You literally didn’t post a single bit of fake news.
You posted news that was the best information we had at the time, but then was later corrected. They all involved real things that happened, and told the story as it evolved over time.
Fake news is made up. It may use a real incident as a starting point, and it may not. But it’s made up. The facts are fake. They don’t have retractions. They make shit up to get people angry and get them to believe absolutely fabrications.
And entire websites are devoted to this now.* And they get play in what is the largest news aggregator we now have: Facebook. And the second largest: Google searches.
I know Google is now going to filter its news to make sure that there are real sources to the information, to keep out the bullshit. I heard at least some people on Facebook are trying to do the same thing.
Yeah–they’re doing the electronic equivalent of us yelling “CITE?” And this is supposedly a bad thing?
*The biggest has its founder as part of the upcoming Trump administration. I wonder why we’re worried that ignorance is winning?
“Yeah, but he has an IMDB page so clearly it’s all a false flag orchestrated to divert attention from all the legitimate questions being asked by pizzagate investigators.”
Seriously, this is the level of ‘reasoning’ being deployed by the deplorables.
Again, these stories were not simple acts of bad journalism. They were either largely or wholly fictitious, and intentionally so. And for the most part, they were published on obscure, anonymously owned sites that appear to have been created relatively recently for the purpose of publishing fake news, plagiarized or hastily aggregated news, conspiracy theories, propaganda, or a mix of all four.
[…]
Fake news is the proper term for this sort of content. The word fake means not genuine—a forgery or a counterfeit. It implies an intent to deceive. This phenomenon deserves attention, because the top fake news stories are often shared even more widely than the actual news.
You’re not talking about fake news. You’re talking about journalistic failures, or in some cases, your own failure of understanding.
I’d say the Rolling Stone campus rape article closely parallels the Breitbart “distort and misreport” style of pseudo-journalism, except that of course Rolling Stone is not a fake news “site” since it does not have this distortion as its goal, and indeed was unaware of the issues in the article.
Yesterday Buzzfeed published a study of Americans’ responses to fake news:
It won’t come as a surprise to readers of this thread that Republican respondents fared worse than their Democratic peers when it comes to swallowing fakery–but the Democrats have little to brag of, either:
So most commenting here seem to dismiss this Pizzagate thing as “fake news”. That’s a very vague term which tells us nothing about the situation at hand, but it’s all you ever seem to here from the debunkers, the msm and others. If you’re going to debunk something and you never even mention any of what some are describing as the evidence, you’re a failure at debunking, and obviously don’t know the first thing about how to prove something wrong. There can only be so many reasons for this kind of fake debunking, and I can’t think of any that doesn’t involve the intentional minimization and/or suppression of evidence, well, other than stupidity or a big head.
That being said, can anyone actually show me why the evidence should be dismissed. I’d like to think these things aren’t going on, but quite frankly there is enough circumstantal evidence to warrant a thorough official investigation. So why should all this just be dismissed? I’ll give you a head start as to some of the questions I’d need answered.
Has any of the documents Wikileaks has been putting out over the last ten years been proven false or faked?
Have the Podesta emails been proven to be faked?
Why do so many of the emails use certain words out of context? (Mostly, but not all food related words)
Is the FBI lying about many of these words being used as code language used in pedophile groups?
That’s just a start, but I’d need many more questions to be answered to dismiss this as “nothing here”, so if anyone could help out, that’d be great. I know one thing, I’d have a hard time sending my child to a family friendly pizza joint that had entertainment like this.
At a certain point, you take something more seriously than it deserves. Clinton is running a child prostitution ring out of a pizzaria, based on coded messages from private communications, where certain words allegedly are referring to other things. Based on what? Fucking nothing. These people are insane. There’s about as much reason to “debunk” Pizzagate as there is to “debunk” conspiracy theories about the flat earth.
Because it’s fucking insane. The only reason to put in actual effort to “debunk” it is for the amusement of other skeptics, because anyone who actually believes that shit is *beyond *far gone. They’re incapable of critical thought or source analysis. So why bother spending the time to explain why?
What evidence? The fact that Podesta talks about having Pizza once in a while? The fact that if you are allowed to replace words at random by pretending there’s a code you can make things sound sinister? There’s nothing there.
Anyone else want to bother? Because I honestly don’t, and I don’t see why anyone else should. This “theory” is completely bonkers. It’s less “we didn’t actually go to the moon” and more “the moon is a giant hologram”.
It’s not “fake news”, it’s “alt-truth”.
There is obviously a continuity, with rigorously fact-checked, peer reviewed journalism on one side, completely made up propagandist bullshit on the other, with various degrees of satire, honest reporting errors and biased reporting falling in between. The problem is that because we have created this adversarial political process and because Americans are dumb as shit, some people think there is an equivalency between all news sources, so long as your particular point of view is represented. MSNBC shows a left-leaning bias and Rolling Stone was maybe too eager to publish a couple of stories before properly fact-checking so that justifies the right leaning bias of Fox News, the right-wing propaganda of Breitbart and the lunatic ravings of every wack-job Alt-Right blog and clickbait news engine.
It’s like you tell someone 90% of what Donald Trump said was fact-checked and proven to be complete BS and they will say that “all politicians lie”, like it’s all equal.
Not that I’m aware of. There have been some stories that were faked Wikileaks, but the stuff Wikileaks has actually released, have been the genuine article AFAIK.
No, but then again why would we suspect that? They’re just plain old boring emails between people I don’t know.
Like what? What was out of context?
What has the FBI said is code language? All I’ve seen is baseless speculation by people on the Internet who have poor critical thinking skills. I have seen from a source that I trust was that the abbreviation “c.p.” was used for “child pornography,” and that at some point morphed into “cheese pizza.” That’s a pretty weak association to be accusing someone of molesting kids. I just looked at my own email and there are hundreds of messages that refer to pizza. Am I now a suspect too?
That’s the problem with this brain-dead conspiracy theory. There is literally nothing, no evidence at all, unless you re-interpret some words to mean other things. I could take your post here and with a made up list of word substitutions, I could change the meaning to say that you like to break into farmers’ barns and have sexual relations with the animals. But that’s not evidence, it’s crazy-talk!
The references to food as a secret code in Pizzagate reminds me of a subplot in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile where a terrorist is caught because he received a telegram using a code where certain vegetables (potatoes, artichokes, etc.) referred to certain weapons and munitions.
For those unclear on the point, Death on the Nile is fiction. Not real. Imagined. :smack: There was no Hercule Poirot, no Colonel Race of the British Secret Service, no actual real-world telegrams referring to explosives as artichokes. Ripping off a nearly century-old mystery when making up a slanderous fiction of one’s political enemies is not at all original and only mildly amusing. :rolleyes: