Is that the criteria you’re using? If it’s more accurate than a claim by Trump or Breitbart than it’s not fake news? I’m not sure if you answered the question. Independent of the claims that Breitbart or Trump have made, how do you assess the claim that the likely % of non-citizens voting is zero? Do you think it’s reasonable to simply dismiss the data point of the 1 out of 85 they indicated?
I don’t know what this is referring to. Can you elaborate - what conclusion is being assumed in the premise of an argument here?
And now I see I forgot the quote tags in my post #99. Hopefully it makes sense
Meh; the point is that even granting you that, and supported with very little evidence in the end, the number of illegal voters is most likely a pittance and in practice those illegals have been really unable to change results.
Again the conclusion that there were many illegals voting was indeed mostly smoke, as even the authors are not sure about it. And the fake news creators continue to make assumptions from a likely wrong premise.
Breitbart and others even abuse the paper to make more smoke all right. As Peter Hadfield could say, they and many others did not really read the article, nor the rebuttals and what even took place in 2014.
Needless to say, CNN has never carried on any of its shows (or website) the claim “three million illegals voted” in California. But the woman who made the statement was absolutely adamant.
Though it’s possible she believes she saw this claim made on CNN, it’s probably just as likely that she read on a Facebook page that someone *else *had seen it on CNN. That was good enough for her.
…And surely that’s the difference between people who consume fake news and people who reject fake news: the latter are not content to play the telephone game (e.g. ‘I saw it on my cousin’s Facebook feed from someone whose neighbor tweeted about watching CNN say that three million California illegals voted.’) People who reject fake news are the kind of people who would never think of making a claim in a message board post without appending at least one supportive link–and they would expect that link to be questioned, too.
But the fake-news consumers are content to say ‘you can Google it’ when challenged on their claims:
I suspect that there is nothing to do except kill everybody who lives and breathes “Fake News”.
The problem is not that it exists, the problem is that there are millions of people for whom the “Fake” stuff is MUCH preferable to the real stuff.
As the saying goes: Water seeks its own level.
Which sounds better:
A. There has been a huge shift in how stuff is made and delivered. “Longshoremen” (aka stevedores) Used to unload stuff from trucks and hand carry into the ship. Then fork lifts and pallets cut the number of stevedores required.
Now, there are about 5 guys running a crane.
The factory production line is now a series of robots handing the work from machine to machine.
No more paint booths for small parts - the robots powder coat anything metal.
B. The nasty Chinese took the jobs from Good White Americans. Change the rules, and all those jobs will magically re-appear and it will be like 1960 again.
Too many people prefer “fake” fairy tales to reality.
And is not just the unemployed automated-out-of-the-work-force people.
You don’t have to go to the polling place to vote - just send a Text! Seems to have worked,
At this point, any story above inter-personal dealings which has a simple, easy, comforting message is probably not the reality of the adult world.
And don’t forget American’s love affair of hate and fear - we never seem to have enough enemies - any story in which a foreigner makes an American’s life harder is an easy sell.
Anyone interested in this topic will want to take a look at the new survey (on American’s consumption of fake news) published yesterday in Buzzfeed. (I posted at greater length about this in the "What’s so bad about fake news sites? " thread.)
There is just this thirst in the country for simple, emotionally-validating and It-makes-sense-to-me news. Men are pigs, black people are thugs, Obama wants to destroy America, China took all our jobs, pro-lifers hate women, etc.
In virtually all examples there all the sources had to acknowledge the gross errors and make corrections and/or the involved fired.
And that leads one to identify one property of the fake news makers: they never do make corrections and many times the hired guns continue to be prized among the consumers of those news regardless of of how misleading or lying POS they are, like James O’Keefe .
Are those bad journalistic practices from the parent company, journalistic malpractice, or simply individual bad calls from journalists? Like, just for example, the fake GWB documents. Not only was it not immediately apparent that they were a hoax, but the network in question quickly fired the journalist who broke the story, a neophyte nobody with no strong reputation for journalism. I think his name was Don Mathers or something like that.
I’m going to repeat myself at least once just because my suggestion keeps getting overlooked…
I think google et al should not block fake news, just give more info on where it came from.
Just as my cellphone will inform me if a new number is considered a spam number, it’s fairly easy for facebook and others to just add a line to a link saying “This may be a ‘fake news’ site" or even “This story is of dubious origin, click here for full details”.
Then you don’t get people complaining about some conspiracy to suppress the “truth”.
They can track where stories come from and whether they later get debunked and present the user with more information than we have now.
Well personally I’m more concerned about misinformation infecting scientific discussions and the classrooms, such as the notion that one’s biology is not what should define their sex, but rather if a 40 year old man decides he ‘feels like’ a woman he should have an immediate right to use the bathroom with little girls.
