
Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995) - DyslexicAtheist
https://twitter.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561
======
hirundo
> Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately
> predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news”

It's like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two
clocks they're always somewhat different, and so you're no longer certain of
the time, and have less faith in clocks.

Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along
with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it,
it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in
the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks.

But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I'm not at all sure that's
true of news sources.

~~~
gregmac
Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what
time it is _if it 's correct_. If you take the time to verify and/or set it
against an accurate time source, then this is no problem.

However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step,
and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting
clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to find another
clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as
"fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they _think_ the
time should be.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
In attempting to dismiss the point Bill Gates gets it partly right. 'you'll
only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who
says "Hey go read this"...', and says so as though it is some arbiter of
quality as they would have verified first.

Not that people generally verified that much anyway, but if it comes from
_people_ we trust and like we probably don't engage natural scepticism. Not
like you might if you doubted the source, or heard a wild claim on the news.
The friend has become the source, and reinforced the veracity. The sharing
model did that. It probably also explains the amplification effects of social.

So I suppose the meta question is did they pick a side, or was it picked by
the random connections within the peer group?

~~~
ggg2
not really. I migth have dozen of friends who did read, and did figure out it
was BS.

But the systems optimize for positive interactions (which generates
eyeballs/pageview/ad impressions). So even if a dozen friends dismissed
something, correctly, that one dumb Shitposter will get the word accross and
the sytem will benefit the thumbs up with a zero effort propagation (one
click) versus the critic (time to sit down, write an argument, work to have
that thumbsuped... or o HN: create an account years in the past, acumulates
karma just so you can downvote things that are actually wrong).

the incentives are the problem (advertising) not presence of wrong content
amidst good content.

~~~
WorldMaker
Relatedly, a big problem with Twitter/FB was showing the friend dismissed
content as well as the verified content, because dismissed content eyeballs is
still eyeballs on content, then making it sometimes hard to tell which was
which.

A friend might retweet on Twitter content they were dismissive about, but that
retweet would sometimes accidentally legitimize that content by removing the
dismissive context (spreading it away in readers' timelines).

Similar with FB showing you stuff friends react to or comment on; their
reactions might be Anger and their comments critical, but that context also is
still partly lost if you weren't looking for it, and sometimes intentionally
whitewashed ("x friends reacted to this" instead of "10 friends hate this, but
one kind of liked it"), in the maelstrom of the FB timeline algorithm.
(Obviously the worst case on FB up until recently was how easy it was for
people to whitewash paid ads by resharing them, losing the context of who paid
to promote that content in the first place.)

------
vanderZwan
Terry Pratchett was a news reporter before he turned writer[0], and IIRC the
latter partially happened out of frustration with how little people seemed to
care about the truth (of course, the UK tabloids have a particularly notorious
reputation here). Although I may have interpreted that last part based on Neil
Gaiman's memory of Pratchett as being a very angry man, in a good way[1]

In that light it's not that surprising that Pratchett had good insights on how
the internet would pan out: he had a very good understanding of the human side
of it, and especially a good feeling for the ways in which humanity was going
to disappoint him, and all of us.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-
site/2014/sep/12...](https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-
site/2014/sep/12/terry-pratchett-writing-dragons-at-crumbling-castle-
childrens-books)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-
pratchet...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-
angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman)

~~~
kps
Sir Terry Pratchett (OBE, GNU) was also active on Usenet. He knew ‘social
media’ first hand.

------
ghc
“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce
Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other?
That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented
as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If
it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us —
to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power
always is.”

“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are
read by educated people.”

“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle.

“Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty
comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He
takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading
articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs
about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is
our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people
who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right
already. They’ll believe anything.”

