> 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.
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.
And a stopped clock is right twice a day. So all the stopped clock merchant has to do is wait for the clock to line up, then shout from the rooftops that they have the right time.
It's not enough to be correct by coincidence, process matters. We see this often enough in scientific papers where the statistics come into question. News process is different, especially given how sources work. Not everyone is willing to be recorded, and recordings are increasingly untrustworthy anyway, so at some point you have to start believing that the reporter heard person X say Y.
The worst part of the whole fake news fiasco has been people using the (very real) problems of the established media as an excuse to switch to consuming total nonsense from fabricated sources.
Interestingly, time itself is a social construct. Not just in the sense of relativistic time, but in the sense of how we came to move from individual local clocks ("decentralised time") to using time from the communication network which had to coordinate internally ("railway time").
Clocks are a great analogy. As pointed out, the problem is in verification. Say everyone has a clock and they're all showing different time. How do you actually get to the ground truth? Observe and measure planetary motion? That's too much hassle. This is where the analogy cracks a bit (or does it?). What you want is for your clock to show the same time as others' clocks do, so you join a group where you synchronize your watches. Other people join groups too, possibly with different synchronizations. Fact has become convention, subordinate to localized social utility.
Indeed they are, and in no small measure because everyone is convinced that they know what clocks do and nearly everyone is wrong. Everyone thinks that clocks measure time. They don't. They measure the space-time interval between events, but when you try to explain that to people their eyes glaze over and they start mentally fitting you for a nice padded cell. But this actually matters if, for example, you want to understand the details of how GPS works.
Fake news is the same way. Most of the time it really doesn't matter, e.g. the person working the register at the grocery store can believe that aliens have kidnapped their pet hamster and it won't impact their ability to ring up your order. So most people go through life believing crazy things it never matters, until when it finally does their thought processes are so deeply entrenched that the actual truth sounds completely insane to them (c.f. "clocks don't measure time.")
Truth is constant, lies are variable. With news, you need to look at stories that use different sources and find out the consistencies. The problem on the web is that so many articles are plagiarized or paraphrased from an original source like the AP.
Is truth really constant though? The answer would probably depend on the domain being considered. Many things change over time and truth can change with them.
So perhaps the core problem is that multiple contradictory “truths” can exist depending on ones point of view and ones point in time.
This would be separate from intentional misinformation which does tie into the debate. It seems likely that the modern problem of multiple clocks could just be a representation of different points of view.
Let's make a distinction between universal truths as you described and local truths that are defined as an accurate retelling of the events that unfolded at a certain time at a given place. That cannot change with time as its already been "recorded"
Things always happen a particular way, regardless of peoples memory of that event. Case in point, a video camera can sometimes give an accurate retelling of the events at a particular place at a particular time.
A video is closer to the event than a textual retelling, but is still only a proxy. The choice of camera positioning can significantly change the viewer's perception of the event, and the narrative formed.
Ok then let the accurate retelling be defined as the view from all angles. One need not interpret events that transpired before to interpret the action because thats where bias in news comes from. It comes from trying to infer meaning and deduce reasoning with no factual proof. Actions speak louder than words so its more important to describe the action than the intent
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?
I believe that pre internet society naturally crafted trust networks that, even far from perfect truth, were vastly superior to the scattered noise we have today. Unless we evolve a way for people to get massively interested and educated to be their own trusted filter.. (not impossible ..)
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.
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.)
The Internet has the problem that it has many easily available untrustworthy sources and the information needed to verify what they say is harder to find or not there at all. We have a world of shallow information at our fingertips, but deeper learning and research is still in the realm of paywalls and undigitised content.
And if your friend has not verified the watch, and you set it against theirs and tell your friends this time which you believe to be correct when asked, you are now unknowingly propagating incorrect time.
In fact, if you get a bunch of people who, say, want to get up a bit later, they can band together to set their time deliberately wrong and influence as many people as they can to synchronise with their incorrect time (whilst all along pretending it is the correct time), and soon it becomes hard to know which groups are telling everyone the correct time, and which groups are disseminating the wrong time to achieve their political ends...
> 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.
People do exactly this with clocks, too. If I had one clock reading 9:10 pm and one reading 1:45pm, and I just had lunch, I'd assume the second one was right rather than look for a third source.
News by definition is a 2nd hand source of information. You are relying on someone to accurately report a situation based on the information given to them by their sources. There's always likely to be parts missing and it's important to look at all the "Clocks" to get the whole picture. With the web, it's very easy to think you are reading from multiple sources when in reality they are all owned by Verizon Media.
Agreed, the thing is it seems that previous singular clocks were somehow cared for in a way to keep it in the middle. It's no perfect information but systemically, it made everything run somehow at a single pace.
>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.
It's also that those in power would love it for their opinions to be the "authoritative" ones and only ones permitted to be heard. Same for mainstream media (though for them it's their business model).
The internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions.
Imagine everybody being able to criticize the Vietnam War in the sixties, or e.g. segregation in the 40s, or prohibition in the 20s, or the war on drugs in the 80s, or McCarthyism, on a platform that could get equal eyeballs as the Time or TIME LIFE or NYT. All those critiques would be discarded as "fake news", "propaganda" and so on too (in fact whatever little was, e.g. in underground papers and so on, got exactly those labels).
Of course people would also be able to voice their support those things, but that we be business as usual. People touting the elite's opinions were never without a soapbox in the mainstream media. The revolution is in the ability of the "unwashed masses" to speak for themselves.
