This Is What It’s Like to Read Fake News For Two Weeks

CPUd said:
Who is "we"?
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Count me in. Along with all the other people who have commented on the shenanigans of you, ZippyJuan, TheCount, PRB, Sam I Am, Squarepusher, and a cast of thousands.

I could actually find out who is behind all your nonsense. Would not be that hard with a little digging.
 
Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’

TBILISI, Georgia — Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the nation of Georgia decided early this year that money could be made from America’s voracious appetite for passionately partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to soar.

“I don’t know why, but it did not work,” said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real — and completely fake — news in a stew of anti-Clinton fervor.

More than 6,000 miles away in Vancouver, a Canadian who runs a satirical website, John Egan, had made a similar observation. Mr. Egan’s site, The Burrard Street Journal, offers sendups of the news, not fake news, and he is not trying to fool anyone. But he, too, discovered that writing about Mr. Trump was a “gold mine.” His traffic soared and his work, notably a story that President Obama would move to Canada if Mr. Trump won, was plundered by Mr. Latsabidze and other internet entrepreneurs for their own websites.

“It’s all Trump,” Mr. Egan said by telephone. “People go nuts for it.”

With Mr. Obama now warning of the corrosive threat from fake political news circulated on Facebook and other social media, the pressing question is who produces these stories, and how does this overheated, often fabricated news ecosystem work?

Some analysts worry that foreign intelligence agencies are meddling in American politics and using fake news to influence elections. But one window into how the meat in fake sausages gets ground can be found in the buccaneering internet economy, where satire produced in Canada can be taken by a recent college graduate in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and presented as real news to attract clicks from credulous readers in the United States. Mr. Latsabidze said his only incentive was to make money from Google ads by luring people off Facebook pages and onto his websites.

To gin up material, Mr. Latsabidze often simply cut and pasted, sometimes massaging headlines but mostly just copying material from elsewhere, including Mr. Egan’s prank story on Mr. Obama. Mr. Egan was not amused to see his satirical work on Mr. Latsabidze’s website and filed a copyright infringement notice to defend his intellectual property.

Yet Mr. Egan conceded a certain professional glee that Mr. Trump is here to stay. “Now that we’ve got him for four years,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”

By some estimates, bogus news stories appearing online and on social media had an even greater reach in the final months of the presidential campaign than articles by mainstream news organizations.


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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html

Stuff like this has me torn between trying to educate people and getting in on the action myself.
 
lol, I was getting pretty upset till I read this was an article on politico. Should have known.. CPUd pretty much only posts articles from politico, wapo and nytimes.
 
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CPUd said:
If onlys and justs were candies and nuts, then everyday would be Erntedankfest.
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Completely lacking in self-awareness. Entirely.

Your firebrand no longer controls the narrative; your anti-audience is overtaking your target audience; and as it just so happens that your targeted audience easily gets confused, they are starting to ask you questions, tough questions that you cannot satisfactorily answer, because your “truth” is steeped in utter bollocks, misdirection and deception.

You are losing your audience to new alternatives that you now, in utter desperation, decree as “fake-news.” (As if this is some new revolution. And I am the fricking idiot here? Right.)
 
Weston White said:
Completely lacking in self-awareness. Entirely.

Your firebrand no longer controls the narrative; your anti-audience is overtaking your target audience; and as it just so happens that your targeted audience easily gets confused, they are starting to ask you questions, tough questions that you cannot satisfactorily answer, because your “truth” is steeped in utter bollocks, misdirection and deception.

You are losing your audience to new alternatives that you now, in utter desperation, decree as “fake-news.” (As if this is some new revolution. And I am the fricking idiot here? Right.)
Click to expand...

lakD3Fm.jpg
 

Fact-Checking Won’t Save Us From Fake News

Fake news.

We’ve used this phrase so many times in the past two months that it’s almost lost meaning — partly because it can mean so many different things. Depending on who you talk to, “fake news” may refer to satirical news, hoaxes, news that’s clumsily framed or outright wrong, propaganda, lies destined for viral clicks and advertising dollars, politically motivated half-truths, and more.

