
Don’t Want to Fall for Fake News? Don’t Be Lazy - jonbaer
https://www.wired.com/story/dont-want-to-fall-for-fake-news-dont-be-lazy/
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kinkrtyavimoodh
MIT this and Psychology that don't change the fact that the world is made of a
web of abstraction of trust. It is not possible for any individual to have the
time or competence to evaluate the trustworthiness of every single entity they
rely on in day to day life.

If I employed a plumber and she did a bad job because she used a tool wrongly
or used the wrong pipe fitting, will it be reasonable for the world to expect
me to know the intricacies of plumbing (where do I learn them? How do, I, in
turn, trust that source of information, and ad infinitum)?

Yes, it's good to do some basic due diligence for things that affect our
lives, but there's a reason high-trust societies are much nicer to live in.

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leibwiht
Rallying against objectively "fake" news doesn't do anything about the much
more serious problem of the way that mainstream news is less than truthful in
more subtle ways, such as under-reporting or not reporting things that are
true, emphasizing certain facets of a true story to follow a crafted
narrative, reporting on things that otherwise wouldn't be newsworthy to
advance that narrative, etc. Disproving blatantly fake news is trivial,
disproving years of propagandizing full of half-truths and consistent
narratives is impossible.

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lucio
The example is silly. There are several sources of the same video. If it's not
a funny meme, a normal person will look for the original video. In all of the
videos he applies pressure on the intern's arm, you can see it by how her body
moves. To shift blame to Sara Sanders because she shared a GIF instead of a
video, is the "spin" that reveal bias. You can put the original video instead
of the GIF and the Sanders tweets stands: "[We will] never tolerate a reporter
placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House
intern" The article falsely claims that Sanders cite the GIF as grounds for
revoking Acosta's press pass. The mentioned grounds for revoking Acosta's
press pass can be seen in all videos and cameras. (touch the arm, apply
pressure). It's not the GIF, it's what happened. The article implies that the
GIF was intentionally modified, but the truth is that:

>At BuzzFeed News, Charlie Warzel dug into the creation of the Infowars clip,
establishing that it was made by zooming in on a GIF excerpt from the original
video. GIFs can drop frames when constructed, and video-encoding methods can
introduce other changes. In the end, Warzel couldn’t decide whether the video
had been doctored or not. Citing experts, Motherboard concluded that the video
wasn’t doctored, but that it was "altered" —a distinction that might confuse
as much as it clarifies.

The article also falsely claims that "The events described in Sanders' tweet
simply did not happen."

So, if this article plus its title is meant as an "Study on Irony", then it's
a great article.