The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites.
The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.
I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there:
* If they report on what's said in a new government report, they'll avoid including a link to it or even including its name, to avoid you Googling for it.
* If they attack a politician over a short snippet of a speech he gave, they'll only embed the snippet and won't link to a video showing the full context, thus ensuring you can't verify that the removal of context hasn't changed the meaning.
* If they report on an academic paper, they won't mention its title or link to it, nor report on any of the raw data or explain its methodology - they will report only the conclusion (or their spin on it)
The alternative media is more trustworthy, because it has links, which means you can independently verify its claims. The mainstream media is unique in having a strict standard of not permitting rigorous substantiation and referencing of claims made in its articles, maximising the difficulty of auditing them for truth. They deserve the distrust the public directs at them for that reason alone.
If people tended to do their due diligence about sources, then fake news wouldn't be a problem, and verifiably false and incredulous memes wouldn't have any social or political influence. But they do, because people mistake cynicism for intellectual rigor, and don't believe they need to check the sources for the alternative media, because it's enough to simply mistrust the mainstream and assume the alternative is probably correct, provided the story it tells is sufficiently cynical. As a result, any valid alternative criticisms by the alternative media are just drowned out by the racists and crackpots going on about QAnon and gay frogs.
Perhaps a lack of providing direct links to credible sources is a problem for the mainstream media, but that doesn't necessarily justify an implication that the mainstream media does so in order to protect attempts to mislead people with false information, and that, therefore, the degree of falsehood is on par between the mainstream and alternative media.
The alternative media, meanwhile, often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so. And voicing any opposition to the alternative narrative just gets you called a tool of the establishment, leading to exactly the sort of echo chamber mentality that it tends to criticize elsewhere.
I think breaking things down into "alternative" and "mainstream" is not productive. I see no particular reason to come in with an a priori assumption that the mainstream media should be given a default presumption of truthfulness until proven otherwise, and the alternative media should be presumed false unless proved otherwise. To me, they're all in the same category to start with, and each media source starts presumed false unless they prove themselves worthy of trust.
I mean, seriously... why should they be given a default presumption of truthfulness? Because they were... there? Because they were so honest before? But how do you know that? You can't just the honesty of a source if it's effectively the only source you have. (And in practice, despite there being "three news networks", they seem to have been the same source in practice. I can only remember minor sniping between the various sources every once in a while.) Why default to trusting them? I'd say it's basically just the availability heuristic at play, in a way. It's easy to see the availability of effectively a single source, and approximate that to honestly, but you have no rational basis to make that approximation.
If anything, after decades of fairly unquestioned and monolithic dominance, the simple heuristic of "unchecked power corrupts" suggests that the mainstream media is virtually 100% likely to be deeply corrupt. I find the idea that the media was allowed to operate in a state of highly ethical reporting for decades and it simply never occurred to any commercial, governmental, or intelligence entity that "Gee, golly, it sure would be useful to exert a lot of control over that" to be an idea that requires a degree of trust in commercial, governmental, and intelligence entities that I can find only marginal evidence in favor of and significant evidence against.
The media often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so, all the time.
I'm not really sure what you are trying to argue here. Your bullet points are equally applicable to "alternative" media outlets and "mainstream" media do often link out to government reports, sources, etc in their articles.
Maybe we're consuming different sets of MSM and alternative sources, but my experience is not only that they are not equally applicable, but that your suggestion that they are is completely ludicrous.
95%+ of MSM articles I read that reference an external document do not link to it. MSM articles are usually littered with links, but they're internal links to lists of other articles by the same MSM outlet about the topic. Meanwhile, the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration - is basically unimaginable to me; I've never seen it happen as far as I can recall.
Does InfoWars count as "alternative media"? I mean, it's clearly not "mainstream", but the format - the medium - is no different to a mainstream news show. I wouldn't've thought it fell into either of the two categories we're discussing.
Yes, but while the Internet has resulted in more propaganda, it has also resulted in more opportunities for clarification and other sides of the story to at least be available. Your story may not make it through the FANG gauntlet of algorithms and, as such, a mass audience may not see it, but it feels to me like alternative angles are way more available now than they were in the 90's and before.
A youtuber named Rezo ja lol ey made a video shortly before the elections (European and regional parliaments) about how one of the biggest parties CDU (and also SPD), the ones in the government for many many years now (Merkel's party), have been acting differently from what they said they'd do, and how they're massively messing up on climate action. He calls for viewers not to vote for them, (and of course not AfD, alternative for Germany, a newish right-wing party who denies climate change - their youth organization is starting to challenge that) and to vote for people with a better climate agenda.
This video blew up very fast, and had a few million views before the elections (now at almost 14 million, Germany has 83 million inhabitants). The CDU actually made a response video but didn't publish it, and then published a 11-pages pdf. There was a support video of 70 more German youtubers too.
In the elections, both CDU and SPD lost a lot of votes, and the green party gained a lot. Some of the discussions and statements in the more official media are.. interesting.
Some CDU politicians seem to think that this video is the reason for their losses, and not their policies or the way they treated the young voters before (protests against internet upload filters on EU level have been called 'paid for', marginalized or laughed at, they tell the Fridays for Future protesters to go back to school and leave the climate to the pros etc).
Main CDU figures have mentioned Russian disinformation campaigns, said to review the guidelines for publishing ('If 70 publishing companies would have said not to vote for CDU, what then?'), said that the Green party had profited from a shift in public fear of climate change from terror and security etc. Now they're trying to set up a conversation with Rezo, offline. It's all quite weird.
