
How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study - dudisbrie
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=B3AA27688CB9AB211A9616FDF1273E32&gwt=pay
======
okreallywtf
First off this is terrifying. Additionally I was realizing the other day I
thought of another reason fake news might resonate so quickly with people that
doesn't get brought up as much (not that I think I've had a novel idea of
course, it probably isn't true or has been brought up and I haven't seen it):
fake news has little nuance.

Its part of what I think makes conspiracy theories so attractive, they give
the impression that no matter what else is going on, someone is in control and
things happen for a reason. I think the alternative that nobody is in control
at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people).

I don't think it is entirely that fake news fits into your own viewpoint
already, I have some "friends" on facebook that sometimes share fake-right
news that aren't even really right wing, they are just kind of gullible (I
hate to say that but they also fell for the fake wireless-charger video going
around. Luckily that one was a little easier to debunk). The fake news would
be so simple and digestible, without any nuance or subtlety that it might
subconsciously be immediately favored over a more nuanced story. I don't
dispute any of the other analyses going around but I think the simplicity of
fake news can't be ignored and we need to remind our friends and family that
the world is complex and very few stories are so straightforward.

~~~
devoply
> I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary
> for some people (maybe all people).

But that's not true either, those two are not the only possibilities. The fact
is that what happens in the world is usually due to the collective action of
many different people and groups, with converging and diverging opinions. It's
something like vector math, the resultant vector determines direction of
decision making. The mass narrative which has been sold is that no one is in
control, and things just happen. Which is also not true. Implicit conspiracy
is common, when those interests converge.

The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer working.
HALP! Or maybe mass propaganda techniques have been democratized. HALP!

~~~
cryoshon
>The headline might as well as be mass propaganda techniques no longer
working. HALP!

i read the opposite: the propaganda technology known as "clickbait" has become
so widely disseminated that truth or factual information can't compete because
it doesn't translate as smoothly.

the truth and the facts are always a bit less streamlined, and are always
presented in a slightly more complex way-- slightly more cognitively
expensive. the human mind takes the easy path whenever it can.

~~~
devoply
Human brain is easily hijacked by memes, propagandists have been doing it for
a century, now the masses are doing it too -- and they are mad (are the masses
mad? or the propagandists? why not both? what's the truth? i don't know!).

Richard Dawkins on memes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRggkkAIC5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRggkkAIC5A)

For instance this meme sunk Howard Dean's campaign:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwkNnMrsx7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwkNnMrsx7Q)

Dan Quayle and the potato incident:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdqbi66oNuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdqbi66oNuI)

------
ttam
The amount of attention that fake news are receiving from traditional media
_AFTER_ the elections is astonishing... almost as if they wanted to blame fake
news for the results of the election and the failure of their own forecast

Why were they not so active about this phenomenon during elections? I doubt
they were unaware of it since even I saw many tweets that were obviously fake

~~~
andrepd
Hindsight is 20/20, and that applies to everyone. Sorry to say, but not all
journalist are incompetents like you suggest. Yeah of course after Trump "won"
the election you can say "yeah of course he did it was so obvious, how come
none of those stupid journalists could see it" yadda yadda. Same thing for
this fake news phenomenon. Did _you_ realize it was happening before Trump won
the election and gave us all a rude wake up slap?

~~~
xnull2guest
I both realized:

1) Trump had a significant chance of winning because of a disgruntled American
public voting against establishment candidates (the same reason Obama himself
was elected in 2008).

2) There was "fake news" before the election.

Indeed, I know a number of additional things.

3) Right now there is a crisis in faith and credibility in the US domestic
news. The reason for this is that the official narrative across the media
industry - much of it literally state propaganda - has been consistently
proving hallow and unreliable. People are continually confused, and their
attentions are jerked around as the media needs the public to be
outraged/motivated/mobilized at each subsequent juncture.

4) There is huge amounts of fake news and misinformation INSIDE the industry.
If you want to focus on Trump rather than national security and propaganda,
take the ubiquity of the "search terms spike for how to move to Canada after
Trump won primaries" with absolutely no coverage giving the context that
Canada had on that day finally passed a long-in-revision piece of legislature
revising US-to-Canada patriation and such search terms would have spiked
regardless of the candidate in the US primaries. (Trump is not and never was a
candidate for president that I would endorse.)

5) The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of
misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as
sole sources.

