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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:17AM
from the truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth dept.
from the truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth dept.
Despite the best efforts of Mark Zuckerberg to downplay Facebook's role in the election of Donald Trump, the scrutiny of how fake news is spread on the platform has intensified.
Buzzfeed News is reporting that "more than dozens" of Facebook employees have created an unofficial task force dedicated to addressing the issue.
Buzzfeed quoted one member of that task force, who did not want to be named over fears for their job.
"[Mark Zuckerberg] knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season," the source said.
The election shook out the way it did because there were ways around the narrative the media was pushing?
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Facebook's Fake News Crisis Deepens
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:40AM
If it appears on "social media", credibility is automatically suspect.
What we need is a browser plugin that does what this site does: http://realorsatire.com/ [realorsatire.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @01:04AM
> What we need is a browser plugin that does what this site does
It wouldn't make a bit of difference. The people must gullibly attracted to fake news, and there are plenty of soybeans in this group, don't care about facts. They've decided that all sources of news are equally untrustworthy which as a way to give themselves permission to believe even the most bonkers stories - as long as the story confirms their world-view. A plugin that tells them if its fake will just be ignored because whoever is programming the plugin is also untrustworthy. You see this in their denunciations of sites like snopes and politifact as being biased against their tribe. They like the post-factual world because it validates their rage orgasms.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @05:13AM
Except Snopes has long cajoled people not to trust them but do their own research (and in fact, people often trot out unconfirmed stories as proof when they are simply unconfirmed), and politifact is biased in approach-
Trump was the most fact-checked of all the 2016 candidates. Of the 650 fact checks PolitiFact conducted, 158 were on Trump -- good for 24 percent of the total. Hillary Clinton was fact-checked 120 times over that same period, approximately 18 percent of the total. As PolitiFact notes, the number of Trump fact checks is to be expected because "he made himself more available on television in the early part of his campaign than his Democratic or Republican rivals. Trump also participated in more debates (11 by our count) than either of the top Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders."
So, yes, Trump has been fact-checked 38 more times than Clinton. And, yes, PolitiFact was the one deciding what statements to fact check.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/01/donald-trump-has-been-wrong-way-more-often-than-all-the-other-2016-candidates-combined/ [washingtonpost.com]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-2008-politifacts-2013-lie-of-the-year-that-you-could-keep-your-health-plan-under-obamacare-it-rated-true/#5c61f842316a [forbes.com]
And if you really want to discuss post-factual, there is no better place to start than with feminist claims of US campuses have rates of rape exceeding the Congo, which has been ongoing, has been debunked repeatedly, and refuses to die.
There are multitudes of different truths to be found in the media, from the misunderstood to the half-truth to outright lie. Even a fact checker can only really help with one of these instances, and the rest are in the arena of claim/counter-claim where there is certainly bias, but not the type you're speaking to.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @06:47AM
So, yes, Trump has been fact-checked 38 more times than Clinton. And, yes, PolitiFact was the one deciding what statements to fact check.
Oh please. Do not even pretend that Trump wasn't a flowing river of outlandish statements begging to be factchecked.
Yours is the false equivalency of journalistic objectivity at work. The two candidates did not say equal numbers of check-worthy things. What do you want them to do? Ignore crazy shit that Trump said because Clinton wasn't running the crazy train at full speed too?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @07:02AM
Yours is the false equivalency of journalistic objectivity at work. The two candidates did not say equal numbers of check-worthy things.
Was that simply because Trump is bat-shit insane, or that the media used kid gloves and often times failed to report wikileaks revelations about Clinton?
I mean if we are going to discuss journalistic objectivity...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday November 16 2016, @06:19PM
Google: "wikileaks clinton"
Result: 46 million hits.
I think it was covered a bit...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday November 16 2016, @06:23PM
OOh, let's get even more specific, using The Donald's favorite whipping boy the New York Times:
Google: "site:nytimes.com wikileaks clinton"
Result: 42,200 results.
The New York Times covered the story over fourty thousand times!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @10:55PM
Which is good and all, but can you do a comparison against some Trump keywords? How about sentiment analysis next? Nah, lets just look at keywords which to try to prove your point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:43PM
Strangely none of Trumps' lies included lying to congress, if we are talking false equivalency.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday November 16 2016, @10:06PM
Strangely none of Trumps' lies included lying to congress, if we are talking false equivalency.
Oh they will, don't you worry.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 16 2016, @01:24PM
Another variation of this phenomenon, when it came to political news: As anyone familiar with my posts here knows, I'm towards the raging left end of the political spectrum, and I'm fairly active on Facebook due to work for some organizations that require it. That means I encountered throughout the general election some friends of mine spinning pure nonsense that either made Clinton look good or Trump look bad, or both. The thing was, a lot of those memes and posts and articles were verifiably factually wrong about all sorts of things, and when I pointed it out the reaction was not "Oh, thank you, I'll fix my post" but rather "Shut up! You shouldn't say that, because it just helps Trump! Do you support Trump?" In other words, there are some people who stupidly share BS, but also quite a few people who share BS on purpose.
I have to assume that those towards the right-wing of the political spectrum encountered similar stuff for Trump. I saw some of it go by.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by deimtee on Wednesday November 16 2016, @01:40AM
Yeah, but how bad are US politics when you actually have to ask if things like http://denverguardian.com/2016/11/05/fbi-agent-suspected-hillary-email-leaks-found-dead-apparent-murder-suicide/ [denverguardian.com] are real or satire?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:35AM
> Yeah, but how bad are US politics when you actually have to ask
The only reason you have to ask is if you've already decided that all the fake news about the "clinton bodycount" is something you want to believe in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @05:55AM
And it's gone.
I swear print media will have a resurgence just because it is lest affected by the memory hole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @06:40AM
(a) its still there
(b) the site is obviously a fake news site, come on already
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:11PM
Nope. 404.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 1) by J_Darnley on Wednesday November 16 2016, @09:41PM
Thank god for archive services then [archive.is]. Preserving what's published no matter how real, fake, embarrassing, or inspirational it was.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday November 16 2016, @02:30AM
Ok, realorsatire might be possible to keep reliable. But if you need it you probably won't be the one using it.
Fact checkers on the other hand are mostly useless because they either start out as frauds pushing an agenda or quickly realize that if they don't push the Narrative they will be punished. But most are happy to serve. As the formal 'media' have beclowned themselves over the last couple of decades and lost credibility with most people they have tried 'rebranding' a few of their less infamous minions as 'fact checkers' with the results one would expect of such an effort.
(Score: 2) by J053 on Wednesday November 16 2016, @08:33PM