> The narrative you're expressing, that the mainstream media as a complex exists to further propaganda on the part of the "elites" and that only the web has been able to provide an honest and unbiased form of news is undermining the actual subject at hand, which is the degree to which the web and those unwashed masses are being employed as tools for propaganda by the same elites.
Being able to control the flow of information is much more powerful than being able to buy bots. When information was monopolized by a few outlets, those outlets had tremendous power and they did abuse it. Infamously, the New York Times denied the widespread famine in the USSR during the 30s and mass starvation of Ukrainians, now considered an act of genocide by many countries (most estimates ranging from 3-5 million Ukrainians starved). This sort of thing cannot happen in today's connected world. If millions of people are starving, YouTube video after YouTube video of dead people littering the streets would be posted to call out the deniers on their falsehood (provided the victims had internet access). But the 1930s was before the internet, and the world just had to take the word of reporters. The NYT author that denied the starvation won the Pulitzer prize for his false reporting.
> The implicit (and arguable unjustified) trust in the mainstream media has simply been replaced by an implicit (and equally unjustified) trust in alternative media, resulting in greater obfuscation, deeper manipulation and more lies, rather than more truth.
I don't think there's much basis for this claim. I think that the internet makes stupid people that believe in falsehoods much more prominent and and easier to find. Florida's reputation for being a crazy state is analogous to this. Florida police are required by law to publish all arrest reports, which makes crazy stories easy to find and publish. The internet essentially does that for the ignorant and stupid. I'm willing to bet that despite increased anxiety over people being led to falsehood, actual belief in falsehood is either the same or declining.
I think you're also misrepresenting the situation when you say that trust in mainstream media is being replaced by trust in alternative media. Do you earnest think that people trust the average YouTube video more than mainstream media outlets? I think that's an important factor at play here: much of the alternative media is well aware of the fact that can't rely on trust to get people to listen to believe them, and so they have to back up their claims with solid evidence if they want to be trusted. Those YouTube channels I consider reputable are very cautious about only making claims that they can back up with evidence.
The problem is that we've gone beyond voicing criticism to constructing parallel, unconnected realities. It's not like there's one side praising the Vietnam War and another side criticizing it, it's like there's one side saying "hey, there's a war going on in Vietnam" and another side saying "no there isn't." And the "no there isn't" side can burrow comfortably into a huge mass of media telling them that their reality is the true one and everyone else is delusional, which makes it impossible to bring them around no matter how much evidence you marshal. "Here's a photo of a Vietnamese villager we burned with napalm." "Pffft. Photoshop." "Here's some footage of Vietnamese fighters in battle with American soldiers." "Pffft. Crisis actors."
Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.
>The problem is that we've gone beyond voicing criticism to constructing parallel, unconnected realities. It's not like there's one side praising the Vietnam War and another side criticizing it, it's like there's one side saying "hey, there's a war going on in Vietnam" and another side saying "no there isn't."
We always had that too. Not for "a war going on" or not, but e.g. about atrocities "our side" did during the war (which establishment media would downplay), or private interests served by such and such law (which establishment media would hide).
Those were alternate realities (e.g. are X foreign group "freedom fighters" or "CIA sponsored death squads"), not just simple disagreements on technical points.
>Democracy needs to provide room for criticism, absolutely. But it also requires everybody to be operating from some kind of baseline consensus as to what's real and what isn't, or at least some openness to having your mind changed by evidence.
Let's suppose, hypothetically, that I find my way to an "alternative", non-mainstream site. This fictional site specifically claims that they found the student records of the brother of a prominent (fictional) Congressional representative, and also found the divorce certificate of that representative and her former husband. This fictional site claims to have found embarrassing information about the representative from cross-referencing those two legal documents. The Congressperson and the mainstream media immediately dismisses this as a crazy conspiracy theory[0].
My question, then, is:
1) If this fictional site is lying, how would I verify that if no other media organization will verify or disprove this information?
2) If this fictional site is telling the truth, what grounds would I have to believe this if all the mainstream sites are calling it a conspiracy theory?
3) If someone were to go on an major investigative journey to uncover something that goes against all major media biases, how would he be able to present his case without being immediately dismissed as a conspiracy theorist?
4) If someone- mainstream or alternative- were to go on the internet and simply tell lies, how would we be able to fact-check them if they were the only news organization covering that particular story?
Really people living in parallel realities were always with us unfortunately. From moral panics to the "paranoid style" of politics which involves a vast conspiracy of their favored scapegoat which is impervious to evidence as counter evidence is more evidence of "their" control. Where "their" has been variously the Jews, the Catholics, Illuminati, and Marxists, cultural and otherwise, and more.
>Imagine everybody being able to criticize the Vietnam War in the sixties, or e.g. segregation in the 40s, or prohibition in the 20s, or the war on drugs in the 80s, or McCarthyism, on a platform that could get equal eyeballs as the Time or TIME LIFE or NYT. All those critiques would be discarded as "fake news", "propaganda" and so on too (in fact whatever little was, e.g. in underground papers and so on, got exactly those labels).
People were able to express those opinions, there were tons of publishers putting out independent papers, pamphlets and books. They didn't have the same reach as something like the New York Times, but I don't think the internet provides an equal amount of eyeballs either. It's easier to access now, but it's also easier to access something like the NYT.
And this same thing has been going on for centuries. Practically the same post was written about the Sans-culottes.
> The internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions.