~~~
trobertson
> the official narrative across the media industry - much of it literally
> state propaganda - has been consistently proving hallow and unreliable.

> The "fake news" surge is a grasp by establish monopolistic forms of
> misinformation distribution to maintain their domination and credibility as
> sole sources.

This is exactly it. The following google trends graph makes this obvious:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=fake%20news](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=fake%20news)

------
exolymph
I agree with something Ben Thompson said on his podcast Exponent — fake news
is a problem intimated tied to Facebook as a platform and the filter bubbles
that most people create for themselves. This material functions less as news,
per se, and more as performative identity affirmation.

~~~
noobermin
Somewhat true. There was a bit of this in the blogger bubbles of the 2000s
too, but facebook does bring it to a larger audience.

------
narrator
It's funny how the next big idea for the news media to get on board with
starts at the New York Times and then filters it's way down the food chain
through the less influential newspapers, CNN, and other mainstream news
outlets, etc. It's sad that nobody is coming up with their own material much
any more among the big networks. The agenda is set and it's all just a bunch
or mstaphorical retweets.

It's like there's some board somewhere that comes up with the next big thing
we are going to try and sell to the American people on and they publish it in
the NYT and then the whole mainstream dutifully jumps on board and it gets
pushed and pushed by all the networks until they give up or they move onto
something else.

Searching news archives, one could build a nice directed timeline of the
genesis and bloom through the media of these regular campaigns.

~~~
birken
The NYT seemingly has written a well supported and fact checked story
explaining how a verifiably false tweet from a person with few followers
spread far and wide.

What exactly is being pushed on the American people?

~~~
cryoshon
>What exactly is being pushed on the American people?'

what about that time the NYT pushed the iraq war

or that time they pushed hillary clinton

or that time they pushed (insert whatever their paid PR "article" of the
second is pushing for)

~~~
woodruffw
If I remember correctly, the NYT published a written apology for their role in
popularizing the invasion of Iraq. Newspapers make mistakes, recognize them,
and apologize publicly. That's journalistic ethics.

They were also forwards about their editorial support for HRC, having declared
her their candidate well before she became the presumptive DNC nominee. You
might not like the fact that pro-HRC opinion pieces made their way to the top,
but there's no ethical dilemma there either.

~~~
mythrwy
There's not an ethical dilemma in pushing a candidate but an issue of trust.
Lots of people don't trust Hillary. So when a publication goes out it's way to
pump her up and writes biased hit pieces on the opposition are people who
mistrust Hillary going to trust the publication?

The point is, you can't argue why people should trust you rather than the
opposition. You have to provide reasons for them to do so.

It would be like building an app that wasn't getting positive reception and
then trying to argue or shame people into liking it rather than giving people
what they want. It plain doesn't work.

People want to know what is going on. Tell them to the best of your ability.
Don't couch it in spin, don't support sides, don't appear biased. That is how
you establish a reputation of trust. It's not a matter of what is legal or
ethical in this case at all.

~~~
mythrwy
The irony of attempting to "argue" with my point is incredibly hilarious. I
would suggest suspending ideological preference for a moment and re-reading my
post.

It's about trust and human nature. Not nitpicking details to try to "prove"
you are right. You will never win what you are trying to win like this. Ever.

But since you asked here is a sample:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/politics/donald-
trump-w...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/politics/donald-trump-
women.html?_r=0)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-
trump-w...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-
women.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-
donal...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donald-
trump.html?ribbon-ad-
idx=2&rref=politics&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&pgtype=article)
(the implication being of course that Trump is tied to racism).

Now lets oppose the outrage above with the treatment of Hillary's behavior.

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/27/us/politics/wh...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/27/us/politics/what-
we-know-about-hillary-clintons-private-email-server.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/us/politics/hillary-
clinto...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/us/politics/hillary-clinton-
fbi.html)

Look guys... it's not an ideological thing here. But you can't behave like
this and have people who support a different ideology take you seriously.
That's a simple fact.

