocking tone (Seriously?
Seriously?), and that's what I wanted to push back against.

So: would you agree that the proposition of systematically biased is
_unlikely_ , while also agreeing that serious people could harbour doubts
about the impartiality of said polls?

It would seem to me to be in the interest of everyone (ironically, especially
liberals, although it seems they haven't quite gotten the point yet) to
seriously investigate these allegations in light of the revelations of
Wikileaks, revelations which the mainstream media worked so hard to cover up
and discredit.

------
digi_owl
The failing in the end is that the west refuse to talk class.

We are very very happy to talk gender or race, but not class. Class is very
much forbidden.

~~~
kurttheviking
"forbidden" might be a bit strong; Pro Publica has had a variety of articles
on this over time. A recent retrospective one:
[https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-
forgotten-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-
class)

Or, was there some other aspect of class you feel is broadly unaddressed?

~~~
digi_owl
The typical mantra form the big parties in the west is a mix of "we are all
middle class" and "education fixes everything".

Thus when industry workers etc see their livelihood go out the window because
of pressures from a globalizes market, and more center-left politicians seems
willfully blind to the issue, said workers end up voting right wing. Because
although the message is at its core racist, the talking points alt least touch
of the problem of jobs etc.

------
whybroke
A parallel false equivalence: snopes sometimes makes mistakes therefore it's
as bad as breitbart.

And the idea that misinformation has no impact is the equivalent of saying
advertisement has no impact. Or propaganda.

What is happening is an attempt to cast doubt on the genuine information
sources critical to a well informed electorate. The same way doubt has been
successfully cast on climate change and natural selection. The word
'Lugenpresse' was used to do this in a previous generation.

That anyone genuinely believes the implication of this, that the entire free
press of all democracies world wide is conspiring against the American people
while Putin's press and tabloid websites are their sole champion, could not
possibly be more absurd.

------
tomohawk
The article makes it seem like a lot of these stories are just the result of
reporters being too busy. That may be, but that leaves out other reasons such
as the revolving door allowing partisan operators to run newsrooms, outright
collusion with candidates, etc. Here's a more "haha, only serious" take:

[http://freebeacon.com/culture/news-thats-fit-
fake/](http://freebeacon.com/culture/news-thats-fit-fake/)

------
throw2016
I think this is as good a time as any to reflect on the news industry and
their business model. I think the word 'news' itself is becoming somewhat
nebulous and this is important as it relates to the value that news
organizations can extract from a paying readership.

Traditionally information was power and the ability to influence large numbers
people was valuable and this unique power was what made the news industry
important and also made it prone to abuse and control.

The free press is supposed to play a critical role in a democracy but as a
business it can't perform that function and is reduced to currying favours,
pushing agendas and journalists trying to be part of an inner circle so it
can't play the role we think it plays or should play. Best case they are just
vehicles for advertisements but worst case they are colluding to manipulate
the public.

Journalists don't go out randomly on the road to get news, various government
departments, public organizations and businesses reach out and brief
reporters. 'News' comes to them. Their power has tradionally come from having
exclusive access to eyeballs which could fund having more reporters and thus
'more news' but that has become irrelevant with the internet.

I don't think people are willing anymore to pay for briefings from various
public departments and private businesses with some opinion thrown in. If it
comes free, they may choose to consume it for amusement but as a business
model or a pillar of democracy it seem the 'press' has challenges and 'news'
itself is going to need defining to give it value. And as citizens we need to
find new modes of accountability for democracy because the press can't deliver
it.

------
rektide
Reminds me of & compares decently against a post on how people deal with the
media in China: [https://medium.com/@xuhulk/watching-the-election-from-the-
po...](https://medium.com/@xuhulk/watching-the-election-from-the-post-truth-
future-97a0d66bdcfe)

------
Beltiras
Sometimes Snopes gets it wrong too. Read this article by Kevin Folta:
[http://kfolta.blogspot.is/2016/11/snopes-claims-about-
glypho...](http://kfolta.blogspot.is/2016/11/snopes-claims-about-glyphosate-
in-food.html)

~~~
vidarh
... though they've thankfully already corrected it:

[http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-
cance...](http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cancerous-
herbicide-in-food/)

------
msravi
The gist of the article is not that fake news is not the problem, but that
people have lost faith in _all_ media, including mainstream media.

> The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the
> media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer.

So basically, now, people give about as much credence to an established media
article as to a social media article - which is a good thing in my opinion,
given that established media are no longer vetting their sources as they
should, are hypocritical about their opinions, and are instead giving in to
the biases that they hold in their own echo chambers. Social media simply
provides an alternative, equally biased opinion from the opposite end.

