The Fake News Machine: Inside a Town Gearing Up for 2020 (cnn.com) 225
CNN has a story on Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, which back in the day was known to make porcelain for the whole of Yugoslavia. But now, as an investigation by the news outlet has found, it makes fake news. Veles has become home to dozens of website operators who churn out bogus stories designed to attract the attention of Americans. Each click adds cash to their bank accounts. From the report: The scale is industrial: Over 100 websites were tracked here during the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, producing fake news that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump. One of the shadowy industry's pioneers is a soft-spoken law school dropout. Worried that his online accounts could be shut down, the 24-year-old asked to be known only as Mikhail. He takes on a different persona at night, prowling the internet as "Jesica," an American who frequently posts pro-Trump memes on Facebook. The website and Facebook page that "Jesica" runs caters to conservative readers in the U.S. The stories are political -- and often wrong on the facts. But that doesn't concern Mikhail. "I don't care, because the people are reading," he said. "At 22, I was earning more than someone [in Macedonia] will ever learn in his entire life." He claims to have earned up to $2,500 a day from advertising on his website, while the average monthly income in Macedonia is just $426. The profits come primarily from ad services such as Google's AdSense, which place targeted advertisements around the web. Each click sends a little bit of cash back to the content creator. Mikhail says he has used his profits to buy a house and put his younger sister through school. [...] That site was blocked a few months ago after Facebook and Google started cracking down on fake news sites. Mikhail is now retooling his operation, with his sights set firmly on the 2020 presidential election.
Trump was right (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Trump was right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not rigged, influenced. Mostly it's just a reflection of Americans seeking validating stories to share with others gullible enough to be influenced.
That's pretty much it. I have a few friends who were Trump supporters, posting a lot of fake news articles every day. The articles were obviously fake: "Hillary indictment this week!", "Hillary dropping out of race!", etc. It is hard for me to imagine them posting those articles had any influence over anyone to change their vote, and these people wouldn't have voted for Hillary under any set of circumstances.
Re:Trump was right (Score:4, Insightful)
"False equivalence", was the secondary theme of the entire election, right after post-truth Trumpian lies.
Plenty of people who don't pay enough attention saw the garbled mess, along with the very valid, but exaggerated criticisms of Clinton (shouldn't have had her own email server), and concluded that all sides were equally bad.
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concluded that all sides were equally bad.
Well, they certainly aren't equally good
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They were equally bad, but they were both still bad. I voted for the lesser of evils, Gary Johnson.
Voting Methods (Score:3)
I feel like instant runoff, range voting, or approval voting would have had a strong chance of electing Johnson. I don't think that Trump's most ardent supporter could claim that he would win under approval voting, and Hillary was nearly as disliked. The country seemed like it was poised to take a more conservative turn, or perhaps I should say some conservative backlash, but Johnson might have won broad approval as everybody's second choice.
I disagree totally with libertarian principles, but I think that i
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I disagree totally with libertarian principles, but I think that it's pretty clear to everyone that they are a large segment of American politics and that our political parties don't necessarily reflect the broad divisions in our society very well. I would like to institute a voting system which would more accurately reflect the support there is for your party. I think it would be better for the nation for us to have more choices at the polls, and more meaningful ones
I often wonder if we would have better outcomes with a parliamentary systems, with a mixture of regional representation and at-large candidates. Having lots of parties would mean that people would find parties that match their ideals, and parties getting some seats gives them some influence. And having more at large candidates reduces the winner-take-all aspect of state by state campaigning, without going all the way to a nationwide popular vote.
It seems that the two party system leaves lots of people fee
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I'd imagine that with any of those options, you'd find political parties and their nominations were pretty different. I'd imagine that either Clinton, Cruz or Kasich would win. I'd imagine that all three, plus Trump and Bernie would be on the ticket, as the parties moved towards nominating a slate. And then the never-Trumpers and never-Bernie-ers would vote for the rest of the field. Okay, Cr
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Johnson gave stoners a bad name. It's not the weed, he's just an idiot.
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I don't think he's an idiot, just goofy and awkward on TV. Bill Weld was the more polished guy that should have been the top of the ticket.