When this happens people will get their information from elsewhere.

Last I have to say about this. Think about it or not. But I don't intend to
argue.

~~~
woodruffw
Debate isn't ironic, and it's not productive to laugh at people who want to
reason with you.

I'm not sure what you mean by "trust and human nature". These seem to be self-
evident (read: mostly rhetorical), and not directly in conflict with what I've
said.

I'm also not sure what details I've nitpicked. I pointed out a case that I
thought you might consider a hit piece, and explained why dulling it down to
just that has a chilling effect on journalism as a whole and operates against
the public interest.

The articles you linked portray Trump in a negative light. Is the conclusion
supposed to be that HRC must be portrayed in an _equally_ negative light? It's
odd to have to say this, seeing how I'm not a particular fan of hers, but the
media cannot treat circumstances as equals when they are definitively _not_
equal. There is no modern analog to what _either_ candidate has in their
closets, but to equivocate between them via this fact alone is, bluntly,
bewildering.

I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, and I hope you revisit this
conversation (or perhaps the thoughts behind it) at a later point without
immediately defaulting to a defense against "ideology".

------
psychometry
Americans apparently don't learn how to think in their many years of
compulsory schooling. They can apparently be shown pictures of unmarked buses
and be told to believe anything you want. I really don't know how you combat
that. How can you try to show these people the truth when they don't have the
capacity to discern fact from fiction?

~~~
noobermin
It isn't just that people aren't critical in their thinking, they just tend to
be _more critical_ in their thinking about things that violate their
experience (read: things they disagree with) than things that they expect.

For example, are you critical of the floor being solid when you get out of
bed? You probably wouldn't spend extra milliseconds contemplating they
hardness of the floor. Now let's say you get up and the floor is wet. You
might take a moment thinking about what happened, looking up at the ceiling,
whether the dog peed, did someone spill water, etc.

That is an extreme example, but many people find it very difficult to
critically analyze everything they come in contact with. It _helps_ immensely
that things like political opinions are controversial, so we are at least
aware of other possibilities, but it is still very difficult to accept
something that contradicts what is established in our minds, even when that
which is established is wrong. So it isn't just that we need to be critical,
it is we must be somewhat critical[0] of even things we believe when there is
at least some doubt to their validity.

[0] I actually wouldn't call this being critical, but rather, being open-
minded to being incorrect.

------
tmaly
read Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying. He lays out the bigger manipulation of
the media. False blog posts get picked up by slightly bigger media sites. Then
larger sites like Huffington post pick the story up. There is no validation of
these stories.

------
mythrwy
In the absence of real news fake news will flourish. (turns out nature does
indeed abhor a vacuum).

Censorship isn't a workable answer. The answer is for mainstream media to
attempt to regain credibility by providing non-biased reporting and leaving
off the propaganda.

This isn't an ideological statement either so please don't misconstrue. If you
prefer, think of it as a strategy.

BTW.. I'm personally am sick of the "fake news" whining. I suspect I'm not
alone in this. If it was a problem it was a problem a year ago.

I generally don't agree with Zuckerburg but in this case I do. Fake news
didn't win the election. So please just stop it. Threatening forms of
censorship isn't going to win more respect. Try behaving respectfully.

_Last article about fake news I intend to ever read or comment on_

------
Jerry2
"Fake News" is a Orwellian double-speak for alternative news.

Mainstream media lost its grip on propaganda and now they're trying to push
for censorship of opposing views (this past election is the proof of that).
Read this interview with the founder of Snopes for the background of this [0].

Never mind the fact that "real news" organizations have been caught lying so
many times and have collaborated, behind the closed doors, with Hillary's
campaign, for example. [1]

And they're also grouping WikiLeaks under the "fake news" category as well. I
guess that's the punishment for exposing how corrupt the mainstream media
really is.

[0] [https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-
not...](https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not-the-
problem-4ca4852b1ff0)

[1] [http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-
hit-l...](http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-hit-list-of-
fake-news-sites/)

~~~
noobermin
The article is specifically about an event which was a mistake. Perhaps they
are making a larger statement about alternative media by posting that, but
that wasn't the point of the article.