 _That Hideous Strength_ , by CS Lewis (1945)

~~~
vbuwivbiu
looks like the problem described in the last paragraph has been solved...

very weird book. Similarities with Cold Lazarus

------
schnevets
Fake news has always existed, and society builds up an immunity whenever it
evolves into a new medium. I don't see the illegitimate Wordpress-based sites
that peddle lies as any different than the National Enquirer-esque print
tabloids or radio conspiracy theorists of yesteryear. Folks who didn't grow up
with the internet may have trouble telling the difference, and even
Millennials constantly fall for biased social media outlets, but there is
already proof that the next generation is seeing through the most flagrant of
cheap tricks.

I'm not saying society is immune to propaganda, but the most blatant offenders
are a bit like a temporary illness until media consumers wise up.

EDIT: Added context from my original comment.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
Do you have evidence that historical forms of fake news and propaganda became
less effective over time?

~~~
schnevets
Outside of looking at history and saying "everything seems to work out", I
don't have much. However, there is the phenomenon of Banner Blindness
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness))
in frequent web users.

------
bmmayer1
If you read the interview, Bill Gates rightly predicted the rise of
sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell
you what is worth reading and what isn't. It's no one's fault that no one
_listens_ to those recommendations--it's just human nature to be predisposed
to confirmation bias.

But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of
authority on equal terms--is patently false today. Everyone knows how to
filter for content they should believe and content they shouldn't. The only
problem is, everyone's opinion of what is 'fake' is different.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It's no one's fault that no one listens to those recommendations

People do, in fact, listen to the recommendations.

Those gatekeepers, however, are just as heavily biased as the “news sources”,
which themselves are actually just gatekeepers for freelance writers and press
release mills.

Whatever point in the network is influential is, obviously, the highest value
target for corruption, and more layers of gatekeepers with no greater inherent
resistance to corruption don't change anything.

> But Pratchett's claim--that all information would have the same veneer of
> authority on equal terms--is patently false today.

No, it's not.

> Everyone knows how to filter for content they should believe and content
> they shouldn't.

Yeah, everyone knows how to select the gatekeepers that reinforce their
preconceived biases.

------
imtringued
Fake news has always existed. The only difference between today and hundreds
of years ago is who had the most reach. Back in the past only the church and
royalty had the power to spread (fake) news. Nowadays anyone can go on social
media and do the same.

~~~
blancheneige
> Back in the past only the church and royalty had the power to spread (fake)
> news.

How so? Do you have an example in mind?

I can think of a lot of fake news or misleading propaganda deliberately
disseminated by seditious and revolutionary groups during the French and
American revolutions.

~~~
manfredo
The church and royalty had power to arbitrarily execute those that spoke out
against them. Inquisition against heretics is one example.

~~~
blancheneige
You're stretching the definition of fake news to encompass instances that
would otherwise not fit. Parent also states that _only_ the church and the
royalty had such power. If we are going to extend the definition of fake news
to include defamation and false accusations, then the church hardly had a
monopoly on the matter since they often responded to such allegations when
spread by the commoners.

The overwhelming majority of such cases started as tips or accusations of
indulging in superstition (at best) or poisoning and murder (at worst). If
false, they would in fact be a prime example of fake news spread by the lower
class. The case against Galileo or other re-interpretations of the Bible are
outliers if you read actual trial and testimonies.

Therefore I re-iterate my question: what concrete example(s) support OP's
assertion regarding this exclusive power of fake news dissemination?

~~~
manfredo
I suppose if you're really want to be pedantic this wasn't _completely_
limited to the church and monarchs. If enough people in a village wanted to
suppress some information, or promulgate some falsehood, they could intimidate
others into compliance. Plenty of Italian city-states had power structures
more centered around wealthy merchants rather than nobility. So sure, it
wasn't _entirely_ limited to the church and nobility. But the church and
nobility were undoubtedly in the most effective positions to carry out such
deception.

The key observation is that when communication technology is primitive, then
the ability to spread information is limited to a handful of people. Namely,
those that either have the social position to spread their interpretation of
the world and what is happening in it, or those that have the power to
intimidate and force people into silence or compliance. Throughout much of
history, this was religion (easy to spread information when people go to one
of your institutions every Sunday, and your priests make up a huge portion of
literate society) and the nobility (you control the armed forces and have more
or less unilateral control over employment them).