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And then decided not to vote for either Hillary or Donald, and instead voted 3rd party. I can't see anything bad about that reaction, as the major parties were both posting fake news.
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It is hard for me to imagine them posting those articles had any influence over anyone to change their vote, and these people wouldn't have voted for Hillary under any set of circumstances.
Well, it's not just a matter of convincing people who to vote for, but just as much in getting them motivated enough to go out and actually vote (or making them decide it's just not work it so they don't). Make people a little more angry and that could influence the final number of voters, not matter if the cause was real or not.
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With regard to his last sentence, he's *sort of*, but not quite, on the right track about CNN. If you look at their headlines as of late, it's really heavy on the hyperbole. Take for example their (and many other mainstream media news organizations) reporting of the Google memo, labeling it an "anti-diversity" memo; this label is a bit disingenuous even if many interpret it this way, and I tend to think that a news organization that aims to be truthful would opt for a different label.
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THEY do
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There are many parties influencing the election. What is the difference between anonymous donations that are protected as free speech (under the Citizens United verdict) hiring shills versus a sovereign nation doing the same thing. Ideally, elections should be closer to Canada, where there is no advertising permitted so candidates have to stand on their own merits.
Or just dispense with the pretexts, and just auction the seats off to the highest bidder. Money is free speech, right, as per that SCOTUS deci
Advertising in Canada (Score:2)
Not sure where you heard that, but we definitely have election advertising in Canada. [elections.ca] The main difference to the USA is that in Canada you can only run election advertising in the 37 days prior to the election (which helps limit the never-ending election cycle where candidates are in determinant campaign mode) and no advertising on the actual day of the election (which may
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There are many parties influencing the election. What is the difference between anonymous donations that are protected as free speech (under the Citizens United verdict) hiring shills versus a sovereign nation doing the same thing. Ideally, elections should be closer to Canada, where there is no advertising permitted so candidates have to stand on their own merits.
Or just dispense with the pretexts, and just auction the seats off to the highest bidder. Money is free speech, right, as per that SCOTUS decision.
Just to be clear as I understand it, in Canada:
The previous Canadian governing party, the Conservati
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That would absolutely run afoul of first amendment protections here. Canada and most of Europe are definitely heading down a slippery pro-censorship slope in this area as of late, so I personally wouldn't ever be in favor of anything that erodes the first amendment, or else we could very well do the same.
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My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin? As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale. Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
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My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin? As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale. Or, do we just want to say that the invisible hand will take care of all this, as we ride down the lassez faire ideology into another Great Depression?
Actually, it is not true that elections are for sale. Because of gerrymandering, most seats are so safe for one party or the other that even huge amounts of cash don't budge the needle meaningfully. Political advertising and campaign spending matters, but no matter what you spend, you aren't going to elect Hillary in rural Mississippi, or Trump in Berkeley.
Now the behavior of elected officials may be influenced by donations to reelection campaigns, but mostly that is when they are in and safely incumbent.
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My question is... where does the First Amendment end and overt bribery begin?
Speech alone inherently cannot be bribery.
As it stands now, the CU verdict has pretty much put any electable seat in the country up for sale.
No, it really hasn't. There have been many elections since CU that put this notion completely to rest. During Colorado's state senatorial recall election, John Morse outspent his opponent 11 to 1, and still lost anyways. Hillary's campaign + superpacs outspent Trump's by 6 to 1, and look how that turned out.
But most importantly, remember Larry Lessig's Mayday PAC? I remember myself saying that it's not going to work here on slashdot, and he and his contributors foun
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The Great Depression was caused by banks.
Not caused by, and even then, "banks" is misleading, because it was only one bank: The central bank; aka The Federal Reserve, aka The Fed. What kept the depression going after this was heavy deflation due to mismanagement on the part of the Fed. Milton Friedman explained it rather well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But everyday citizens were to blame as well by means of doing what's called a run on the bank. A run on the bank will ruin ANY economy, no matter how it's run. Arizona saw another example of t
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This isn't right or left wing, it's simple economics, and there isn't any commonly accepted economic theory that says that banks caused the depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The most common consensus however, was that the federal reserve acted poorly.