~~~
beaner
I think the commenter is addressing the overall implication of the article
(that "fake news" is common and widespread) rather than the specific instance
they're investigating. If this was a one-off, it's not really newsworthy.

~~~
noobermin
You're right. I think the article might be casting doubt on the sources after
reddit which carried the story, but I feel the main issue the article
addresses is false news _stories_ , not the credibility of news _sources_ ,
which Jerry2 seems to be talking about.

------
xnull2guest
I remember reading a great deal on Judith Miller, the Iraqi National
Conference, and the selling of the fake news out of (originally) the New York
Times that propagandized the American public into invading Iraq.

There's a number of ways that state narration becomes viral. The contacts that
officials have with the media (the DNC leaks about media contacts pales in
comparison to how the industry and government function together on a larger
scale) coordinate messages, themes and ideas across distribution outlets -
enabling large bodies of the American public to receive the same information
(however fake it is or is not) in roughly the same time span.

This messaging is able to set the boundaries for the ideological debate. For
instance, the Snowden Documents were reported across media outlets under the
terminology "Bulk Collection" rather than Mass Surveillance, and they all made
the same arguments provided to them by the state for what was going on, what
was and was not legal and what data was and was not collected. Almost all of
this was fake information that went viral immediately. American citizens had
discussions about whether or not Merkle and Obama were upset with one another
- rather than discuss the actual contents of the leaks, which the media
broadly did no technical reporting on.

"Should we set up safe zones in Syria, or should we put boots on the ground?"
is a safe ideological spectrum to coordinate for the American public, but it's
difficult to see private-public partnership on messaging the American people
to include, for example, criticism of American regime change, the US led
coalitions' support of al Qaeda/Nusra/Fatah/Sham and the Islamic State Group.
Both context and opinion are narrowly scoped to present particular fake
perspectives that ultimately leave the American public uninformed and anxious.

Virality in general, of course, is studied by the Department of Defense, and
it's Strategic Communication in Social Media (SMISC) research effort has
sought to create the operating conditions and strategies to control virality
of information in populations (strategic communication or "stratcom" is a DoD
term for propaganda, replacing the older terminology psyops).

I think we're going to see evolving threats and technologies to detect, thwart
and control virality more and more in the future - and people volunteering to
be part of those networks of controlled information because its default,
cheaper, has a better user experience, or just plain has all the other people.

------
anabis
An anonymous blog entry titled 「保育園落ちた日本死ね」"Couldn't get slot for my child in
nursery school, Japan should drop dead." got discussed in the Japanese
parliament. The opposition party picked it up.

I wish political discussions were more evidence based, but I don't know how to
do it.

------
honkhonkpants
I think the original fake tweet author's response to this is pretty revealing.
He essentially retracts his tweet, while reserving the right to repost it
again, and to post such false things in the future. Let's read his own word:

"While there’s no such thing as absolute certainty, I now believe that the
busses that I photographed on Wednesday, November 9, were for the Tableau
Conference 2016 and had no relation to the ongoing protests against President
Elect Trump."

In other words, he is saying in that first sentence that he doesn't rule out
that his original interpretation will eventually be proven correct. There's no
such thing as an absolute certainty, after all! It remains possible that the
2016 Tableau conference and its 13000+ attendees were all an elaborate ruse to
cover up an astroturf protest. We can't rule anything out prematurely! But he
_currently_ believes that this might not be the case, in agreement with the
overwhelming evidence. Currently.

"I don’t know that Donald Trump was talking about me (posted 24 hours after my
post), but he’s among many with doubts"

Many people doubt this fact, in the face of overwhelming evidence, because
people like Eric Tucker, Donald Trump and his campaign apparatus have spent
the last year priming the public to believe crazy things that aren't true.

"Let’s not be afraid to say things when we aren’t completely sure"

Well actually yeah, let's just be afraid to do that.

"I value our ability to discuss with each other in a civil and respectful tone
regardless of where our views may stand."

Except for that part where he gets up on Twitter and makes stuff up about
people with whom he disagrees, and posts those made-up things as facts, he is
totally 100% down with respect. Very respectful. None more respectful.

For reference the original tweet was "Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today
are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in.
#fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI"

~~~
honkhonkpants
Here's the news story that Fox News posted in its non-opinion, non-blog,
supposedly-factual reporting section of their site.

