
How Lies Spread Online - mutor
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/opinion/sunday/truth-lies-spread-online.html
======
js2
> Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his
> Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour,
> it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood
> flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be
> undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its
> Effect…

Jonathan Swift (1710)

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/)

~~~
jcl
Thanks for the quoteinvestigator link... I was likewise reminded of Terry
Pratchett's version, also mentioned there:

"A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on."

It's quite amazing that the researchers essentially quantified those idioms.
And it's also somewhat surprising that none of the idioms found their way into
the article. :)

~~~
js2
Indeed, I went looking for the version I was familiar with ("A lie gets
halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.")
in order to correctly attribute it, whereupon I discovered the source of that
version is unknown, so I quoted the Swift version since I it's centuries
older, sourced, and I liked it best after reading them all.

------
ChuckMcM
This was from March but it is a good question. It prompted me to do some spot
checks on Facebook virality and Twitter virality as well.

One of the things that stands out in false stories is that because they are
false they stay "on message" in their falseness. This contrasts with stories
that are more truthful which tend to include questions and unknowns that might
later contradict or modify the story.

So for an example, a false story about a series of events leading up to an
outcome, there are no events mentioned that suggest randomness or any
discussion of alternate ways the outcome could have come about. Where as
truthful stories have either tests that were done for counter factual
narratives or suggestions for other areas that were not covered as completely.

Basically a common theme in truthful stories was they still included
"inconvenient" facts which might or might not be significant and the false
stories contain no such facts or even hints.

If I still had an ontologist I could talk to I'd try to figure out if we score
stories using an ontological structure score (where perfect scoring is most
likely false :-).

~~~
kryogen1c
> One of the things that stands out in false stories is that because they are
> false they stay "on message" in their falseness. This contrasts with stories
> that are more truthful which tend to include questions and unknowns that
> might later contradict or modify the story.

This is the main barometer that I use to see if I live in an echo chamber or
not and orient myself in the world. The people I listen to (Rogan, Peterson,
Weinsteins, Rubin, and to a lesser extent Shapiro and Harris) tend not to
speak authoritatively except in narrow circumstances and their opponents (and
people I disagree with) tend to speak as if their opinions are self-evidently
correct and disagreement is out of the question.

Unrelatedly, another tool is to examine my mentors' critic's arguments. It is
very telling that Jordan Peterson is equally accused of being far left and far
right.

~~~
BeetleB
>This is the main barometer that I use to see if I live in an echo chamber or
not and orient myself in the world. The people I listen to (Rogan, Peterson,
Weinsteins, Rubin, and to a lesser extent Shapiro and Harris) tend not to
speak authoritatively except in narrow circumstances and their opponents (and
people I disagree with) tend to speak as if their opinions are self-evidently
correct and disagreement is out of the question.

I've found it to be a useful tool in other spheres as well.

The further you are from mainstream medicine, the greater the confidence
signaling. Doctors tend to express the least confidence, and crackpots the
most. This is why alternative medicine thrives.

------
growlist
In my observation these fact checking organisations usually fall down on the
left's side of things, so either it's predominantly the right that lies, or
the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut bad
behaviour on the left, or my perception is incorrect. Though I have to say the
whole concept of a single self-appointed authoritative source troubles me,
what with its Ministry of Truth overtones.

~~~
ajross
> the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut
> bad behaviour on the left

Could be true, I guess. Everyone has "perspective" about what is important.
That still doesn't seem to be a reason to _disbelieve_ a fact checker when
they tell you that, say, POTUS is lying, though.

> Though I have to say the whole concept of a single self-appointed
> authoritative source troubles me, what with its Ministry of Truth overtones.

There are literally multiple competing fact checking organizations. How
exactly does that have overtones of centrally enforced authority? How in
particular given that the _actual_ central authority in this country has made
a habit about calling _correct but unflattering coverage_ "lies"?

