How the war against fake news backfired

[crossfire]

Fake news has become a problem that the media and the tech industries are urgently searching for ways to solve. But in the post-election push to fix the problem, those who most want to find the solution have managed to lose control over what, exactly, the definition of “fake news” is.

Comments

[tilmon]

The problem, at least in part, is that few people understand what a credible primary source is and how to understand if it is credible. The scholarly, reasoned, use of primary sources undergirds much of not just journalism but also the liberal arts. Failure to understand is also often coupled with anger because a lot of people (perhaps some of your coworkers even?) think that history, literary criticism, anthropology, etc., are just opinion and the only reason they never did well in those classes is because their opinion didn't agree with the teachers'. Where I work, I am privy to a lot of students unloading about how they, for example, keep failing their history exams because the evil teacher asks "trick" questions and they can only try to guess the evil teacher's opinion, as if the percentage increase of immigration in the late 19th century was determined by a cabal of liberals instead of by crunching easily verified numbers

[amw]

Some guys on my Facebook started whining because their beloved satire sites are being included in the first round of fake news filters. I avoided getting into that dumpster fire of a conversation, because my view is that there is very little difference between Infowars and WWN and the Onion. You have to go down this messy path of saying "well it's not the content that matters, it's the intent". So if the intent is propaganda and disinformation, then it's fake news, but if the intent is entertainment and satire, then it isn't? What about if the intent is just to make money by getting the most clicks? In my books it's all garbage

[grace_om]

I think there are two, related issues:
1. Lack of critical thinking and logical thought by readers. Can't see how fb could fix that :-/
2. Degradation of journalism to the extent that even generally credible sources (e.g. NPR) put out click bait headlines (which are the only bit most people read), and the articles are often poorly written, lack proofreading, and rely on obviously hasty background research. Maybe social media could help a bit here by vetting sources that at least adhere to journalistic standards of 2 independent sources...present them differently so there's more than a catchy headline linked to a ad-filled page that looks just like a blog.