I think the real enabler isn't the internet, but the ubiquity of recording devices. Now that a significant slice of the population is carrying around near-professional-quality cameras at all times, we no longer "need" to trust established media sources. For many newsworthy events, someone will have uploaded phone footage to YouTube, or an indie publication will have covered it with a camera they dropped a grand on, and video proof is better than any journalistic credentials.
Of course, that last part is rapidly ceasing to be true as we get better at doctoring video, heralding the end of this brief era of democratized journalism. Over the coming decades we as a society are going to have to re-learn what it means to have trustworthy media sources.
Fake news is neither about the availability of multiple perspectives, which have been around for millenia, nor about the power of the Internet, which has been around for decades, nor about misrepresentations of fact, which have been instrumental to every war the US has prosecuted in the post-WW2 period.
The term "fake news" appeared, along with an obsessive need to "fact check" and censor, following the election of Trump. It is the result of the inability of the establishment (i.e. liberal capitalists and Washington) to control narratives. Electing Trump signaled a grave threat to the control of this establishment and thus a need to tighten its failing grip on narrative.
It's funny because you're literally just parroting Trump campaign and Republican establishment propaganda.
The term "fake news" did not appear after Trump's election[0], nor was it created by "liberal capitalists and Washington," nor did any of the stories deemed fake news (ie, Pizzagate, Hillary Clinton's kill count, Hillary Clinton having some neurological disorder) represent any sort of hidden truths slipping through the grip of the establishment.
"Fake news" always meant exactly what it indicated - false news items being presented as truth - until Trump and his supporters co-opted the term and rebranded it into something exclusively invented by his enemies to discredit him.
It didn't appear then, but it became a grave concern at that point. Meanwhile conspiracy theories have existed for ever. Pizzagate is nuts, but so is belief in reptilian aliens controlling governments, etc.
The energy to contain these stories escalated dramatically, with Zuckerberg being dragged in front of Congress, etc., after Trump's election.
Meanwhile the biggest "fake news" item of the past few years was Russiagate, which escaped your list along with widespread condemnation from establishment media.
I don't suggest that Pizzagate, etc., are true, merely that the sudden alarm about them is a symptom of elite anxiety.
By the way, i am not a Republican and am not parroting anything. Please don't poison the well. Just make your argument.
I agree. But child abuse among elected officials does happen. A former Speaker of the house [1] was jailed for payoffs to admitted sex abuse victims. I'm not saying this in support of pizzagate, which I believe to be false. I'm saying this to call attention to another threat from "fake news", that legitimate and outrageous complaints can be swept under the rug by loudly exclaiming, "fake news again!" and people being conditioned to automatically dismiss claims when they hear it.
You may not be a Republican, but you are nonetheless parroting their propaganda.
Linking the phenomenon of fake news with a liberal media conspiracy while downplaying or discrediting any connection it had with Trump's campaign and his supporters is parroting their propaganda.
>Meanwhile the biggest "fake news" item of the past few years was Russiagate, which escaped your list along with widespread condemnation from establishment media.
Because my list was of items which occurred prior to Trump's election, establishing a basis for the origin of the term. And it has yet to be established to what degree Russiagate is fake news, although your attempt to dismiss through equivocation is recognized. For someone who's not a Republican, you're really good at their techniques and talking points, though. Mention liberal sour grapes or the deep state next, maybe you'll get bingo.
The sudden alarm about Pizzagate, Zuckerberg and fake news is not a symptom of "elite" anxiety, but public anxiety over the sudden weight of influence that conspiracy theories and lies once relegated to the likes of 4chan and Reddit seem to have to influence the public. There is no secret cabal of liberal globalist elites who are harmed by any of this, it's only the public and their ability to discern the truth that's harmed.
It's not clear to me how you are identifying "public" anxiety, as opposed to the anxiety of Washington. We can observe the latter in the behavior of Congress, e.g. The former is unclear.
In any case, let's go with "anxiety". Why is there sudden anxiety? Why should we worry about Pizzagate now while we didn't worry about similar things two years ago?
The answer is simple: Trump was elected. He is not alone; there is a widespread revolt of rightwing "populists" in progress worldwide. Marine fucking LePen just beat Macron in an election.
The people who support Hilary Clinton and Macron (i.e., "liberal globalist elites" to use your term) are materially harmed by this trend. They are desperate to understand how they can reverse it; but they refuse to consider that their ideology is simply unpopular. Instead, the problem must be "fake news".
>Why is there sudden anxiety? Why should we worry about Pizzagate now while we didn't worry about similar things two years ago?
Because Pizzagate, along with other fake news, misinformation and slander campaigns, appear to have contributed in a nontrivial way to Trump's election, and all of them are by definition complete and utter bullshit.
We should worry when obvious nonsense takes precedence in our political discourse over actual fact.
You seem to believe "Russiagate" is fake news, so why aren't you as concerned about Pizzagate or any of the other anti-left conspiracy theories as you are about Russiagate? Is fake news only a problem when it attacks the right, and only a solution when it attacks the left?
>They are desperate to understand how they can reverse it; but they refuse to consider that their ideology is simply unpopular.
But Pizzagate is not an attempt to reverse any trend, or a legitimate criticism of any ideology, nor does it present a valid political alternative to any existing policies. It's just an extension of an already established right-wing trope linking liberalism and supporters of progressive ideas (particularly gay rights) with sexual assault and pedophilia.