~~~
growlist
The problem I see is that unless these organisations are beyond criticism they
can always be accused of bias and all their work dismissed, and then consider
the context:

'It is impossible to overstate the degree of daily vituperation visited upon
the president in the media. Comics and actors use their non-political programs
to attack him, often to the implicit applause of the press. Virtually all
coverage outside the conservative Fox News and isolated conservative outlets
is negative, often couched in highly hostile terms. Virtually all of the
columnists at the New York Times and the Washington Post, America’s two most
respected dailies, despise Trump – and that includes nearly all of the
conservative, libertarian and Republican columnists too. Trump supporters who
follow news at all cannot escape the daily blast of negativity. This has,
predictably, hardened the attitudes of many Trump supporters.'

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/libera...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/liberals-
donald-trump-support)

~~~
ajross
You're conflating fact checkers with "the media", and sort of changing the
subject.

Can you explain again why exactly you don't trust answers you get from Snopes
or Politifact? Don't tell me what "many Trump supporters" think. Tell me why
you don't trust them.

~~~
growlist
Can you tell me why I _should_ trust them? Shouldn't we approach these
organisations that purport to be the single source of truth with extreme
scepticism?

Apart from that in my observation these organisations are not impartial, and I
think in the context of the universal anti-Trump media they are easily
dismissed as just another group suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I should make clear I don't live in the US and so have no direct stake in this
and follow it more out of curiosity/amusement than anything else. I'm not
going to try to argue Trump doesn't lie, but I think CNN etc are becoming
hysterical.

~~~
ajross
So... I see you did decide to respond.

> Can you tell me why I should trust them?

Because they have a years-long(11 for Politifact, 19 for Snopes) history of
being right. They're consistently, reliably right. So yeah, I trust them. I
trusted them under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. I trust them
now.

Maybe you are the one who needs to re-evaluate priors: maybe, just maybe, the
"universal anti-Trump media" environment is driven by some kind of objective
(heh) truth about the Trump administration's relationship with (heh, heh) the
truth, and _not_ by mere opinion. Maybe.

Bush wrecked a ton of stuff. His administration spun like crazy. They didn't
like like Trump lies. _No one ever_ has lied like Trump lies. That's not
"opinion", it just is.

~~~
growlist
You are just asserting here though aren't you? There are those that assert
just as forcefully that they are wrong. On what basis am I supposed to choose
which is correct?

As a disinterested observer it seems like every couple of weeks the media
switch to a new script in a desperate search for something that will stick:
Russia! Gun control! Sexist! Racist! Stormy Daniels! on and on yet apparently
unsuccessful thus far as polling with his base looks pretty good for him.
Perhaps it's all substantive, but even if it is I don't think the tactics are
working. Surely better to stand back a little and let Trump make himself look
foolish with his never ending ridiculous tweets?

Trump seems more conman than anything else to me, but the media would have us
believe he's the Antichrist.

------
css
Kind of annoying how they mention the journal article and then don't link to
it. Here is the actual research (paywalled):
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146.full)

~~~
shmageggy
This drives me nuts that our supposedly best publications still have not
developed the habit of linking sources, _especially_ on an article that is
concerned with spreading falsities. The irony is overwhelming.

~~~
kingbirdy
This is an op-ed so in this case I'd say it's more on the author than the
publication. In general though I agree, it'd be good to see a well cited news
source.

~~~
fireattack
The author is also one of the paper's author, maybe he intentionally wanted to
avoid link to its own publication?

------
sien
You hire Judith Miller to write about WMDs.

Then get 'quality' news to publish it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller)

The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds
of billions and thousands of lives.

~~~
bumholio
It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the
whole US government and it's intelligence agencies, as was the case with
Iraq's WMDs, to online propaganda organized by private individuals to the
benefit of various political candidates or their own online circulation.

What happened with Iraq was not just fake news, it was fake governing, it was
another order of magnitude. Miller and the NYT were just some of the many
useful idiots.

~~~
Veelox
Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?

Yes; many of the specific bases of support they pointed to had been debunked
_before_ they were publicized by, among others, UN weapons inspectors. While
it's far from _proof_ , that alone is _reason to believe_ that they were
knowingly fabricating their claims.

