How Fake News Goes Viral

[Michael Hardner]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?_r=0

One man noticed some buses near a protest in Austin TX.  He tweeted that they carried professional protesters.  Soon the internet was blaming George Soros, and even Donald Trump was taken in.

 

We don't censor fake news on here, but yet there isn't much of it.  Why is that ?

[Michael Hardner]

http://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/people-like-fake-news-better/

 

Quote

BuzzFeed Canada's Craig Silverman discusses how bogus Facebook stories blew credible news out of the water.

More on fake news, and how teenagers from Macedonia (sic) earned cash by swaying the US election.  There is no evil here, just mundane mediocrity...

[bush_cheney2004]

Fake news is not new, just the means of distribution.  

[Wilber]

It's on Facebook, it must be true.

[DogOnPorch]

The Ministry of Truth will determine what news is fake, citizens of Oceania.

[Omni]

On 11/22/2016 at 7:07 AM, DogOnPorch said:

The Ministry of Truth will determine what news is fake, citizens of Oceania.

Don;t need a ministry of truth, just a bit of common sense. Hillary didn't kill anyone, and 49 people were shot in Orlando, just to catch you up.

[GostHacked]

On 11/21/2016 at 8:30 PM, Wilber said:

It's on Facebook, it must be true.

Facebook admitted to putting up fake news articles to see how people reacted.

 

 

 

 

[Omni]

From what I hear of late one problem Facebook is having is finding algorithms that can effectively separate the wheat from the chaff. Let's hope they can come up with something by next election time so Americans don't fall for the same crap again.

[?Impact]

It's not just Facebook. Obviously Twitter and Youtube are responsible for propagating just as much fake news. I was doing some research on gravity the other day, and the first hits on Youtube are the song by John Mayer, the movie, and then the flat-earth society misinformation. Real scientific information on gravity is way down in the list.

[GostHacked]

On 11/24/2016 at 7:56 PM, ?Impact said:

It's not just Facebook. Obviously Twitter and Youtube are responsible for propagating just as much fake news. I was doing some research on gravity the other day, and the first hits on Youtube are the song by John Mayer, the movie, and then the flat-earth society misinformation. Real scientific information on gravity is way down in the list.

Youtube may have rated things different, but Youtube (I don't think anyways) has not put out fake news. Facebook HAS put out fake news deliberately, AND news organizations have picked those up and propelled them further.

[Bryan]

I think it's hilarious that some of the worst perpetrators of fake news this past election cycle are the ones now complaining about it. 

[dialamah]

15 minutes ago, Bryan said:

I think it's hilarious that some of the worst perpetrators of fake news this past election cycle are the ones now complaining about it. 

Majority of fake news was delivered to conservatives/republicans in order to create support for Trump.   

Buzzfeed analyzed news stories and concluded that conservative sites were twice as likely as liberal sites to run false or misleading news.

Is that what you were referring to?

 

Edited December 1, 2016 by dialamah
Made an assumption, I might be wrong so changed my post.

[Altai]

On 22.11.2016 at 3:47 AM, Michael Hardner said:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?_r=0

One man noticed some buses near a protest in Austin TX.  He tweeted that they carried professional protesters.  Soon the internet was blaming George Soros, and even Donald Trump was taken in.

 

We don't censor fake news on here, but yet there isn't much of it.  Why is that ?

The news may be fake but professional provokers are not fake, they are real.

[cybercoma]

Fake news goes viral for a number of reasons, not the least of which are confirmation bias and also the fact that the vast majority of people who share news stories don't read anything past the headline.

There's also a strong contingent of people, whom we both know, who are utterly incapable of critically evaluating the credibility of a source. They don't understand the difference between substantiated and verifiable facts and arguments and conspiracy theory nonsense that has zero credibility and no substantiation. Your counterpoint at one time was, "some of that stuff has turned out to be true," but the fact of the matter is even a broken clock is right twice a day. If you throw enough crap at the side of a barn some of it is bound to stick. What should be clear is that we evaluate credibility so we can have a reliable look at what's going on. Wild-ass hypotheses stated as fact are completely unreliable.

So you combine click-bait headlines, confirmation bias, and the desire for some people to believe they're smarter than everyone else because they think they've found some top secret information that the ever elusive "they" are trying to hiding from mainstream media--those things all combine for a giant clusterf**k of misinformation and propaganda being shared within echo chambers online. 

Some people are so divorced from reality that they will deny factual evidence when you show it to them. They will completely ignore the patterns in the data. Some even get angry at having their propaganda-filled assumptions challenged. The Allegory of The Cave has never been more apt. One of Trump's people recently went so far as to say, "there's no such thing as facts." This exposes a critical misunderstanding of postmodernism and deconstructionist theories. When social scientists or humanities scholars say that there's no "truth," they're not saying there is no facts. They're saying that there are many perspectives on those facts and different meaning ascribed to them. There are many "truths" experienced by those facts. Trump's people saying there's no such thing as "facts" is the rallying cry of propagandists who don't want people evaluating the facts the Liar in Chief, who objectively is the least truthful politician ever seen in American politics. They are literally arguing that they can create their own reality and stunningly ignorant people buy into that wholesale.