But on a radio show I listened to the other day, an ‘era where the lines between fact and falsehood are blurred’ could be a sign of the times, as this began to become the case in the last days of Rome.
And of course this goes well beyond left/right politics, though from your post it sounds like you’re singling out ‘right-wingers’ as the misinformants; I might be wrong to assume, but I get the feeling you’re less concerned about school boards defining sex by ‘feelings’ instead of biology, or Salon.com giving a voice to a self-admitted pedophile claiming his attraction to children is an ‘orientation’ and objecting to it a form of ‘bigotry’.
Not to mention the ‘anti-fat shaming’ trend, in which it’s apparently now politically incorrect to claim that obesity is an unhealthy lifestyle as it might offend people; despite this being little more than free PR work for fast food corporations than serious nutritional information; much like the cigarette cartels which used to advocate smoking as a health or ‘weight loss’ product before their advertizing was cracked down on.
And yada yada - anyway I think your ‘plan’ to swamp message boards with facts is pretty futile, not to mention boring. I’d much rather spend my free time with a good book or a drink of my choice, than spamming message boards with Wikipedia posts, but that’s just me.
Plus considering the internet is more or less a pure democracy, I’m pretty sure the number of misinformed folks posting nonsense will always outnumber the number of informed ones, not to mention the trolls who aren’t really misinformed, but just love posting nonsense because it riles you guys up.
So I think you need to come up with a better game plan than that.
For someone concerned about misinformation in science you sure don’t know much about gender or sex.
Your sex is largely based on your outward appearance and your genitals. Your gender is based on your brain, and there is convincing evidence of differences in brain structure - transmen (that’s men born as women) have brains that are legitimately built differently to cis women, despite their mismatched sexual organs. This often creates a dysphoric effect, and currently the best way to resolve said effect is by allowing those people to transition to the opposite sex - we don’t have the technology to change their gender (i.e. their brains) at the moment. Just as your sexual organs do not determine who you are attracted to, they also don’t determine which gender your brain thinks you are.
This is not news; try to keep up.
Okay, you’re interested in science denialism when it comes to “fake news”. Commendable; it’s a real problem, and it has been for a lot longer than in politics in general, thanks to the efforts of sites like NaturalNews, WattsUpWithThat, and Answers In Genesis. But it’s also largely on one side of the aisle. Okay, the medical quacks? That’s bipartisan (just ask Orrin Hatch). But which side has all the creationist representatives? Which side has all the AGW denialists? There is a legitimate partisan difference here, whether you like to admit it or not.
Oh, and for the record? Salon is right. According to the available research, pedophilia is not a chosen orientation. For many people, it’s a constant burden they have to live with, knowing that exploring their sexuality is impossible for them because doing so would seriously harm other people.
Every single medical professional and medical organization in the world will, if asked, tell you loud and clear that obesity is unhealthy. EVERY SINGLE ONE. There is no “PC Taboo” here. That’s entirely your own invention. Rather, the taboo is on fat shaming. There’s a difference between saying “it’s unhealthy to be really fat” and constantly giving people shit about unhealthy habits or eating too much. The former is well-understood and done to try to push people in the right direction. The latter is not. In fact, once again, for someone complaining about the misinformation infecting scientific discussion, you’re really behind the times when it comes to the research. Fatshaming doesn’t help. At all. It actually makes things worse.
Before you appoint yourself the gatekeeper of scientific fact, it would behoove you not to be completely wrong about every single thing you say.
But sex hormones in the body such as testosterone play an influence on brain development, so no you can’t treat the sex of the physical body and the physical brain as completely unrelated, as they’re interlinked. Ultimately the brain is just another organ in the body.
Apples to oranges, because being a ‘true transgender’, or being born with the brain structure not matching the body isn’t the same as just being a transvestite.
Plus in some cases, the people in question didn’t even have to provide medial proof they’d been diagnosed as transgender, meaning that anyone could just claim they were and gain access to the bathrooms. In some cases rapists and perverts used this as a way to get access to women and girls.
There’s no evidence that pedophilic thoughts are ‘genetic’, or that the development of pedophilic urges is equatable to the way that homosexuality is said to develop.
Plus, the author that Salon hosted was outed as a member of a genuine pedophile message board which advocated actual sex acts with children, not just a ‘no contact pedohile’ like he claimed.
Actually there have been ‘campaigns’ with actually medically obese people using slogans like ‘fuck your body standards’, so how’s that any different than smokers coming out and chanting ‘fuck your health standards’?
I even read the Breitbart reports about him, nothing was mentioned about advocating sex acts with children, only thought crimes. But yeah, he needs always to be under a watchful eye.
Of course the point is still that a lot of what you are reporting as a fact is not. Specially the argument about the sexual predators being used to counter new bathroom rules.
You know, everyone’s so worried about this, but I’ve never heard a peep from these people about little boys being molested in the mens’ room. Why is that?