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First of all, I'm not right wing. Second of all, let's use the internet then:
https://sunlightfoundation.com... [sunlightfoundation.com]
http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/... [fortune.com]
https://politics.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
So no, it's not a falsehood. An example of a falsehood would be if somebody said that you were any smarter than a tic-tac.
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Its not slippery at all, they're banning hate speech which is nearly always from conservative and fascist retards which is completely rational.
It obviously isn't working because fascism is actually gaining ground in the EU, where it isn't in the US, which doesn't ban any speech that doesn't advocate violence. By that I mean there isn't a single politician who openly identifies as such in the US, yet the combined EU has many of them, with up to 25% of the votes in many EU states going towards the local fascist party, and in some that party is actually the governing party:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At any rate, here's why it's slippery:
https:/ [slashdot.org]
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I'll just leave this here.
https://www.nytimes.com/intera... [nytimes.com]
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But it's not just dumb people. Confirmation bias is baked into human cognition, and it's hard to overcome; even if you're inclined, it bites everyone on the ass.
Bandwagon effect too. It's easy to see when other people who you disagree with indulge in it, but I strongly suspect everyone does. And, in a natural enviornment (e.g. small hunter gatherer groups) the bandwagon effect is probably a useful heuristic. But it makes the social media the most powerful amplifier of propaganda ever. It's no longer Bi
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Situationally dumb, yes.
But people who can do better often don't, especially when their emotions run high. So the fact that you can be smart and have exhibited a pattern of smart behavior -- even critical thinking -- doesn't mean you're immune.
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But now he doesn't care because it was rigged in his favor.
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Hell, I'll settle for 0.1% or 0.01% or even just 1 fucking name.
Why keep calling it fake news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because then you have to admit it's always been around and you don't have to fall for it. Coin a new term and no one will blame your innocent self for trusting it.
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Because then you have to admit it's always been around and you don't have to fall for it.
+5. The Internet has always been a source of some pretty ridiculous disinformation, but it's a new phenomenon created by the alt-right when it might have affected your preferred candidate.
Re:Why keep calling it fake news? (Score:4, Interesting)
One man's lies are another's news these days.
Inventing news for the sake of ratings is more of the issue here than outright lies. Sometimes it's more about what they choose to report on than that the reporting is false. I learned about this a long time ago...
I was watching the local news reporting covering a Senate campaign in North Carolina (Jessie Helms was running for re-election for who knows how many times..). I remember a day when both candidates had rallies in Raleigh on the same day and the local TV news on WRAL covered both events on the evening news. For the challenger's rally, they covered the candidates speech, which was highly critical of the incumbent. Nothing wrong with that right? Yea, but for the incumbent's rally they covered only the protestors that shoed up, who where (you guessed it) highly critical of Senator Helms, but didn't choose to report on anything Helms said. Yes, they covered both rallies, but ALL the reporting was critical of Senator Helms. THEN they reported on a poll they had taken, that showed the incumbent loosing the upcoming election by nearly 10%... Helms won by nearly 20% in the election 2 weeks later.
This is how "fake news" is made. Nothing they reported on was actually a out right lie, it all was true. However, the perception is that Helms was loosing the election because everybody was critical of him and the polling showed it. The perception was fake...
I'll leave it to you to apply this to today's political reporting... But "Fake news" is not always untrue, sometimes it's just really biased in it's selection of the reported facts that makes it fake.
Re:Why keep calling it fake news? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fake news" is not always untrue, sometimes it's just really biased
Nope. One sided, biased news is not fake news. Even deceit by omission is not fake news. This is why Fox News and Daily Mail is not Fake News. It is fake when it is just a fabrication. Those guys in Macedonia are not selectively covering real events, they are making shit up. Remember when Pope Francis endorsed Trump? This is what Fake News is. This is what the friendly article is about.
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I would say in most cases there is no practical or moral difference between lying by omission and lying by false statements. The effect is the same: to establish an untrue picture of reality in the recipient's mind. The method by which you do this is just a minor detail.
There is, however, another class of untruth which ihas always been important politically but has become even more important in recent years: bullshit.