And on a side note, I don't see why false accusations of crime or violation of
social norms don't count as fake news. Such accusations are probably some of
the most common instances of fake news.

~~~
blancheneige
It's not being pedantic to point out that OP's assertion was false. Especially
given the context of the thread.

>The key observation (...)

That was not his/her key observation though. I'm happy to argue with this one
(anti-monarchist and anti-clerical libeling and propaganda has been a well-
established business for centuries), but I was hoping someone could provide
concrete examples regarding the original point instead of alluding to ill-
defined historical events in the hope that the hazy understanding and possible
bias of the reader would fill up the void. Very fake news-esque way of making
a point by today's standard ;)

>And on a side note, I don't see why false accusations of crime or violation
of social norms don't count as fake news. Such accusations are probably some
of the most common instances of fake news.

Sharing overlap while having disjoint components does not make two definitions
equal. Especially for an anachronistic term that's awkwardly trying to be
applied retroactively in the present discussion. There already exist well-
defined terms for what you are referring to, why not call them that.

~~~
manfredo
> That was not his/her key observation though. I'm happy to argue with this
> one (anti-monarchist and anti-clerical libeling and propaganda has been a
> well-established business for centuries), but I was hoping someone could
> provide concrete examples regarding the original point instead of alluding
> to ill-defined historical events in the hope that the hazy understanding and
> possible bias of the reader would fill up the void. Very fake news-esque way
> of making a point by today's standard ;)

This isn't "anti-monarchist" or "anti-clerical". This is just the way the
world worked before civil rights and the importance of objectivity developed
as a concept. The Romans claimed the Carthaginians sacrificed children to
their gods. Archaeological evidence found that most sacrifices were animals,
and the small minority of human remains were newborn children (likely
stillborn children) and the claims of child sacrifice are believed to be a
blood libel. Greek historians provided impossibly high figures for some
battles (e.g. claiming that Darius invaded Greece with a million soldiers).
Many of the histories of battles in the Punic wars are believed to be
inflated. Not surprising given that our main source, Polybius, was a client of
the Scipios who were renowned for victories against Carthage as these larger
numbers aggrandize their fame. Roman writers also claimed that the Huns were a
barely-human race that could hardly speak, and were essentially animalistic
(Greek and Roman writers actually wrote this about most nomadic people). I
suppose none of us really know how the Huns behaved, but I highly doubt they
would have managed to conquer much of Europe if they really were as described.
A Byzantine emperor claimed to have defeated an incursion along the Danube
that had large numbers of women fighting as soldiers who he paraded back in
the capital (highly suspected that he captured female noncombatants and made
up the story of them fighting to make his victory more exotic; there is no
credible evidence of women fighting in any organized capacity before the
modern era). Snorri, one of our primary sources on viking-age Scandinavians,
is widely believed to have exaggerated pagan Scandinavians' violence, as he
was a christian write and wanted to paint a contrast between the savage pagan
Scandinavians and comparatively civil ones after conversion. Do I really need
to go on?

In premodern times, the ability to communicate information broadly and record
information was highly exclusive. Those that had this exclusive power often
used it for their own gain. This is something that every responsible historian
is aware of, and views many claims with suspicion especially if there's a
potential motivation for bias in the author. I am very surprised to see this
claim being called "fake news-esque". This is something I thought every high-
school graduate was aware of.

> Sharing overlap while having disjoint components does not make two
> definitions equal. Especially for an anachronistic term that's awkwardly
> trying to be applied retroactively in the present discussion. There already
> exist well-defined terms for what you are referring to, why not call them
> that.

True "fake news" is an awkward thing to apply to premodern times, since the
idea of "news" is a highly modern concept. But it's perfectly clear that the
people in this comment chain are using the term to refer to misinformation,
particularly intentionally spread misinformation that benefits the one
spreading it.

------
moomin
I remember many years ago a journalist at The Register asking Tim Berners-Lee
how his semantic web proposals were going to deal with spam.

TBL again, just didn’t get it, because he didn’t see the world through a
social lens. The problem of “tag spam” was already pretty prevalent when the
question was asked.