Again, we're not talking about actual news, but news that is literally fake. The Democratic Party does not run a secret sex-slave network and Hillary Clinton does not practice satanic pedophilic rituals. You and others may not support Clinton or Macron, but Pizzagate doesn't help your cause.
>Instead, the problem must be "fake news".
The problem is fake news. And the problem is people like yourself, who seem not to believe that the falsehood of fake news is actually a problem, as long as it targets the people you disagree with.
First, let me be clear that i am not on the right, I am on the left. The actual left, not the Resistance "left" that favors the national security state, perpetual war, income inequality, etc. From this perspective i see Russiagate as an attack on my (left) position: it is an attempt to drum up support for imperialism while simultaneously demonizing left critics of the establishment as "Putin sympathizers", etc.
The difference between this and Pizzagate was that Russiagate was promulgated by the NY Times, Wash Post, MSNBC, et al, while Pizzagate was, and remains, marginal. You suggest it contributed meaningfully to Trump's victory; I don't believe that. I think Trump won because he coopted a largely leftist critique of capitalism that resonated with Americans. This critique was also available in Sanders' campaign, which was marginalized in favor of Clinton's "things are fine, more of the same" message.
This is exactly what is happening everywhere else; Macron lost because he wanted to maintain the "there is no problem, we don't need to reform our ideas" pose. The result is people vote for the only folks offering change, even ersatz change: the right.
The appearance of these rightwing movements after the crash of 2008 is also not a coincidence. Neoliberalism is in crisis, serious crisis that goes well beyond a mere confusion over facts. People are looking for alternative facts in the first place because they are dissatisfied. The first, easiest place to find those answers is the fascist right.
So long as neoliberals continue to deny this crisis, continue to pretend their policies are good and should be popular, and continue to incorrectly blame "fake news" or "the Russians" for their woes, they will continue to lose elections, and real power, to a dangerous creeping fascism.
Do you believe that there are secret sex slave networks in the world, anywhere, at all? If so, who participates in them?
Do you believe that satanic rituals are practiced anywhere in the world? Who practices them?
Do you believe that pedophilia is a thing that exists in the world? If so, which ones are the pedophiles?
>Because Pizzagate, along with other fake news, misinformation and slander campaigns, appear to have contributed in a nontrivial way to Trump's election, and all of them are by definition complete and utter bullshit.
While keeping this discussion respectful, I would like to propose another hypothesis: that the rise of fake news may correspond severe distaste towards the direction that the country is heading.
There are many people who disliked Obama's policies. There are many people who liked Obama but disliked the country's direction at the end of his second term. There are many people who disliked Trump's political opponent. And finally, there are many of the people who fall into these aforementioned camps who felt a level of entitlement among elitists whom casually dismissed their concerns.
Imagine hearing that your daughter lost the track and field state championships to someone who used to be a boy. Or seeing violent criminals get away from cops because the cops were too afraid to do their job. Or having your gun taken away from you in a high-crime neighborhood with a police response time of an hour.
Imagine people in those positions, who feel that bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are making what feel to be obvious stupid decisions. Can you imagine why they would be more likely to believe that those bureaucrats are involved in a child sex trafficking ring?
>Can you imagine why they would be more likely to believe that those bureaucrats are involved in a child sex trafficking ring?
Honestly? No. And if I could, I still couldn't sympathize with them.
There is a big difference between having an honest disagreement about political policies and being willing to believe a politician is trafficking in child sex slaves and the occult. I wasn't happy about Obama or his policies, from the complete opposite end of the political spectrum being discussed here. I wanted an anti-war leftist, and got a pro-war centrist. But I still didn't believe he was a Muslim interloper who wanted to start a race war. I despised George W. Bush, but I don't believe he "did 9/11."
How would one go from "hearing that your daughter lost the track and field state championships to someone who used to be a boy" to Pizzagate? From "seeing violent criminals get away from cops because the cops were too afraid to do their job" to "The Clintons had Vince Foster killed?" There is no rational way to connect those dots.
The establishment, power players, etc, wants to control the narratives, and be able to label "fake" whatever they want, whether it's against Trump or in his favor. They'll want the same power tomorrow too, when Trump is long gone.
Back in the day, part of what's called "fake news", and basically the part the establishment didn't like, was labelled "disinformation".
I am grateful to the internet for exposing how deeply our social consensus was dependent on a particular culture and ruling class owning the means of disseminating information, ie newspapers and tv channels. With the means to distribute ideas more openly available there has come both a broader range of views across the population and a noticeable weakening of the ruling class’s ability to direct public attention and belief toward strategic conclusions.
This hasn't changed at all, only that the way the ruling classes exert influence. One just needs to look at Facebook to understand how the field has changed and I would argue for the objective worse.
The so-called broadening of ideas isnt the result of giving a voice to the voiceless, but strategically decrying science and research in the pursuit of profits. This is the heart of the argument against climate change and has resulted in a noticable weakening of science as a basis for truth and rationale.
Science institutionally wed itself so completely to the previous ruling social structure that it is natural that it would be undermined as collateral damage in the battle for cultural influence.
Agreed. There are tons of important stories that only came out because the internet democratised the media and let independent voices get heard, and it's brought just as many reliable sources as it has fake news sites.
That's not always been a good thing sure, but it's at least shown the world that no, not everything was 'fine' and that the political and social systems in play now have failed a lot of people.
This is a fantastic analogy. With so many sources available--mainstream and other--we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives. However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.
> However, technology also makes it easier for people to seek out sources that support preconceived biases.
