What is fake news?

Great Debates
1

“Fake news” is a term that basically didn’t exist until late October, but once it was out there, people have been falling over themselves to slap this label on anything they don’t like. But what is fake news? Let’s look at what it isn’t.

Honest mistakes - Legitimate news organizations that make honest mistakes in their reporting and (hopefully) issue a retraction later.

Momentary lapses of integrity - Legitimate journalists working for legitimate news organizations who, for whatever reason, make up stories about coming under RPG fire (for example).

Bad journalism - Questionable sources, innuendo, opinion presented as fact, “just asking questions.” Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a girl in 1990? I don’t know, but it’s not fake news.

Genuine beliefs of things that aren’t true - Conspiracy theories of all stripes.

Legitimate reporting of things that never happened - Real reporters covering real events that turn out to be hoaxes.

Stuff that you just don’t like - True but irrelevant nonsense that’s spread around to sway opinion.

Satire - The Onion, tongue in cheek twitter jokes,

So what does that leave? Fake news is made up out of thin air by people who want the stories to go viral for ad revenue. Let’s look at some examples.

Hillary Clinton will be indicted by the FBI in 2017. This story was first posted on worldpoliticus.com and shared 140,000 times. It was not true. It cites unnamed FBI sources who never existed. It was not bad journalism, it was not an honest mistake, it was not a genuine but incorrect belief. It was just a lie made up for the money.

Obamas unfollow Clinton on Twitter. This story was from yournewswire.com. It’s easily verifiable and has no basis in fact. Whoever wrote it knew it wasn’t true. Sure, Sean Hannity repeated it (bad journalism on his part), but it’s fake news.

Lastly, and the reason I started this thread, Pizzagate is not fake news. It’s a combination of a conspiracy theory (a legitimately held but incorrect belief) and bad journalism (infowars.com JAQing off and presenting innuendo/opinion as fact). The creation of the pizzagate conspiracy theory was not financially motivated, although people who spread it may have been. It was not made up out of thin air – there are in fact emails that exist and say things, even if that’s the extent of facts.

2

My own exposure pretty much revolves around friends who are infected with Facebook psychosis, most especially the Bernie enthusiasts. They were constantly alerting me to extreme stories from news outlets I had never heard of with suspiciously generic names, about the insane efforts on the part of the DNC to drive Bernie away. Checking into the Facebook, I’d see that one and two or three more, all from sources that don’t seem “anchored” anywhere.

Is this part of the “disinformation” campaign from Russia? I’m guessing it is, with the shrewd effort to cause dissension on the mild and middlin’ left. The Bernie people I know were already miffed at the DNC, and this stuff just set their hair on fire.

How many of them refused to vote for Hilary because of this? And how many of them were located in those crucial states? Dunno, anyone know of a way to find out? Because rough guess, if eighty thousand Bernie people in those states refused to vote for Hillary despite the horror of Trump, then, yeah, it swung the election. Like I say, I don’t know, and don’t know how to find out.

But if anyone thinks the Russian campaign could not have swung the election, that it isn’t possible, perhaps you could prove it?

3

Respectfully setting aside the source of the DNC email leaks and focusing on the thread topic, what you’re talking about isn’t fake news either. The DNC leaks did indeed happen; the authenticity of the emails hasn’t been refuted; the emails did have a few nuggets of content for people who were already inclined to believe that the DNC had it in for Bernie from the start.

Now, news stories like “CONFIRMED, DNC Coordinated Efforts to Sabotage Sanders Campaign,” where the body of the story was 90% someone bitching and 10% the few nuggets of content from the DNC leaks that had already been public for weeks or months did indeed have the effect of setting Bernie supporters’ hair on fire, I would classify that as bad journalism at worst.

That’s not to say there wasn’t fake news about Sanders. I don’t have a good example on me but I do remember this story from HuffPo, which is actually a commentary about fake news that was spread around by a ton of people who didn’t read past the headline.

4

How do you differentiate that from satire like The Onion or The Enquirer? Surely they have profit motive as well.

5

I think it goes something like, I don’t know how to define satire but I know it when I see it.

6

I wasn’t aware The Enquirer was satire.

While The Onion has a profit motive, they don’t expect their stories to be taken as real news.

7

I’m not sure what to call the Enquirer but I think it’s safe to say they also don’t expect their stories to be taken as real news. I hope. Please.

8

The original Pizzagate tweet reported that the New York City Police department while investigat discovered the existence of a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party while investigating Podesta’s emails. This was a factually incorrect claim with no basis in reality. Therefore I have no reason to believe that creator of this tweet actually believed it was true. Far more likely he willfully lied in hopes that it would go viral and defame the party and candidate that he opposed. This is different from most conspiracy theories which start with a fact but then misinterpret the implications. For example there really was an UFO that crashed around Roswell NM in 1947 it just wasn’t an extraterrestrial. The World trade center buildings really did collapse in a way that resembled to some a controlled demolition. etc.
While its true Pizzagate didn’t have a profit motive, I think that the motive of defaming or discrediting a disliked individual or group, or promoting an ideological viewpoint are sufficient to count as fake news provided that the creator of said news willfully lied in its creation.