~~~
Veelox
Would you be able to link to a source about the UN weapons inspectors or
something similar? All I have is pretty much hearsay and I was young enough
when the towers fell that I understood "bad guys did it" but not much more.

~~~
maxxxxx
I wish I could find a TV interview with a German inspector I watched back
then. They got some super secret leads from the CIA, went to the locations and
never found anything. The response from the US was to cut them off from
information and shout even louder that they had all this bullet-proof
information.

Some links: [https://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174708587/u-n-weapons-
inspect...](https://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174708587/u-n-weapons-inspector-
looks-back-on-iraq-war) [https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-
weapons-insp...](https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-
inspections-fast-facts/index.html)

Here is something about the Iraq-Al Qaeda link they tried to proof.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-
Qaeda_li...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-
Qaeda_link_allegations)

I don't know if Bush and friends really believed their claims but if you
looked at it from a neutral point of view it was very clear that they had made
up their minds to invade Iraq and desperately tried and failed to find
evidence.

------
iamleppert
This pretty much quantifies one of my core beliefs about human behavior:
people are dishonest by nature.

The reward mechanisms for our world are clearly optimized for dishonesty and
deception. This isn’t to make some kind of statement about our culture, rather
it’s an observation about reality. Dishonesty and falsity are everywhere, and
you even find it in nature and animals.

I don’t think it has anything to do with good or bad per se, as it does with
the path of least resistance; a lie is almost always more connvienent than the
truth. People who are most successful tend to be those that are the most
dishonest and are also very good at knowing how to tell fact from fiction
which they then use to create more elaborate offensive and defensive models of
the world.

If you think about it this way it doesn’t seem that odd, as even nature and
evolution are constantly truth testing, it’s like at some level you must
assume everything is a lie until proven otherwise, and even that evidence may
itself be just a more elaborate falsehood.

People rarely go to the movies to be entertained by the truth.

~~~
fouc
Things are probably more nuanced than that. People are also honest by nature.

Telling the truth has way less cognitive load, and people generally aren't
going to be stupid enough to get stuck in weaving an elaborate net of lies
just to support that one original lie that they refuse to come clean on.

But there's also certain levels of dishonesty or lies by omission etc that
people will do at a social level. Sometimes it's even beneficial for greater
harmony between people.

I bet game theorists have studied this type of stuff quite a bit.

------
Tycho
You know what else spreads online? Truth that the mainstream media wont touch,
or would rather suppress. Take for instance this smug, misrepresentative
Washington Post editorial on a documentary about the geopolitically
significant Magnitsky Act, a film which western audiences would probably never
see if it wasn't for the internet.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/russian-agitprop-
lan...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/russian-agitprop-lands-in-
washington/2016/06/19/784805ec-33dc-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3a74c4293ce4)

------
Jerry2
After reading about all this "fake news" phenomena, I came across this TEDx
talk by Sharyl Attkisson: How Real Is Fake News? [1]. She's a former reported
for CBS News [2] and in the video, she explains where the term comes from and
what the long-term consequences are. If you have 10 min of free time, give it
a listen.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharyl_Attkisson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharyl_Attkisson)

~~~
SpikeDad
Come on. Sheryl Attkisson is now a reporter for Sinclair - the local news
equivalent of Fox. Her integrity was compromised at CBS News and it's now non-
existent.

~~~
jibal
Her talk is a carefully crafted piece of propaganda (which is consistent with
her career as a right wing ideologue who is quite selective of who and what
she chooses to investigate). The reality is that, for about 2 weeks in 2016,
the term "fake news" was used to refer to the sort of manufactured lies that
were spread by Russian bots on Facebook ... before the right wing coopted term
to refer to actual news stories from legitimate news organizations, and to
this day Trump and the right wing routinely dismiss true stories as "fake
news".