Whatever definition you pick, fake news is worrying media folks. Stories meant to intentionally mislead are an affront to journalism, which is supposed to rely on facts, reality and trust.

As such, news about fake news has boomed. So have proposed solutions. Already we’ve seen lists of fake news sites; browser extensions that identify fake news sites, flag questionable Facebook posts and correct Donald Trump’s tweets; and calls for social media companies to take responsibility for allowing fake news to thrive.

Fact-checking is key to journalism — it’s a skill and a service that’s instrumental in providing the information to the public. My first job in journalism was as a fact-checker and, later, a research editor; as a journalist I’ve had many fact-checkers save me from dumb mistakes. I even wrote a book on how to do it well: “The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking.” Fact-checking politicians’ statements or articles after they’ve published — a close relative of the type of fact-checking that goes on behind the scenes in journalism — has been instrumental in holding politicians accountable. I know what fact-checking can do, and how important it is. But to combat fake news, it’s simply not enough.

Don’t get me wrong — fact-checking is a start, and some of it may even help. But for all the hand-wringing, hot takes and congratulatory posts about the latest fact-checking heroics, fake news continues to do what it does best: adapt. Google and Facebook may block well-known abusers from advertising networks, but the fake newsmakers will just launch new sites. Facebook is partnering with fact-checkers, but the groups that will do the work — ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes — already face partisan criticism.

Fake news purveyors have even co-opted the term “fake news.” In early December, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones published his own list of fake news sites. At the top are The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The stakes are high: Fake news has consequences. Take Pizzagate, a conspiracy claiming that a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., houses a child sex ring led by Hillary Clinton. In early December, a man went to the restaurant armed with an AR-15 rifle, ostensibly to free imprisoned children. He fired the weapon, although he didn’t hit anyone. Then, he saw that there was no evidence of the ring and surrendered.

Despite the consequences, some readers don’t seem to care. In a recent poll from Pew Research Center, 88 percent of respondents said fake news is a source of at least some confusion. But 23 percent admitted to sharing fake news, and 14 percent said they shared a story they knew was fake. Against this backdrop, President-elect Donald Trump can unapologetically make outlandish claims that can be easily proved wrong.

I’m as distressed as any journalist is to watch fake news spread, even as available facts can disprove it. But if facts don’t matter, what does? The history of news — and the power structures that control its spread and consumption — may offer clues on how to wrangle fake news in a way that fact-checking alone can’t.

Step one is to consider that fake news may be a fight not over truth, but power, according to Mike Ananny, a media scholar at the University of Southern California. Fake news “is evidence of a social phenomenon at play — a struggle between [how] different people envision what kind of world that they want.”

Ideological fake news lands in the social media feeds of audiences who are already primed to believe whatever story confirms their worldview, said Angela Lee, a journalism and emerging media professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Readers also share stories for the LOLs. “You don’t only share things because they are true,” Lee said. “You share things that entertain you, that start a conversation between you and your friends.”

Stories such as Pizzagate aren’t meant to inform, but to seed doubt in institutions, distract and flood newsfeeds with conflicting and confusing information. And if fake news isn’t about facts, but about power, then independent fact-checking alone won’t fix it — particularly for readers who already distrust the organizations that are doing the fact-checking.

So how can we strip power from fake news? How do we prevent the next Pizzagate?

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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fact-checking-wont-save-us-from-fake-news/
 
CPUd said:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fact-checking-wont-save-us-from-fake-news/
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So stupid.

If the mainstream media wasn't lying constantly, and wasn't the original source of fake news, then people wouldn't have to turn to lesser known or unknown sources who provide both truthful and at times untruthful information.

Of course it seems that the main source of fake news on the right, comes from the left, just as your OP provides insight on. That's no big surprise. People on the left tend to be pathological liars.
 
dannno said:
So stupid.

If the mainstream media wasn't lying constantly, and wasn't the original source of fake news, then people wouldn't have to turn to lesser known or unknown sources who provide both truthful and at times untruthful information.

Of course it seems that the main source of fake news on the right, comes from the left, just as your OP provides insight on. That's no big surprise. People on the left tend to be pathological liars.
Click to expand...

The ones doing it to get paid are typically apolitical.
 
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