This is what the attack on intelligence and academia gets you. Mind-numbingly stupid people, who buy into the notion that you get to pick and choose what is real and what isn't. And that's how you get fake news going viral.

[DogOnPorch]

Luckily, you're too smart to be fooled by fake news. Unlike the unwashed masses.

[Wilber]

2 hours ago, DogOnPorch said:

Luckily, you're too smart to be fooled by fake news. Unlike the unwashed masses.

It's easy to be fooled by fake news if people aren't more critical of their sources, they can still be fooled if they are.  Washed or unwashed, if people just look for sources that confirm their  opinions without questioning them, they are bound to be fooled. Facebook says it is trying to weed false news out but I still see things pop up that could be right out of National Enquirer and don't withstand even minimal fact checking.

There is so much noise and misinformation out there that it is getting more difficult to find facts, even though we have access to more information than at any time in history.

Edited December 1, 2016 by Wilber

[Guest]

Why would people get their news from Facebook when there is a plethora of well respected news sites a click away?  It's completely beyond me.

[Bonam]

28 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

Why would people get their news from Facebook when there is a plethora of well respected news sites a click away?  It's completely beyond me.

Simple. People are on Facebook anyway to talk to their friends, post photos, look at friend's photos, etc. Facebook intersperses this set of social information with third party content it thinks you're likely to click on, including both ads and news. If you're just sitting there in your free time and browsing Facebook and see a news article or video with an interesting headline, you might click on it and read/watch it, even though you would not have actively sought out to look for news during that time. This tendency to actually read/watch the article/video may be increased if you see that one of your friends has commented on it. Many of the articles shared/linked on Facebook ARE from well respected news sites, but of course many others are not. 

Edited December 1, 2016 by Bonam

[bush_cheney2004]

52 minutes ago, Wilber said:

..There is so much noise and misinformation out there that it is getting more difficult to find facts, even though we have access to more information than at any time in history.

 

There is no ultimate truth....and even "facts" are suspect.   Then we have the SJWs who think they own the truth and the facts, and that people will act as they do once they understand the "truth/facts".    That's not the case at all....free will trumps "truth"...pun intended.

[eyeball]

1 hour ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

There is no ultimate truth....and even "facts" are suspect.

Oh well, at least we still have reality.

[Wilber]

4 hours ago, bcsapper said:

Why would people get their news from Facebook when there is a plethora of well respected news sites a click away?  It's completely beyond me.

I agree, it might be a good source for news about friends and family but I think many people spend so much time on social media, they don't have time to find legitimate news sources.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Bonam said:

Simple. People are on Facebook anyway to talk to their friends, post photos, look at friend's photos, etc. Facebook intersperses this set of social information with third party content it thinks you're likely to click on, including both ads and news. If you're just sitting there in your free time and browsing Facebook and see a news article or video with an interesting headline, you might click on it and read/watch it, even though you would not have actively sought out to look for news during that time. This tendency to actually read/watch the article/video may be increased if you see that one of your friends has commented on it. Many of the articles shared/linked on Facebook ARE from well respected news sites, but of course many others are not. 

 

3 minutes ago, Wilber said:

I agree, it might be a good source for news about friends and family but I think many people spend so much time on social media, they don't have time to find legitimate news sources.

Yeah, I guess I'm just not up on how Facebook actually works.  I too thought it was just a friends and family thing.

[Wilber]

10 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

 

Yeah, I guess I'm just not up on how Facebook actually works.  I too thought it was just a friends and family thing.

Me either, I just look at my wife's page which she just shares with family and close friends. Even so, she still gets these phoney news articles showing up on the side of her news feed.

[Bonam]

1 hour ago, bcsapper said:

 

Yeah, I guess I'm just not up on how Facebook actually works.  I too thought it was just a friends and family thing.

It is. And the average facebook user has 338 facebook friends. So that means there's always new content being posted. Among those 338 friends, you'll likely have people that share, react to, or comment on, random news articles, and those can show up in your feed with a note that says "Joe liked this" or "George commented on this". And if you ever click on any of those types of articles, facebook will then remember that as something you're "interested in" and sometimes show you articles like that randomly, even if none of your friends interacted with those articles. While it's a good algorithm to show people content they might be interested in, it also tends to create an echo chamber effect, since it will present you the kinds of information that you react to (that could potentially be stuff you disagree with - a friend of mine was commented that Facebook always shows him all kinds of far left opinion pieces, but that's because he always gets mad and comments on them). 

[DogOnPorch]

7 hours ago, Wilber said:

It's easy to be fooled by fake news if people aren't more critical of their sources, they can still be fooled if they are.  Washed or unwashed, if people just look for sources that confirm their  opinions without questioning them, they are bound to be fooled. Facebook says it is trying to weed false news out but I still see things pop up that could be right out of National Enquirer and don't withstand even minimal fact checking.

There is so much noise and misinformation out there that it is getting more difficult to find facts, even though we have access to more information than at any time in history.

The whole 1984-esque filtering of what is news and what is not SHOULD disturb you.

Who decides??