
Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’ - aaronbrethorst
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
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apatters
While I don't doubt that fake news is widely shared on Facebook, blaming the
outcome of the election on it seems like a convenient way to dismiss the
preferences of tens of millions of voters. It seems like there's a real effort
right now to show or at least insinuate that _fake news is the reason Trump
won._

There are so many disturbing things about that narrative I don't know where to
begin. It would require a profoundly dumber US population than I believe
exists. It would imply very cynical things about the US education system which
don't mirror my experience growing up there (I have seen truly bad education
systems overseas, and while the US could use some work, it's a paragon
compared to some others). It would require the conservatives to be much dumber
than the liberals, which just sounds like bigotry and arrogance to me. It
essentially dismisses the concerns held by Trump's supporters--who are fellow
Americans after all--which only widens the growing divide in the electorate.
And finally if you believe this idea that fake news is a serious problem which
needs to be curtailed, it almost inevitably leads to censorship mechanisms
which will be abused down the road. How do you fact check the entire Internet?
Anyone in journalism knows how much work it can be to fact check one article
and often the facts are open to interpretation, particularly in politics.

Elites in government and business are now pushing for the creation of
censorship mechanisms in order to curtail fake news, and they're hoping to get
away with it because of popular disillusionment over the results of the US
election. We really, really need to come together on this point and stop them.

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pappyo
I wonder though, how much influence fake news had on people, not help people
choose who to vote for, but to dissuade them to vote at all. A sort of
unpropaganda, if you will. This election got so far into the Tyson Zone[0]
that the headlines of fake news became hard for even well informed citizens to
parse. Fake news could have provided a chilling effect that influenced the
election.

Of course I have no data to support this, but I think it would be a
fascinating case study / sociological experiment.

[0]
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tyson%20Zone](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tyson%20Zone)

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jackweirdy
A former boss of mine used to talk about how he found economics interesting,
because unlike telling someone not do something and watching them ignore you,
with economics you can change the rules of the game so they don't want to play
any more.

"Fake news" is just another manifestation of the same old "Thirteen cat facts
you won't believe" and even "One simple tricks" we've been seeing for years.
It's economically profitable to make large amounts of people look at your
site. Until that stops being the case, all of the parasitic crap we see on the
web will continue to grow. It will grow bigger and faster, too, as more people
get connected to the web, and don't know what's "true" and what's not.

I have no concluding remark to this observation, other than get used to it,
unless you're a decision maker at Adwords, in which case pull your finger out
and realise you hold the position of power to stop this.

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jessaustin
It seems inevitable that this sort of thing soon will be mostly automated.
After all, Trump fans aren't alone in wanting to read conspiratorial
affirmations of their moronic beliefs. We'd all like that, at some level. If
any particular search engine or similar aggregation platform actually succeeds
in curbing fakenews (rather than loudly crowing about initial attempts to do
so, as in the current case), that platform will see its own popularity
decline. Nobody wants that, so this "problem" will remain "unsolved".

~~~
Natsu
It's not clear to me that anyone actually believes any of the sites mentioned.
I mean, the business model only relies on people clicking the page and seeing
ads, so in that vein, all the clickbait headlines we've ever seen on the MSM
are pretty much the same.

Given what I've seen, the body of the article is probably superfluous. Just
have a Markov chain regurgitate some utter nonsense and figure out how to
generate viral headlines.

Worse, it's not like the MSM is immune to this, either. I mean, just look at
this story: [http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-
news/](http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-news/)

The story gets worse when you look at what was found on Glenn Greenwald's
twitter:
[https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/802247437289226240](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/802247437289226240)
"No-one I've spoken to listed as "allies" on their site had even heard of them
before the WP piece."

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rokhayakebe
This is like USNews and USWeekly mags at the grocery store.

