
Fact-Checking Won’t Save Us from Fake News - SonicSoul
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fact-checking-wont-save-us-from-fake-news/
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drKarl
Traditional mass media (tv, radio, newspapers) have always exerted their power
to influence and even create public opinion to further an agenda. The agenda
depends on the particular media but the news are never completely objective,
always either subtly or blatantly biased in favour of some particular opinion,
political wing or thought stream. So, the same piece of news can be
interpreted with a completely opposite meaning depending on where you consume
it.

Now, with the proliferation of alternative media, not only media corporations
have the ability to create and manipulate public opinion with their skewed
view of reality, there are many other sources of information. Even
individuals, regular people, can start a blog or write news or articles and
distribute them for free or at a very low cost. That also means that organized
groups and societies, political, economical, enterpreneurial, religious or
otherwise can also create their own sources of news to advance their own
agendas. Even traditional media corporations, which have immense resources
compared to an individual, can easily create multiple blogs or sources of
news, masquerading or not as an individual.

That means that traditionally all news were biased and skewed towards some
agenda, but we knew more or less the bias of the media corporations, so we
could identify that bias in the news we consumed. But now in certain
situations it's almost impossible to identify the actors behind an individual
or seemingly individual who writes an article, or form any other source of
news, which means it is even more difficult to identify the bias of the news.

And that is only in relation to manipulation adding a bias to real news... But
of course there can also be other fake news. The thing with fake news is that
some people share or forward them without verifying them so they can spread
virally before they are debunked, and the perception of the image of someone
or some organization can be permanently damaged even after the fake news have
been debunked... But in the end they will be debunked.

Which leds me to think that fake news can be both a political (economical,
etc) weapon to attack someone's enemies using black tactics... but at the same
time they can also be created to inspire "fear" that if you consume news from
alternative channels other than the traditional mass media you can consume
fake news, in an effort to try to redirect people back to traditional mass
media as a "reliable" source of news (which we already know it's manipulative,
biased and follows an agenda).