Bullshit is distinct from a normal lie in that the target is not the recipient's factual b
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One sided news can be fake news. Take one of my favorites from years passed, Fox's "War and Christmas". Every year Fox would dig up any little story about some one being an ass hole about Christmas and would then declare that there was a liberal war on Christmas. I'm sure the stories were mostly true but as for the war? Pure fabrication.
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Correction "War on Christmas"
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It is though, there was literally no liberal agenda against Christmas. They said there was. That is fake news.
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News is all about the ratings, and that means having stories that are new and novel and interesting. Not necessarily intended to be fake. The new candidate was new, and thus what the new guy had to say was the news, as well as interesting. The old candidate had run many times before so what the old guy had to say was not news, it's been said so much it's a bit boring by now. Protesters however are interesting so they get covered. That's why the headlines that people read are "Man Bites Dog" and they don
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Paul had second place in the Iowa primaries, but his name was never mentioned by the mainstream media. They seamlessly transitioned from first to third place without blinking an eye. An uninformed primary voter would not have heard of Ron Paul. If I recall correctly, he was unable to purchase ads in key markets.
Fast forwa
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Thank you for the very good example!
I guess there is a reason behind the oath you need to take in court. The truth, the whole truth and noting but the truth, if I remember right. Deviation from those requirements results in information which is unreliable, can be misleading and basically amounts to a lie, as you point out. Sounds quite reasonable to me...see also logical deconstruction of an average advertisement. Everything stated in the ad is true, yet it misleads you to draw conclusion about the product
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In this case they are making up stories based on know truthful facts then adding
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Because the word "lie" says that you are making a deliberate false statement.
So does "fake news".
In this case they are making up stories based on know truthful facts then adding commentary that is made up.
In other words, "fake news" is just an opinion that differs from your own.
This was based on the original reporter looking at two pictures that were from a different angle, distance and light. Would it be reasonable to a journalist to understand those items, probably not so it is not a lie.
Journalists not understanding common photographic effects? I think they certainly should have understood that. Photos are a stock-in-trade for journalists, and they've certainly all seen tens, if not hundreds of them, during their careers.
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Just call it 'lies'.
“Lies” are too generic. Compare “Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, where fake news are made” and “Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, where lies are made”. The second one sounds like an advertisement for tourist attraction. “Fake news” are a specific kind of lies.
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The original canonical example of "fake news" was something called the "Denver Guardian", which was a single false story framed (literally, in the html sense!) as being a report in an online outlet for a real newspaper. There is no such newspaper, either print or online, but the entire site made it seem otherwise. To my mind, the term has been diluted to shift attention away from such obvious frauds.
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"Lie" is the genus and "fake news" is the species.
However, if I were to choose a more helpful term than "fake news", I'd use "propaganda".
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Because it's a specific kind of lying. Perjury is another example.
It's like saying, why call them robins when we can just call them "birds"?
Little off topic here (Score:2, Flamebait)
As opposed to the usual places that do this (Score:2, Insightful)
New York and Los Angeles undoubtedly will still have the lock on supplying fake news in 2020. In case you have forgotten that's where all the stories about how wonderful Hillary was came from and how she was a lock in for the win.
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Can't see the forest for the trees (Score:2)
They should try self-reflecting on why almost every major news organization and poll showed Clinton winning before the election. Maybe the problem isn't that a handful of websites which favored Trump somehow skewed the election. Maybe it's that the media's expectation for the election was skewed from reality.
The one poll [latimes.com]
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They should try self-reflecting on why almost every major news organization and poll showed Clinton winning before the election.
Because for some strange reason the national polls don't weight the votes by the electoral weight of the state. It's weird.
What? You mean those click-bait articles are fake? (Score:2)
Bana Alabed is CNN propaganda (Score:2)
Bana Alabed is a seven-year-old Syrian Girl. She's also a pawn in the propaganda war. CNN manufactured a story of a seven-year-old Syrian girl asking America to liberate Syria from its tyrant president. Problem is, she doesn't understand English, so her CNN interview is implausible.
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
Fake news is only one part of a larger design. (Score:2)
Destroy faith in government.