Same article has Bill Gates completely correctly predict the death of VHS and
DVD and them being supplanted by something like Netflix/Amazon Video. He was
plenty visionary, he just had a technologists lens.

~~~
ljf
I read years ago - that Bills Gates/Microsoft backed HD-DVD as a disrupter for
Blu-ray - betting in the long term that video streaming would win out - but
not wanting Blu-ray to get too much of a handhold.

~~~
WorldMaker
They were also worried about Sony holding all the cards in video manufacturing
with Blu-Ray. DVD was primarily "owned" by Toshiba with a variety of patents
spread around a consortium of manufacturers. Sony had all the tech and patents
and DRM control in Blu-Ray and were at risk of a dominating monopoly. HD-DVD
did at least push Sony to spread more of the patent rights and DRM controls
around to other manufacturers and create a (slightly) more open consortium
than if there hadn't been a fight at all.

------
ebg13
There's always something magical about the naïveté of thinking that technology
can solve people. Bill Gates understood business and technology. Terry
Pratchett understood people. Gates is literally arguing in favor of filter
bubbles here without the clarity to realize that those bubbles go both ways.

~~~
theoh
I think you are exaggerating the expertise of both men. Gates was successful,
but that doesn't mean he had rock-solid knowledge of all aspects of business
and technology. Pratchett wrote humorous fiction, but that doesn't make him an
expert on sociology.

Pratchett's comment didn't require a lot of insight to come up with—it's just
the (essentially reactionary) observation that publishing on the internet is a
free-for-all. And Gates correctly observed that ranking systems like HITS (or
PageRank) would recreate, online, the way information sources gain authority
in the offline world.

The fake news problem has nothing to do with the web's openness—it thrives on
FB. Offline, and independent of the web, the narrative Fox pushes is arguably
very close to fake news as well. Neither Pratchett nor Gates displayed
significant insight into the that kind of political problem.

~~~
dTal
And I think you're being a little unfair to Terry. Sure, he wrote humorous
fiction, but his grasp of human behavior is the source of much of the
observational humor of his books. They are, essentially, spoofs of society.

~~~
theoh
This is like the argument that comedians who make funny jokes about human
nature must therefore have good insight into politics. Anyone who watches
comedy knows that the ability to be funny doesn't equate to having a good
analysis of the situation.

------
dejv
Terry Pratchett wrote a book about newspappers that is even more relevant in
current age of social media. It is called The Truth.

------
crisper
Public enemy warned us too!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQaVIoEjOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQaVIoEjOM)
1:38

------
gdubs
There’s a great book on the counterculture roots of personal computing and the
internet by John Markoff. [1] Arguably we are in some ways living through the
end result of a thought experiment conceived by a bunch of LSD tripping
hippies in the 60s: “what if we wired a billion brains together? That’d be far
out, right?”

Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was
promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of
this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a
“bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum.

Just interesting to think about in historical context.

1:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said)

~~~
bcaa7f3a8bbc
I also strongly recommend you to read _From Counterculture to Cyberculture:
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism_ by
Fred Turner [0] together with _What the Dormouse Said_. The two books are
really an eye-opener and revealed how everything connected together.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_(author)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Turner_\(author\))

> Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was
> promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of
> this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a
> “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum.

Yes! Recently, David Perell wrote an excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the
Hell is Going On?" [1], which examines and analyzes the current chaos in
politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the
transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and
part of the article has a similar argument just like mine.

[1] [https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-
on](https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on)

\---

It's interesting to see that the personal computing and the Internet was
envisioned by our pioneers as an open, peer-to-peer, decentralized structure,
and they hope to bring the world to a freer and more egalitarian future
(Cyber-utopianism). They were the people who laid out the crucial groundwork
of everything (PC, Web, microchips, crypto, etc) throughout the 70s.

In the 80s, this Cyber-utopianism evolved into Cyberdelic
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic))
and cyberpunk, computer was seen as the new LSD. The cyberpunks of the 1980s
and 1990s embraced technology and the hacker ethics. They believed that the
Internet could help human beings overcome limits, liberating us from authority
(crypto-anarchism) and even enabling us to transcend space, time, and body
(transhumanism).