~~~
NumberCruncher
>> So basically, now, people give about as much credence to an established
media article as to a social media article

"established media articles" are as good as FB hoaxes. Sad but true.

------
tmaly
It would probably be a pretty useful tool to be able to find which sites have
published a specific story or fact even if false just to see which news sites
are reporting it.

------
bakhy
if you'll forgive a bit of cynicism, it turns out, in hindsight, that the
correct maxim should be: "information wants to be false" ;)

------
jonathanstrange
I'm not going to comment on the same story twice. I shit, I just did.

------
verroq
Snopes always had a heavy liberal bias.

~~~
yosito
Truth always had a heavy liberal bias.

~~~
edblarney
Which is false, and why Trump won, even though he's rough-shod, crude, and
otherwise not suited to being president.

Most of MSM has a soft-left bias and a lot of it is hard left - and not in the
classical 'socialist' manner (i.e. representing working class) - they're now
fully onto race and identity issues, and enforcing PC culture.

There was an article in the Guardian today - written by a woman, lambasting
how rude and crude and disgusting the male habit of 'stag parties' (UK
bachelor parties) are. The comments section (and this is a fairly left wing
site) lambasted the author, because were the roles reversed, she'd be
chastised, she's never been to a stag, and the female version of stags are
equally as bad. But in the Guardian, they need an article every day to hate on
white men. Even their readers called them out.

Every day there is an article in the Huffington Post or the Guardian or MSNBC
that could very well be in the Onion. They are easily just as bad as anything
alt-right. But in the article - only the 'alt right' was mentioned as being of
poor quality. Again - this is obvious bias.

Fox News - at least the news items (not the commentary, which is bad) is
actually looking reasonable these days, which is shocking to me.

Watch the local news only for 10 days. You'll feel something is 'too normal'.
It's relaxing. It's just the news - that's it. Then - when you turn back to
cable news - you'll realize how full of spin and ideology it is.

The only reason I watch CNN is to try to grasp what kind of spin they are
applying, and why. CNN is soft about it (Fox and MSNBC are blatant), and
probably the trickiest, but it's there if you look for it.

~~~
mark_edward
Local news is pretty terrible for being an informed citizen. For example,
people who watch it regularly dramatically overestimate the prevalence of
crime in their local communities. This alone probably causes immense human
suffering through our injustice system and jails

------
jack9
When you alter you contradict your own fact checking to include partisan
interpretations and equivocation to bolster an agenda, you lose credibility.

Snopes is no longer a wholly credible source for fact checking when they don't
stick to facts as stated BY SNOPES. Now I have to suspect every analysis on
editorializing. Snopes provides their own custom narrative on judgement re:
[http://www.snopes.com/hillary-..](http://www.snopes.com/hillary-..).
[snopes.com] - she did laugh, she did plea bargain him out, etc. Don't say
false when it's true, but you are trying to meet your own overall conclusion.
It really soured me. Yes, the story is basically false, but the fact checking
there is factually incorrect by their own measure. Her behavior isn't all that
strange among defense attorneys (backpedal apologizing), so whatever.

That being said, the idea of "fake news" is tricky subject when real news can
be spun so hard. Facts get blurred when put together in unexpected ways to
form a new headline which is almost always to meet some agenda. On the other
hand, a news story always starts with a perceived context, so which is more
correct? The more factually correct or the more coherent/recent narrative?

~~~
tomjakubowski
Your link [http://www.snopes.com/hillary-.](http://www.snopes.com/hillary-.).
404s, FYI.

~~~
jack9
Dunno what happened.

[http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-
lau...](http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-laughed-
about-it/)