I just want to point out that the problem is fake news, not biased news. And I also want to point out that people are generally not seeking out these sources, they come to their "News" feeds and are targeted at them because they generate an emotional response.
> we now have opportunities to get a holistic picture by relying on many different narratives.
I'd argue there's so many narratives online and easy discovery of fake, or down-right misleading, narratives that are intended to deceive which has become far easier to come across. Sometimes, I'd rather hear the Fox News spin than about the newest conspiracy theory floating around Facebook when I go to dinner with my folks.
Really? You have clocks you know to be right and clocks you know aren't. Sadly the same can't be said of news sources. The New York Times is probably the best newspaper in the world. And sometimes they do fake news. Do it regularly. And they bitch about the internet being the problem. It isn't. The problem for them is they get caught out in ways that we find out about now. We used not to.
When a big story breaks, set up a twitter a/c. Follow people who are involved in the story and the reporting of it. Read the links that come up. Use your intelligence and education to assess sources, look for corroborating evidence etc and see how far your opinion strays from what you thought of the quality of the nyt reports.
No time? Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, The Donald (may fleas infest his toupee) being an actual russian agent. You can't make this stuff up. But it was made up. And not in supermarket tabloids and faked facebrick screenshots. Anonymous government sources, insiders, reputable news sources.
Fox is entirely fake news. MSNBC is entirely fake news. They should be prosecuted for fraudulently having the word "news" in their advertising. Uncle George's Racist Blog on facebrick is no better or worse but nobody with half a dozen firing neurones takes the latter at all seriously the way some seem to with the excrement that is MSNBC, Fox and their high-school cheerleaders impersonating tv journalists.
It's like complaining you found out someone lies to you when it suits them and you preferred life when you didn't know that. Nixon was a war criminal, J. Edgar Hoover was psychotic criminal at best, JFK tried to set records for the number of women he bedded and had the FBI and secret service cruise chicks for him. People knew who weren't beholden to a political side (eg NYT, Wash Post, WSJ etc) and didn't publish, instead they published fake news. All Zuckerberg's fault of course.
The stuff that [we're aware that] New York Times gets wrong in the modern era barely even holds a candle to what they got wrong in the past.
Particularly the case where the NYT was publishing Soviet genocide denying propaganda as though it were fact. The responsible "journalist", Walter Duranty, even won a Pulitzer Prize for his service as Stalin's uncritical mouthpiece. The NYT didn't denounce him publicly until 1990. For decades, Holodomor denial in the west was defended and perpetuate by people citing the New York Times.
Actually its the continued extreme pressure to commercialize this.
Technology can enable a diversity of content or it can reinforce you staying on the website by serving up continuously sensationalized or aligned content. It chooses the latter to provide more advertising.
This is a serious case for the release of advertising and generation of new revenue models for internet products and presences.
I like the clock analogy - especially when tying in the solution of having digitally transmitted clocks from a source we trust, and so points to solutions that we must each decide which source(s) of trust we subscribe to. The issue then becomes funds being allocated to support this - and I like Andrew Yang's solution relating to supporting democracy (and countering impact of larger contributions by individuals or organizations), of using tax money giving everyone $100 to contribute to any party they want - we could do the same with journalism, and perhaps one in the same with journalism - do it also with allowing organizations to be funded who curate and moderate content for us.
There is some foreseeable scary potential to this though: if say 30 million of your population have been manipulated and contribute their $3 billion to fund the campaign of a pathological liar, someone on the path towards tyranny - perhaps a puppet of bad actors from other nations, then how could that unfold? Perhaps it would balance out however if the remaining population aren't in propaganda media silos and the amount of funds contributed to their campaigns are enough to fund enough action to respond.
The clock analogy really hit me pretty hard. At some point, even those of us who question everything ascribe authority to things that we consider to be trustworthy. When you start to look at the world through that lens, it's easy to see how so many people believe things that others find ludicrous.
Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else.
I wonder what's easier: Curbing the dissemination of fake news on the web or understanding the allure of & preventing people from wanting to believe fake news in the first place.
I honestly think it is the former, so I think there is value in combating it from that angle (in addition to others).
The problem with the second approach is that it plays heavily into psychology, confirmation bias and such. What if people don't want to consume fake news but are instead incapable of recognizing or admitting that it is fake? Even in the face of facts and reality?
There are psychological pathologies which display similar behavior - narcissism being one of those where reality is conveniently rejected in favor of what works for you.
Well - certainly there is the rational that we collectively have no absolute knowable truth in which news sources are valid. But as much as clocks we are still utilizing/referencing them either in passing/conversational thoughts and ideas.
I propose go the other way with the take away:
1) With the increased awareness of fake news comes increased social penetration of FN.
2) We more widely know of fake news existing and simultaneously are more exposed to it.
Terry wasn't arguing that there wasn't fake news before the internet, but that it would be easier to create and make it seem legitimate. Harder to suss out the origins than you would something in real life. And it's not just biased news, like the way two clocks might give a slightly different time, but actual fake news and 'facts'.
This is not true. There are fake news that have existed for thousands of years (religion), and the mass communication seems to have a negative impact even on those strongholds of fiction.
Also, as soon as two clocks are subject to different acceleration they can display different times that are equally accurate ... as the truth of a news story can depend on your path to it.
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
The difference is, before the internet you had one or two or three clocks, and they were off by a minute or two.
With the internet, there are seven million clocks, and some show the time for days and places that don't exist.
This is a great analogy. The scary thing is, there are countries that do only have one clock (totalitarian regimes that control the press), but that's worse than having multiple clocks.