Later, a group of entrepreneurs absorbed this idealism (see the early Wired
magazine, it was fascinating!) and transformed it into the Californian
Ideology
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology))
and created the dotCom bubble in the 90s, finally bringing us to the present
world.

But if we compare the original vision to the web dominated by Silicon Valley
today, one would say that the Valley already betrayed this vision at large.
What the FAANG empire have claimed to do, is not what they were/are actually
doing. ( _On the bright side, the Free Software Movement succeed, and the
Electronics Frontier Foundation is still going strong, but both with little
influence compared to the megacorps._ )

What happened?

Ideologically speaking, the most straightforward explanation is that the
idealism has been sold out to corporations and capitalism for profit. I think
this idea is fine and it can explain a lot, but this is a cliche and there's
enough criticisms based on this approach that one could found online, so I
will stop here and explain it from other perspectives.

Technologically speaking, the whole thing didn't come without warnings _from
the inside_. The first warning came in 1984, from the Free Software Movement
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_movement)),
it said the objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if the software
running on a computer grants freedoms to users, otherwise it would create a
dystopia instead; The second warning came from the Cypherpunks Movement
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk))
in the late 80s, it said objectives of cyber-utopianism is only attainable if
the computer and network systems are explicitly designed to preserve the
security and privacy of the users by utilizing cryptography, otherwise it
would create a dystopia instead; the third warning came in late 1990s, from
Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Common movement. He wrote a book
called "Code is Law"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_and_Other_Laws_of_Cybersp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_and_Other_Laws_of_Cyberspace)),
arguing the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically have the liberating properties
by itself (envisioned by the original utopianist), but it was actually an
effect created by the running code. Whoever controls the code can completely
reshape the cyberspace and transform it to a dystopia instead, we must make
sure that our democracy, freedom, human rights is coded properly into the
computer programs, to achieve this, the government must enforce heavy
regulations of the code and the Internet by passing strict laws. This is
controversial, but he got the idea (the "cyberspace" doesn't automatically
have the liberating properties by itself, we must implement them explicitly),
just like the free software hackers or the Cypherpunks. But unfounately,
neither solution has been implemented at a large scale.

Finally, I would try replying to the original question: why do we have a
problem of "Fake News" newadays? I believe part of the answer is the
limitation of all the elitism from the forementioned things. The ideology of
the Internet, more or less, _has an element of populism_. People believed we
could change the world by empowering the individuals by freeing computing
powers from institutions to the people, and connect them via the Internet,
eventually, we can create...

> _a postpolitical, non-hierarchical society made possible by cyberware, in
> which the computer-literate, super-intelligent, open-minded, change-
> oriented, self-reliant, irreverent free-thinker is the norm and the person
> who is not internetted and does not think for him or herself and does not
> question authority is the "problem person"._

And it looked pretty good: things appeared to be moving to this direction -
the emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early
online commmunities such as The WELL
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL))
or Usenet all seemed to prove this point. This was seen as the case even
before 2010, when we had the Occupy Movement and The Arab Spring.

But it turns out,

1\. It was the populism of the elites. Yes, they were revolutionary, they
wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society.
Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the
1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings,
and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism played a
positive role, it bought us the free software movement, for example. But after
all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, the same
populism would stop playing the original positive role.

2\. The development of the Internet was done in the beginning of globalization
and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism. From the 1980s to 2007, the world
was following this trend, so there was no major social conflicts that
contradicted the idealism of the Internet manifested itself through the web.
When the middle east politics started getting destabilized, people celebrated
because the revolution was liberal. There was even the "cute cat theory of
digital activism", which says when there are funny memes involved, people are
more likely to join the political protest of Internet freedom. And it was seen
as a good thing - a faceless dictatorial government was overthrown by lolcat.
Isn't it the miracle of the postmodern Internet?

But post-2010, this world order started to disintegrate. Now it's clear, that
"The Internet is an inherently platform of democracy and equality, which
empowered the individuals to be free from the establishment", this narrative
from the 80s has been proven to be wishful thinking. This is when the entire
thing started to get out of control.