Do this and you also destroy faith in the vote, and democracy itself. The vote is dangerous because it can't be controlled. Strangely, "government is bad" has long been a classic conservative standby. Power not claimed by gover
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You are correct -- they don't give two shits about any party. They are just marketing towards the folks who will fall for this sort of thing.
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Re:Talk about fake news!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump-era logic.
Yes, my friend, if you share these stories, you have fallen for them. That's the whole point of their existence - to be shared. Just because you do it, "for the lulz" doesn't mean you have somehow risen above their intended effect.
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if you mean actually believing that hillary was on her deathbed or that bernie was really an alien, no, never fell for that. sure shared it to laugh at it however
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You "fell for it" in both senses, because you amplified the message. Whether or not you believe the message was true, or whether you laughed at it simply does not matter. By amplifying the message, you you are l
Re:Talk about fake news!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
just because people share these things, doesnt mean they fall for them. that is something that seems to be ignored.
Sharing things and "falling for them" are precisely the same thing, whether you want to believe that or not. What's the goal of the people creating the fake news stories? To get people to share them, and click on them. That's the goal. The goal is not to get people to believe them. They don't make money when people believe their stories, they make money when people read and share them. So, you did fall for them. You're one of the people paying the people who write fake news, so congratulations.
As far as the political lean of the stories, the creators themselves will point out how stories that would appeal to conservatives spread far more quickly than those targeted at liberals [npr.org]. The people who would share a story like the fake Denver Guardian story in the article don't even bother to look at the source site and figure out that this fake news story is literally the only one posted on the site. You'll get people calling bullshit on any little detail on a site like Slashdot and doing research to back up their point of view, but that doesn't happen on the Facebook feeds of conservatives. People like the guy in that article rely on the lack of fact-checking among conservatives to bring him 5 figures in income per month, so it obviously works.
When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?
Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin's famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn't something that started with Trump. This is something that's been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it's always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.
We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
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but this news based on an interview of a supposed, unnamed fake news publisher is real.
If you're referring to the link that I posted, which contains the interview I quoted, some observations:
1. You did not click on the link.
2. You did click on the link, but did not read the story.
3. You did click on the link and read the story, but you didn't understand anything.
In case you're still not getting it, the person is cited, by name, in an interview about a rather famous piece of fake news which he admits to publishing. That's a pretty fantastic tactic you're going with there though. "This 'fake
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my point remains that it is ridiculous to believe someone who is known to produce fake news.
That's a stupid point, so please elaborate. Why is it ridiculous? This is some old-fashioned investigative journalism that tracked him down and got him to talk about it. At first he didn't want to talk, then he opened up a little bit. It's obvious what his motivation was for producing the fake news in the first place - he admits to quite a bit of money. What's his motivation for doing a fake interview? He's not getting money from a fake interview. Why not believe that some of the basic claims he make
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Please re-read my previous elaborations:
By default, a fake news publisher has no credibility, unless you're a liberal hearing what you want to hear after suffering an embarrassing election defeat.
They have no credibility by definition, yet liberals like you lap it up.
Ah. Well, you could have saved some typing and just said "because I say so." You're setting the defaults, you're setting the definition, etc. If I understood your own habits I'm sure I could point to plenty of sources of fake news which you feel differently about because you agree with it, but if your argument boils down to "because I say so" then there's not exactly any room for discussion. So now I'm arguing with some anonymous person who doesn't understand who I am and who wants to make their own rul
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Whoa, go easy on me there pal. Like I said, you won. You definitely won. As for me, I'll just watch the free market to see who everyone who makes money on fake news targets. The free market can't be wrong, after all, so if everyone is pumping out conservative tabloid fodder that's all the evidence I need about your ability to think rationally and critically. I know it's a hard pill for you to swallow. But, remember. You won. You always do. That's what you are, you're a winner. You know it, I know
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You're really stretching and making stuff up, or presenting your own opinions as settled fact.
Ie, the Rush Limbaugh fans were called "ditto heads" and not because they were independent thinkers but because they were being told what to think and readily agreed to it. On the other hand, Hillary wasn't the liberal candidate, she was centrist, the liberal candidates were Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, and they certainly stole away a lot of thunder by attracting liberal voters away from who they were expected t
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Fake News-ception.