Actually it can be much better. As has been argued time and again (including by people who have suffered both), with a totalitarian regimes that controls the press means the population knows to distrust the press.
A "free press" instead, while still controlled by the elites (press empires, their politician buddies, corporatism, etc), on the other hand, gives the false impression of pluralism and trust...
> But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I'm not at all sure that's true of news sources.
Time isn't as absolute as everyone would like to think. At many levels, from relativity through to measurement through to systems of representation through to cultural interpretations. And even if much of the western world has converged on SI, Gregorian etc, there are still big differing views.
I have a feeling that, whilst it's tempting to think that there are any absolutes in the universe, there are none. With facts, like the time, you have to pick what level you're comfortable calling a baseline.
So maybe 'time' and 'facts' are closer than the GP suggests.
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.
“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.”
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.
>a temporary illness until media consumers wise up
Not exactly. Media consumers do need to wise up. However expecting the consumers to bear the entire burden of verification is naive. Consumers want someone to do the verification for them (at least partially) because it's tedious and time consuming. That's why reputation paid off back then.
That's why before the internet the mechanism of information propagation was built in a way to amplify proved, respectable media. The social media on the internet have created a mechanism that can amplify any information. Even worse than that - it amplifies poor quality information with sensationalist clickbaity headlines significantly better that good quality but not so sensationalist information. Add to the picture the proliferation of click-based advertisement and you will see why sensationalism nowadays pays off more than reputation.
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) in frequent web users.
I don't have evidence either way, but one would expect that looking at the history surrounding the introduction of the printing press, the introduction of newspapers, of radio, and television would be a good starting point.
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.
> 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.
> sophisticated networks of trust, content raters and algorithms that would tell you what is worth reading
Didn't this happen? Some versions more formalized by others but isn't this what people mean by an individual's bubble? The concern being that these bubbles can be so different as to be incompatible with others.
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.
> 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.
You'd probably want to read a treatment of the history of infrmation. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is a good (if long) start.
But church, or rather, Church, as power centre is very well established. The Roman Catholic Church thrugh the 15th century controlled knowledge, literacy, education, much of banking, and much of politics.
Not that the lay population mattered for much, but weekly mass was among the few channels by which common messages could be disseminated. Markets, town criers, and private messengers (royalty, nobles, commerce, finance) existed as well. Information might take months to cross Europe (especislly in winter), and longer from abroad. There was virtually no travel from November through May.
Literacy rates were on. the order of 5-10% through the start of the 17th-18th century (varying by region). It was both the explosion in printing capabilities (iron, steam, rotary, electric, web presses, from ~100 impressions/hr to 1 million+) and literacy (to 90-95%+) which accounted for much of the political turmoil of the 19th century -- moreso if you consder "the Long 19th Century" of 1789 - 1914.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
The church and royalty were almost always intertwined, power invested by god into the crown for divine legitimacy and thus has the power to decide what is right and wrong. The clergy also had the skills and resources to read and write, something we take for granted these days, thus control information spread at the communion.
The thing about fake news is that it's only fake when proven to be so.
This is all very fuzzy, I was asking for concrete examples of this fake news monopoly.
Here are good counter-examples: the incessant libeling against the royalty at the time of the French revolution [1], or the distortion and propaganda surrounding the Boston massacre to taint the British monarchy [2]. Not saying this was morally right or wrong, but it contrasts with the assertion of parent poster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You assume his understanding of society is accurate because it is popular? Or because he is popular? You can just as well assume Bill Gates understands society for exactly the same reasons. (Gate's business results are not even a spoof of reality.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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) 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) 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), 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) 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...), 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) 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.
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.
Gates was right, there are authorities that are curating this information. Unfortunately the authorities are called Facebook and they do not give a fuck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>'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.”
Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis.
Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHack [1] (itself an icon of hacker culture).
I do not underestimate the level that Pratchett's comedy can operate at. It took me maybe 15 years for the penny to drop between first reading 'Unseen University' and connecting it to the Invisible College of Robert Boyle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College
May I note that being brilliant does not stop someone from being a children's comedy novelist. If people are annoyed by this, perhaps they should think better of children's novelists, rather than insisting I call Pratchett something different so as not to injure the egos of adults who enjoy his writing.
That description seems more appropriate for, say, Roald Dahl than it does for Pratchett.
Pratchett was, for the most part, a comedy fantasy author. Most of his writing was appropriate for younger audiences (with exceptions, like Monstrous Regiment), but I wouldn’t call it children’s books. The fact that his Tiffany Aching books are specifically aimed at the Young Adult market suggests that he agreed.
Interesting comparison. Roald Dahl has in his oeuvre many stories that are far less intended for children than anything I have ever read by Pratchett. Pratchett keeps pretty much all of his stories accessable by at least teenagers. You cannot say the same for Dahl.
That’s fair, yes. I merely meant that Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolatw Factory, Esio Trot and many others are much more deliberately children’s books than just about anything by Pratchett
Dahl definitely has decidedly non-children appropriate work. Fancy some roast leg of lamb for dinner?
After I've finished my cup of tea. It has a bit of an odd flavour though. Did you add almonds or something?
I'd say that while Pratchett's books are wider in intended audience than Dahl, there does seem to be care taken with pretty much all of them not to include anything that would cause an adult to tell a child not to read them. As a child, I never had any adults tell me that I should not be reading Pratchett at my age, which was a fairly common occurence with much of what I was reading.
If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? Speaking personally, they were all fairly over my head when I was a child. As an adult, they sparkle.