Now it has been clear that ANY idea, can by popularized and supported by a
free Internet. Now in the current age of deglobalization and political and
economic failure, naturally, extreme post-truth and nationalistic ideas are
getting more and more popular support, just like the Arab Spring, both was
supported by a number of people who were frustrated by the status quo.

I guess this is how we suddenly got the "Fake News" in recent years. It was
simply because the world politics created a big market of the reactionary
populism, and the web is the best tool to sell it. It wasn't a significant
problem because the market was not as big as today.

The grassroot nature of the Internet started to revolt against its own
founding principle, democracy and equality, which made the grassroot nature of
the Internet possible in the first place.

------
haberman
I think they both missed the mark.

Pratchett says: "there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any
bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up." But that's not really
true. It's not hard to evaluate fantastical claims by cross-checking them with
other sources.

What I think both men missed is that people would be happy to believe fake or
misleading news _without_ cross-checking it if it reinforced their world view.

------
zzzeek
Gates was right, there are authorities that are curating this information.
Unfortunately the authorities are called Facebook and they do not give a fuck.

------
jordigh
I think it's extremely important to remember what "fake news" is. It's not
misleading reporting, it's not yellow journalism, it's not honest errors in
reporting, it's not rumours.

Fake news is fraudulent websites passing themselves as other news sources
reporting the craziest Onion-like fabrications out of whole cloth with the
hopes of swaying public opinion. Fake news is about a site with a domain name
like cnnews.com or abcnewstoday.com with the same logo as ABC news or CNN,
making up stories, with no pretense of reality, with hopes of getting shared
on Facebook. The term was coined in 2016 to refer to all of the fake news
websites that were popping up during the US election cycle.

But by the time people recognised these fake news websites and Trump got a
hold of them, he didn't bother trying to understand what fake news was and
nobody else did. He said, no fake news, no fake news, you're fake news, and
now everyone thinks that fake news is something we've had forever.

No, fake news is a very recent phenomenon, requiring domain squatting and
social media to proliferate. It's not the same kind of problem as before. We
already had names and discussions of things like slant, editorial oversight,
propaganda, gossip, and errata. Fake news should not be lumped with all of
those.

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

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macspoofing
Lucky guess. I wouldn't put any stock into Pratchett's ability to predict the
future. In 90s there was no way to predict how the internet would shape out
and what challenges we would struggle with, and which ones were non-issues.
The flip side of Pratchett prediction is Krugman's famous statement that the
internet would not have a bigger effect on the economy than the fax machine.
He was obviously hilariously wrong, but when he made that prediction he
_could_ have been right.

Closer to home, I see people making all kinds of predictions on the great
impact that cryptocurrencies will have but it's also reasonable to think they
are a fad. We'll see.

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LifeLiverTransp
The reason fake news can still propagate, is because we have no "Vouching"
system, by which a citizen can vouch for a piece of information -or even
another citizen/organisation.

Where there inheritance of trust, and one weak link in this chain, the social
media plattforms would be very quiet.

Advertising - beyond local, would not be seen. Seeing all content equally,
would be a active choice against this model.

The truth is, we could return to this medieval world, where the wise men vouch
for information given, or proofs of work vouch for the information, or
publishers pay you a cent for reading.

But the powers that be would be undone by this. Thus it will not happen,
unless integrated sneakily into a add blocker.

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gopher2
Fake news is a pendulum. Now we have it, we start to know what it is, we start
to understand how it's created and distributed. Things can start swinging the
other way. But this takes time.

If you really wanted to end fake news and had unlimited time and money, a
great way to do it would be to publish as much completely fake news as
possible, so that people figure out that they need to use reputable, trusted
sources, or end up a fool. Out of money, out of time, and that what they
believed after learning about it on a Facebook group or reddit was wrong.
People learn from painful experiences the most, unfortunately. So some people
have learned from Trump getting elected. Others haven't learned, some probably
won't. It's very easy to be fooled.

If you think of fake news like a virus, then publishing more fake news acts
kind of like an anti-virus. Distributing a version of the problem that is
easier for the immune system to detect and combat and won't kill anyone - to
inoculate against the real thing.