(And of course some right winger was quick to downvote this.)

~~~
dang
Please don't use HN for ideological battle.

Edit: it looks like you've been doing this a ton, as well as posting uncivil
and unsubstantive comments repeatedly. We ban accounts that do this. If you'd
please review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

------
DonaldFisk
I know the authors suggested and found some evidence for novelty being the
reason why false news is so compelling, but might it not be that it fits
whatever narrative or agenda is being promoted? You can make up whatever false
news you want, but you can't make up facts, so false news will always be more
likely to fit the narrative.

Another possible reason is that if you tell your friends something is true,
and later find out from a more reliable source that you were deceived, you
then look gullible believing it in the first place, and even if you don't tell
them, you'll _feel_ gullible unless you hang on to your original belief.

------
dredmorbius
I ran across an intance of this from a few years ago ... 1892: the J.P. Morgan
and the Bankers' Manifesto hoax.

This turned up as a meme, but it seemed a litle _too_ good to be true.

Still, the story had legs, getting passed around progressive-party newspapers
of the late 19th centuries (or at least the ones with snoozing or unscrupulous
editors who didn't denounce the author), in books, and by Charles A.
Lindbergh, Sr. (father of the aviator) on the House floor in Washington, D.C.

And in contemporary Internet memes 125 years later.

The denunciations are piquant. This from _The advocate and Topeka tribune._
(Topeka, Kan.), 14 Sept. 1892:

 _In an editorial note last week calling attention of editors of reform to the
so-called Wall street circular fake first published in the Chicago Daily
Press, we wrote that "the thing originated in the fertile brain of T. W.
Gilruth, who held a position for a time on the editorial staff of the Press."
The compositor transformed the name into Gilmore. We desire to make this
correction lest there be somebody named Gilmore who might object to the
charge, and because the fraud should be placed where it belongs. Gilruth is a
snide, and if anyone who knows him has not yet found it out, he is liable to
do so to his sorrow._

[http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-14...](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-14/ed-1/seq-6/)

That corrects an earlier account which misstated Gilruth's name:

 _The Great West and one or two other exchanges reproduce the Chicago Daily
Press fake purporting to be a Wall street circular. The thing originated in
the fertile brain of F. W. Gilmore [sic: should be T. W. Gilruth], who held a
position for a time at the Press. He has been challenged time and again to
produce the original if it is genuine, and has failed to do so. The thing is a
fraud and so is its author, and neither of them is worthy of the confidence of
the people._

[http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-07...](http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-07/ed-1/seq-6/)

I've not found another substantial examination of the particulars, so I wrote
one myself.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morgan_and_the_bankers_manifesto_of_1892_hoax/)

------
known
"Media does not spread free opinion; It generates opinion" \--Oswald,1918
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democracy,_media,_and_money)

------
JBiserkov
Mostly via HTTP(S).

------
cityzen
NPR did a similar story/podcast on fake news in June:
[https://www.npr.org/2018/06/25/623231337/fake-news-an-
origin...](https://www.npr.org/2018/06/25/623231337/fake-news-an-origin-story)

Interesting to read that fake news is just part of our culture. It seems like
a real problem now is the hyper-awereness that the internet has brought us
all.

------
trentnix
You misspelled Jayson Blair.

------
mirimir
tl;dr = lies spread faster because they're more shocking

And not, I think, just because they're more shocking. Also because they're
more interesting. And more validating. Because they simplify complexity and
ambiguity.

While it's unfair to single out NYT's role, the Iraq War was indeed a major
propaganda effort. It worked, I think, because it helped many people deal with
9/11\. But the largely unasked question has been "Whose propaganda effort?"
Except, ironically enough, for stuff that many would call "fake news" or
"conspiracy theory".

I suspect that much of the "fake news" that mainstream liberals are upset
about now is driven by Russian propaganda. Back in the day, Russia targeted
mainly the radical left. But by the mid 80s, they were focusing more on the
radical right and libertarians. And for those that remember Joseph McCarthy,
that is extremely ironic.

------
WalterBright
I'm sure the NYT's articles are never biased :-)

------
metabagel
This is not a new phenomenon.

[https://fair.org/extra/the-right-of-the-story/](https://fair.org/extra/the-
right-of-the-story/)