9

They do indeed want their readers to make-believe–to make themselves believe, in the way that children make believe bed-time stories. A lot of what circulates on Facebook works in pretty much the same way.

10

I’m pretty sure that they do intend people to take them seriously and that many people in fact do. It has been clear during the election that they have been friendly towards Trump, and clearly intendedtheir coverage to be taken seriously enough to help put him in power.

11

I don’t read the Enquirer, willing to assume that you don’t either. But I do watch Rachel Maddow, and last night she did a piece on how the Enquirer went totally Bat-Boy for Trump over the last few months. Hillary is dying, Hillary is gay, Hillary is a drug-addict. That’s the milder stuff.

You can probably find it on-line at her site, if you want to curl your hair.

12

It’s not. Satire fundamentally makes a point, which leaves verisimilitude irrelevant. The Enquirer et al by nature are entertaining only because the reader suspends disbelief.

13

That tweet, which was indeed fake news, didn’t mention Podesta, his emails, Comet Ping Pong, or any of the key elements around Pizzagate. The conspiracy theory that the Clintons were involved in the “Lolita Express” child sex traffic ring was already months old by that point. I know it’s been labeled as the start of Pizzagate, but I think it’s a stretch. Pizzagate would have happened with or without that tweet.

14

Well that just makes me not want to live in this world anymore. OK, we can call the National Enquirer fake news.

15

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, exactly, but I’ll give you my quick reaction to the OP. You list a whole bunch of things that I have no doubt occasionally happen in all media, and then ask the rhetorical question “So what does that leave?”, creating (perhaps unintentionally) the impression that it doesn’t leave much. IOW, though it may just be my reading of it, I’m left with the impression that fake news isn’t that much of a problem.

I would certainly disagree with that impression. I can offer two general anecdotal examples. If I go to a site like Newsmax or Breitbart and skim the contents, the time before I come across the first blatant lie or misrepresentation can generally be measured in seconds. These are pure propaganda sites and anything they say that happens to be true or partly true is pure coincidence. Yet to many people places like that are a sole and trusted source of news, helped along by confirmation bias. I don’t do Facebook but, if anything, I understand that can be even worse.

The other anecdotal example is the evidence of man-in-the-street interviews, particularly with right-wing types like Trump supporters. Their lack of knowledge and misconceptions are usually so extreme that it’s truly a scary thought to know that they’re actually able to vote.

That second example highlights the fact that fake news as such is only part of the problem – there’s a much bigger problem in the lack of substantive coverage by mainstream media in favor of commercially popular trivia like celebrity news. So for many voters, the effect is a sort of double-whammy of being kept in the dark about major issues of public policy, PLUS the occasional injection of completely fabricated falsehoods. The results can be deadly to democracy in terms of very poor governance, which then snowballs into a general distrust of government. Fake news is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem of public ignorance.

16

When you have a headline that says “Father goes for kidney treatment - leaves hospital as a woman!” or some other such fanciful stuff I can’t imagine as anything but satire. The Enquirer is probably not the best example of a satire tabloid - maybe Weekly World News with headlines like “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby”. In any event, none of these are meant to be taken seriously.

How do you know there wasn’t a profit motive? From what I gather much of the fake news is propagated to generate clicks and revenue. Planet Money did a podcast on one perpetrator of fake newsand surprise - he was in it for the money:

17

Y’all don’t remember when Mars was as big as the full moon a few years ago …

18

Ran across a new one just now.

Obama was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal. Recipients are determined by the Department of Defense with no input from the president, and it has been awarded to high-ranking public servants including the last two presidents.

Now that’s what I call fake news.

19

I would say that Pizzagate (damn I hate how we add -gate to the end of everything) should be looked down upon with the exact same disdain as other things you have labeled as fake news. This is why I believe your definition of fake news is a bit too narrow. Conspiracy theories by their very nature are utterly implausible and do not even approach a reasonable analysis of the evidence. While it may not involve the making up of facts, it makes up interpretations of said facts with the same level of irrationality and possibly even dishonesty. Additionally, the reporting of pizzagate was meant to cause others to share in this irrational, unsubstantiated viewpoint.

IMO, anything that is intentionally trying to get people to believe something that is clearly false is fake news. Clearly false is of course in the eye of rational investigation. A nutjob, or anyone else, sincerely believing something utterly irrational as a conspiracy theory does not make their reporting of it any less “fake” and doesn’t make their wish to get other people to believe it any less “news.”

And because of my disdain for the majority of current mainstream news reporting, I would say that any personality piece that attempts to call it self “news” is in fact fake news even if it is dealing with hard facts. This is of course a purely semantic argument that is mostly about subjective goalposts.

20

Fake news is just what used to be called propaganda. The motive may be monetary or political or strategic. It is made up out of whole cloth, or a wholesale and shameless twisting of something trivial or innocuous or ordinary into something shocking and awful. Authoritarian governments often use propaganda/fake news to keep the population tractable and in line with government goals. The term “fake news” may be new, but the concept and practice are ages old. What’s different now is the speed of dissemination.

This quote from 1710 is more true today than ever.

[QUOTE=Jonathan Swift]
Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…
[/QUOTE]
except that even after the lie is exposed, lots of people still believe it.