[http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/trump-protests-
intensif...](http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/trump-protests-intensify-as-
doubts-swirl-about-spontaneity.html)

Here's some quality facts from that article.

""" But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were
bused to the scenes - a telltale sign of coordination.

“Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem,” one
local in the Texas capitol tweeted Wednesday, along with photos offered as
evidence.

[...]

Rumors have also been circulating that the new batch of anti-Trump protesters
has been bankrolled by individuals like billionaire liberal activist George
Soros and groups like Moveon.org.

“WTF, @georgesoros busing in & paying #protestors to destroy cities is
domestic #terrorism. #fakeProtests #BlueLivesMatter have tough days,” read one
tweet in response to the viral picture of buses in Austin. """

Fox News runs pieces using these fantasy tweets as their primary source. They
also run these stories on their TV network that your mom watches all day.

------
hodgesrm
The focus on the corrosive effects of money on the political system has hidden
what looks like the real threat to the American constitution: the Internet.
The founders understood the threat of monied interests pretty well--after all
the problem was described by historians of the late Roman republic like
Sallust. The mechanics of communication in social networks are completely
different from anything in the classical world. It's a genuine paradigm shift.

Does anyone remember the Foundation Trilogy by Asimov? There's a point in the
story where the calculations of the future developed by Hari Seldon are
derailed by the arrival of the Mule, a black swan event that could not be
predicted easily. It's hard to understand paradigm shifts when they are
happening but it feels as if the US has hit a similar point where an
unforeseeable event overthrows the stable equilibrium of the past 225 years.
What happens next is hard to guess but the range of outcomes seems pretty
broad. I don't think you can rule out the breakup of the United States.

------
akytt
Snow Crash combined with Selfish Gene and infection theory provides a neat
mental model of what's happening. Basically you get a constant bacground of
competing memes all the time. But since the competition is fierce, none of
them becomes too powerful. The elections made a lot of people more susceptible
to infections and ideas become to spread. The social media provides the number
of contacts necessary as well as increasing the transmission likelyhood as it
forms echo chambers. It all makes sense.

------
noobermin
Something that can help people ferret out false news stories in addition to
what has been discussed is to follow-up on stories or at least to be open to
follow-ups. It is definitely as difficult as being critical of your own
biases, as has been suggested here before, but this is at least one other step
we can take to be less swayed by information which can seemingly confirm our
biases.

------
hackuser
I have an hypothesis that I believe predicts very accurately how information
will be treated in this segment of the American political right-wing (hard to
define, but Fox and the WSJ editorial page to the right-wing blogosphere to
talk radio to it's many participants on social media). I invite you to test it
out:

The NY Times is asking the wrong question; they implicitly acknowledge that it
lacks predictive power: The accuracy of information does not predict if it
will spread and be believed.

* Ideology predicts it. If information matches their ideology, they spread it and believe it. If not, they don't. I believe this is now taken to its extreme: Ideological compliance, not factual accuracy, determines 99% of 'truth'. No matter how factually unsound, they will believe ideologically 'true' information. And no matter how factually sound, they will deny and attack ideologically 'false' material. Consider climate change, as an easy example - factually undeniable but ideologically unsound. It's a full-fledged ideological movement, which seems an anachronism in this educated age, happening right under our noses..

I've been reading about Medieval philosoph, and I recognized the pattern. It's
a per-Enlightenment approach, placing ideology (back then it was mainly
religious dogma rather than political) ahead of reason as the test for truth.
Note also the attacks on sources of factual credibility, such as serious
journalists, intellectuals, academia, scientists, education in general, etc.
Those sources provide factual accuracy, but ideological 'falsehoods'. Again,
it's in some ways similar to what was experienced in the Enlightenment.
Finally, note that leaders of this political group prove themselves not by
knowledge, leadership, good decisions, etc., but by saying things that are
both crazy by normal standards but acceptable by the ideology's standards -
their and their followers priority is that they prove their commitment to the
ideology.

....