Bill Gates is right. He's just early.

~~~
shadofx
Painful experiences that are the direct result of believing fake news simply
gets misattributed to something totally irrelevant after consuming more fake
news. People don't like admitting that they're gullible.

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argd678
The internet increased the synchronization of what people believe at what
time, fake or real. It’s like around the world everyone knows the same 30 news
stores every day and has one of just a few standard opinions about them. That
then influences what a huge number of people think and do in all aspects of
their lives at the same time. I think before it was more out of sync at what
time people knew something and that knowledge started affecting what they do.

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flattone
Bill forgot to measure the variety of types of character available to the net,
which in my current view are a significant contributor to the more alarming
instances of fake-news gaining its recent traction.

'Variety of character' example thought process 'this seems totally against all
common accepted knowledge but im feeling unique, im going to run with this
information as very true.'

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moocowtruck
lets be real here, isn't it obvious that where there is freedom to do and say
what you want in a setting anonymously or even not...a high chance of fake
news. Lets be realistic fake news is not new, its just spreads faster on the
internet. People have used fake news all throughout history to drive agenda.

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c3534l
I love that Bill Gates thought fake news wouldn't be a problem because Clippy
would tell you what to believe.

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wyldfire
> You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in
> their index it will mean something.

Sad, but true. Gates was right: Facebook and other mediums propagate
misinformation. By virtue of it appearing on FB, it _does_ mean something,
just not something necessarily beneficial.

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jaggednad
So did vernor vinge in his sci fi book A Fire Upon the Deep, which is worth a
read regardless

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ocschwar
ocschwar in 1996 would have sided with Bill Gates too, albeit for different
reasons.

In 1996 we were seeing disinfo activists (such as Holocaust denialists) trying
to emerge from the margins and turn Usenet into their space, and being pushed
back into the margins where they belonged.

Now, we have Twitter, which honestly makes Usenet look like a golden age of
enlightened discourse.

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primitivesuave
To anyone interested in a compelling analysis of fake news since the invention
of the printing press, Niall Ferguson’s most recent book The Square and the
Tower is an excellent read.

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AnthonyWnC
Fake news has been with us for a long time.. Along with various
religions/churches and superstition/customs, humans had always believed in
various level of fake things.

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johnchristopher
why is there a video of the LotR on autoplay o_O ? It's getting ridiculous.

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inflatableDodo
Terry Pratchett -

> _' OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I
> decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely
> responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it
> goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any
> piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on.
> There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It's all
> there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it
> or whether someone has just made it all up.'_

Bill Gates -

> _' Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will
> have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their
> index it will mean something. For all practical purposes there'll be an
> infinite amount of text out there and you'll only recieve a piece of text
> through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or
> a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular
> expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll
> point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way you can
> check on someone's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the net
> than it is in print today.'_

Well, it appears that a children's comedy novelist had more insight into this
subject than the guy who ran Microsoft. How would Bill's mystical reputation
system deal with this?

edit - I did not think that calling Pratchett a children's comedy novelist
would raise so much ire. I think there might be one or two books of his I have
not (yet) read and I am currently in a mania of fear and excitement over
whether Sky will do justice to 'Good Omens' in the upcoming TV series.

For those who think I am denigrating Pratchett in some way by the description,
I am put in mind of the quote from C.S. Lewis - _“A children 's story that can
only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”_

~~~
pteraspidomorph
Children's comedy novelist?

~~~
inflatableDodo
One of the best children's comedy novelists to have ever put ink to paper, in
my opinion.

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dejaime
Fake news have existed for millennia. This is so stupid.

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dang
Url changed from [https://www.nme.com/news/film/terry-pratchett-warned-bill-
ga...](https://www.nme.com/news/film/terry-pratchett-warned-bill-gates-fake-
news-back-90s-2502712#SUaW1AkKV2tYhwei.99), which points to this.

------
techntoke
Reminds me of that time I worked at Microsoft and they grabbed datasets from
social media to be processed by GPUs to ensure that their brand reputation was
strong.

TLDR: Microsoft uses bots and other means to try to control narratives and
opinions on social media.