>If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels?
In the sense that novels by people like Joseph Conrad or J. G. Ballard are not. 'Empire of the Sun' was one one of my favourite novels as a young teenager, but it was hard work in comparison to Pratchett. The difference in intended audience was utterly clear.
No one who has read Terry Pratchett will be surprised that he has deep insight into human nature.
His books are full of explorations of what motivates humans and how humans misunderstand each other. They are also frequently hilarious.
Bill Gates quote seems to reveal an expectation that humans would respect authority and be guided by it in their decision making -- which shows a shallow understanding of human nature.
The quote also anticipates that information distribution would flow through personal and professional connections and interests rather than being organized in a way to generate the most ad revenue possible.
The Pratchett's I have read seem to be full of basic human archetypes, riffed off for comedic effect, rather than anything approximating how real people think. He's no Shakespear/James Joyce/Henry James.
I was not a fan until I recently re-read all his work - but I dont think he ever would have claimed to be a shakespeare or a Henry James. I would say a more apt comparitive group would probably be Rabelais, Swift,Verne, Vonnegut, Voltaire, Wells, Wilde and Woodehouse - all of which he certainly is an equal writer to and his overall body of work sits well with.
I'm gonna play optimist and note Gates' "not for long" in his response.
I think we're still early days in fake news, and I think society has been here before: broadsheets, polemics, and a lack of trust in news sources in the 19th century ultimately drove improvements in the 20th.
Now in the 21st that's been destabilized; we'll ultimately craft mechanisms to winnow out the chaff, but it's a reactive process: the problem needed to exist before we could address it.
This is exactly right. We are (still) in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions since the invention of the printing press. The invention of the internet has changed the assumptions behind sources of reliable news, funding journalism and control of the political agenda. It is an open question how this revolution will play out but it is clear that the major newspapers such as NYT, WashPo, WSJ, etc. cannot dominate the social narrative as they did in the past which is one reason why everything seems so divisive and scary today. The current uncertainty is not sustainable, so it won't be sustained. But what will take its place is still not clear and the fading influence (and mistrust) of what used to be reliable news sources is all part of the process.
For those interested in this viewpoint I highly recommend reading Clay Shirky's excellent article from 2009 "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"[1].
That was a relevant and prescient article, especially drawing the parallel between our current uncertain news/media situation with the social changes that occurred after the invention of the printing press.
I guess it comes down to how big leaps in information technology act as catalyst for a disruptive reorganization process in society.
Interestingly, the transition from paper to digital media is turning out to have unexpectedly larger implications, disrupting institutional power, control of narrative, facts (and "facts"), knowledge, public awareness, intellectual property, ideologies..
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Pithy lines I liked:
"If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?"
"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."
Added to my reading list:
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Elizabeth Eisenstein)
I think they were both kinda right. What Gates didn't foresee was the extent to which trust became centralized and how that created a need to keep the authorities in check and how keeping them in check enabled fake news.
To be fair, there's some accurate insight in Bill's response that shouldn't lead anyone to just conclude that he was totally wrong. Terry correctly predicted fake news, but Bill also correctly predicted our response to it, which would be to form centralized authorities (like what Facebook is doing), algorithmic newsfeeds, sharing systems, reputation systems, etc. He even says "not for long", like he agreed that it would happen but we'd solve it. Though the jury's still out on whether we'll solve it.
I mean, Bill wasn't really wrong. Just maybe naive?
People have been lying/wrong in print forever. This is not new [0]. What's new is the vast amount of information. He was definitely correct with "for all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text".
What he got wrong is that he seemed to have expected these "referees" to grow vertically when they grew horizontally. Instead of multiple levels of referees filtering the output of one another, we ended up with a few players that vastly outpaced the rest [1].
The rest is the same thing that happens anytime you have a monopoly or relatively few big players. The big players get bigger and bigger. The barrier to entry grows with them. Before long, they control the space.
That space includes the information and the flow of information within it. Sure, they don't have perfect control, but they control enough of it to shape it to however they need (Facebook is a great example of this).
Today, we can all rattle off maybe a dozen companies that clearly control the internet. It is not the wild west anymore. There is the odd exception that might wrestle control of a niche space for a while (e.g. GitHub, Reddit), but once they get big enough to show up on Google's [2] radar, they're bought, threatened, replaced, or somehow otherwise removed.
And then there are things like analytics.
[0]: No, I don't have a source or example, but surely I don't need it to say "somebody has lied in a book or newspaper before".
Bill Gates is smart and successful, but that doesn't mean he is omniscient. He has made mistakes and said many things through his career that turned out to be false. As have we all. This isn't a personal flaw, it is just being human. But people do need to remember that his success doesn't make him wise or prescient, just successful.
>Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story?
Wrong person to ask. For me it was a toddler's bedtime story.
My dad used to play the radio series for me when I was very little. Though I have read the books countless times since then and used to be able to quote the first one in its entirety.
I think what Gates suggest is something like the "web of trust" which W3C was working on as part of the semantic web. The idea is basically if I trust A and A trust B then I can trust news articles written by B.
I'm pretty skeptical it is workable online as a technical solution. But basically this is how trust worked in the newspaper age. ("This was published in the reputable newspaper XXX")
Gates was a blue-blood capitalist, and literally could not imagine people cooperating in a commons with sophisticated computers, because money. Whatever Gates is referring to in that quote very likely has some hobbled assumptions that are hard to conceptualize in 2020.
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.
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.