Finally a couple caveats: 1) In a way it might seem obvious because everyone
tends to believe things that meet their preconceived notions, but this is far
more extreme - usually accuracy does have a large influence on people,
including probably most people reading this. 2) Yes, some people behave
similarly on other parts of the political spectrum, but the reality is that in
2016 there is relatively very large and very powerful movement on the right -
IMHO it just elected a President and has corrupted major U.S. institutions
such as the FBI.

------
colllectorof
How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how
many will end up on HN?

Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way
that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that
really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really,
this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump
supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also
occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim
Hunt?)

Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake
up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's
obvious why.)

I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social
media during Arab Spring.

\---

Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single
Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just
someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you
want to count every blog post and every comment as such.

Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so
either.

At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is
important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and
demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is.

The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true.
No one in the pipeline is a journalist or an editor with incentives to do
fact-checking. And everyone can always link to the original post, say "Joe
Shmoe posted such and such on Twitter" and thus completely relegate
responsibility for the content. (Modern mainstream media pulls these kinds of
stunts all the time: [http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-
republicans-co...](http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-
contend-we-have-no-idea/))

~~~
andrepd
It's almost as if there happened some event of global proportions less than 2
weeks ago that was perhaps in great measure directly caused by this
phenomenon?

~~~
colllectorof
Do you really believe that seeing a picture of two buses on Facebook changed
the candidate someone voted for?

~~~
andrepd
No, not this case in particular, though I'm sure it changed quite a few minds.
I'm taking about the "fake news" and "post-truth" phenomenon as a whole.

------
ry4n413
This entire thing is a fucking joke... Wait a second!

Ahhh... I see now, got your tin-foil hats on? Make sure you stock up because
four years is a long time. Assholes.

------
ManlyBread
Strange, so many fake news about Trump and he still managed to win the
election somehow.

------
_red
"Fake News"

Yellow Cake? Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

------
necessity
Said the newspaper spreading cheap pro-Hillary propaganda the entire election
cycle.

~~~
augustt
I'm curious what you would call Breitbart. Or is this a case of people saying
things I don't like = propaganda?

~~~
colllectorof
I am amused by how often people these days defend NYT by comparing to to
Breitbart. How the mighty have fallen... Breidbard is a right-wing propaganda
outlet. There are facts somewhere in there, but they spin those fact to the
utmost degree. Sadly, NYT is going down the same route right now. They used to
be much more objective just several years ago.

------
jflowers45
already submitted here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430)
and here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981)

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honkhonkpants
And this one already has 15x as many points, so deal with it.

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huilee
Actually, it's normal in HN historically to post links to previous discussions
on the same link. There's no reason to get upset about such a comment.

~~~
honkhonkpants
There are literally zero comments on those other two, so they aren't
discussions.

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madman2890
uh, no shit

~~~
andrepd
Constructive as all hell.

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boneheadmed
NYT = fake_news(newspaper)

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jaydz
Looks like their site is using ads from Google, their party will be over soon.

edit: already banned by facebook, that was fast.

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WalterBright
The trouble, of course, is who gets to decide what is "fake" and what isn't.
Even history books get constantly rewritten because people change their minds
about what is accurate and what isn't.

It's why professional historians try to stick with original sources, for
example.

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andrepd
What are your trying to suggest? This is _objectively_ fake. The claim (that
protesters were bussed to this place to protest against Trump) is objectively,
demonstrably, false.

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WalterBright
It's not a big step to go from using obviously fakes to sell the idea that
fake news must be stopped, to having someone decide if less obvious cases are
fake or simply don't fit the agenda.

Censorship of news is always sold as keeping people from being misinformed.

~~~
jameshart
Hold on a minute there, you almost disappeared down that slippery slope...

All this piece is pointing out is that the difference between 'fake news' and
'real news' is the act of verification prior to publication. The thing
journalists do, which makes what they publish worth paying attention to.

~~~
WalterBright
I've been personally involved in some news worthy events, and then watched the
reporting of it. The professional media was invariably sloppy and flat out
wrong with many of the facts of the case. And these were events where there
was nothing political - the reporters simply couldn't be bothered with fact
checking.

It's made me skeptical ever since.