BWAAAAMP
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If you read the article at all and happened to follow the links, it's quite obvious the main site(s) they're talking about are digital tabloids. They're website and headlines are about as believable as the onion. I don't believe you could convince me that the majority of people who visit politicspaper don't see that. The most amusing thing about this is you have a new organization who actively tries to manipulate facts with bias and pass them off as the whole truth calling a tabloid fake news. Of course
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I have it on good authority that a guy named 'Sergey' founded Google, was born in Russia and is behind this whole 'ad-sense' payment system!
See!Proof that the Russians are to blame.
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Re:Kind of surprised it's in Macedonia (Score:4, Informative)
> this entire russia thing is the epitome of fake news
No it isn't. But the Russians have their own [theguardian.com] sophisticated troll and fake news factories. They probably don't need to rely on some freelancers in Macedonia.
Re:Kind of surprised it's in Macedonia (Score:5, Informative)
The "entire Russia thing" is the epitome of fake news? Well, you're not necessarily wrong. Here's some research [twitter.com] which shows that some of these bots, identifying themselves as British people or whatever, post exclusively between 8am and 8pm Moscow time. People pushing out propaganda which favors Russia and their goal of destabilizing the Western governments set up after the fall of the Soviet Union, doing their work during 12-hour days in Moscow time.
Re: This entire story is made up. (Score:3, Informative)
Just in case somebody is thinking of taking this seriously. Macedonia has an average internet speed between 4 and 10 Mbps.
The idea that Macedonians don't have the ability to make websites is quite frankly insulting. Whether on not they can swing elections is of course debatable. However that wasn't the aim of the sites, the aim was to generate content that people wanted to read (or believe), and they appear to have succeeded.
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/... [bandwidthplace.com]
http://www.dospeedtest.com/spe... [dospeedtest.com]
Re:An article about fake news (Score:5, Insightful)
politically motivated + biased != fake
"fake news" apparently now means "i don't like the perspective used to discuss this news event.", which is exactly that certain people wanted: de-legitimatize all sources of news. However what fake news *should* mean is "this story is made up/has no basis in fact."
Fox news is also not fake news(most of the time) though it is also politically motivated and biased.
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So despite the stories for the past year or so about groups of young people in Macedonia cranking out fake news sites, you've decided that this story is fake because CNN is now also reporting on it. So, just to be clear, you're saying that anything reported by CNN is fake, correct? Anything at all, if it appears on the CNN site, it's fake, right?
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I'd be interested to know how you define "fair".
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that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump
Yes, of course it did. Even if it didn't. It still did. It has to. Trump is evil, he can do no right.
They don't give a flying F about the man's morals. What's important to them is that his followers have been trained for decades to trust only information that confirms their beliefs and to trust that information no matter what the source. It starts with disimissing any story you don't like as "biased liberal media", and ends up with an industry of people making a living out of lying to your supporters. If only once side gets these kinds of parasites attached to it, perhaps its time to take the hint that tha
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So you admit that liberals are the problem in America, then?
The funniest part of this response is that you probably don't even get how hard you just proved my point.
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Yes, facts have a well known liberal bias, right? Forget about the interviews over the past year with the creators of these fake news sites talking about how and why they target conservatives, since now that it's CNN that is reporting on this everything is fake and there's liberal bias everywhere, right? All of those interviews are now retro-actively fake because CNN decided to report on it also.
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You mean like the Associated Press claiming "There are no government rules dictating how tanks [oil storage] are designed." ?
https://www.apnews.com/0485b3c... [apnews.com]
Where's the fact checking in that article?
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Sorry but your claims about the "staged Muslim protest" are unsubstantiated claims, with no evidence. The CNN side of the story is a heck of lot more believable than yours (I say yours because you're the one promoting these tweats). Sorry. You weren't there; you don't know what was going on. Talk to someone that was involved in the protest as the reporter did. All you can do is make allegations based on your own feelings and beliefs. That's not news. To perpetuate these unsubstantiated claims as if th