Hi all,
Early next week I have to do a oral presentation about fake news for my year 11 English class. I have been looking around for some good sites to get some info off of but have not found anything that stands out. If anyone has come across any and could drop a reply that would be much appreciated. I know that this is kinda not tech releaceed but its something that is see on the L1T news a lot!
thanks,
jjackstar
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I can't really lead you on any path in regards to research but I'll give me two cents on all of the fake news stuff.
Fake news has been around for years... think about national inquirer.
How do we keep fake news from being partisan? Meaning that how do we keep republicans from saying all democratic news reporting is fake and vice versa? Can we truly have fake news police that completely non partisan and fair?
How do we determine fake news is fake? How do we determine that source isn't fake? People (usually on the right) say snopes is non-reliable on occasion.
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thereligionofpeace.com
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so are you looking for examples of fake news...or people talking about examples, which can be examples in themselves sometimes.
?
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Im just looking for overall info on the topic, Im aware as to what it is but why it is made and how much that can influence compared to the "correct" news. so far Ive touched on what it is, how to spot it but Im still looking for a way to say what is correct and what is not.
Thanks for all of the reply's so far! good info, seeing someone else's two-cents also helps a lot more than what you might think!
I'm a journalist. Here's the best take you could possibly go with:
- It's a new buzzword for tabloids and yellow journalism
- this conflict has been at the forefront of the profession for over a century
- the real conflict is that credible sources make their money the same way as the lower quality ones
- the current climate presents a slippery slope into broad censorship and deplatforming of anyone outside the overton window of the establishment
bada bing bada boom, paper and presentation done.
I'll be an industry source for you if you want
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(this is me rambling a bit)
In my opinion there is no definitive, "textbook" way to point out what is "fake" and what isn't. It's subjective.
TBH its just a new name for an old thing. Overhyped, sensationalist things meant to grab views or drive false narratives/agendas.
Washington Post famously posted a "list" of "fake news" sites that was given to them by a liberal college professor
She never explained (at least that I can recall) why she chose what sites she did. So what makes this list fake or not? I don't know. It depends if you want to believe it to be.
Disclosure:
This is a heavily conservative site talking about "the list"
There is more I could bring up but I would like others to speak about this because I am certainly not neutral on this subject even though in this post I tried to be
EDIT:
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Awesome! you legend! ill have a read of those sites and add some of that to my speech, much appreciated!
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Oh ok, and the industry source is chopped liver
I see how it is
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sorry i missed your post, they were both at the same time - have you found that it has been affecting the amount of traffic that you have been getting form correct news tkoham?
That's just SEO cornerstone value. If you report on a valuable keyword (you can contact any marketing firm and they'll tell you what phrases or topics are valuable for clickthrough, SEO ranking, etc.) then you're going to drive traffic regardless of content.
Tabloids use this data to create content that is highly optimized for sharing and popularity. Because they have no moral or financial obligation to due diligence or accuracy, they get stories out faster and more profitably. This is how the industry has always operated.
Yes, they cut into traffic on highly traded on keywords (trump is a prime example right now)
anything outside of the "marketing top 40," though isn't really affected.
think of it like TMZ or the national enquirer in traditional journalism. They degrade the signal-to-noise ratio on popular topics, but outside of that the undustry isn't really harmed.
The conflict isn't "fake news" vs. "real news," it never was. The conflict is that tabloids and credible outlets both accrue revenue in the same way.
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Thanks again everyone! all of this info is awesome! ill let you know the end result.
Glad to help. Hopefully your project will wreck the grading curve on the inane "its a problem guys" analyses.
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One thing to look up would be Confirmation Bias. My understanding is that many times there will be polling to find out what an audience wants to see and then caters to that want. In the heavily connected world we live in it is pretty easy to dig up more stories than can be printed to one page or fit into a single news cast. Picking and choosing things that you know your audience agrees with is probably a better tactic than constantly alienating them with stories they disagree with. They can do this while still claiming to be a pure news outlet without bias.
I personally like people to be up front and say 'I'm biased! Here's why!' and listen to things I might not agree with to get some perspective. It feels more genuine, whether it is or not.
I don't know if there is an exact term for it, but sometimes using numeral quantities vs percentages can convey a feeling that something is more or less significant. Or leaving out the details of what the numbers represent in order to mislead people. The inventor of the Saw Stop tablesaw, with technology that can stop and drop a spinning blade before it significantly damages someone, lobbied the US government to make his technology manditory. He cited the number of people that show up at emergency rooms with tablesaw injuries. The problem with this is that more injuries are caused by kickback and not people pushing their hand into a blade.
The technology is great, but it is expensive and ruins expensive blades. It also can be falsely triggered by wood that is not perfectly dry. Lots of pro's and con's, but trying to get proprietary technology made mandatory with misleading numbers doesn't seem right to me.
It's like the news freaking out when a few million dollars of taxpayer money gets misused. It's more money than most people will ever have and pushes people to maximum fury. Then when you find out about hundreds of billions of dollars being misused you can't get any angrier. It's so large a number that it all sorta 'feels' the same. If they divided it up by the number of tax payers and said 'This costs the average tax payer X dollars!' then it would carry more weight. I don't want to hear about anything under $4 billion unless we have stamped out all misuse above that amount. So-called 'Fake News' generally has a grain of truth and tries to tell the truth without telling the whole story, because that story might alienate your audience.
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Just to put my two cents, you can also check out Vox. They always have interesting op-ed that can help you launch in a avenue. ( I have not personally read the first one, but by skimming it I thought it can be helpful for you)
But there have been already useful answer up as confirmation bias, echo chamber, profit, yellow journalism, real time environment of nowadays, amount over substance... so I'm gonna to fade away now. Just remember, everything is complicated and the result of various factors, so there is no straight answer, more like different frameworks that each explain one aspect of the problem.
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Piggy backing off what another user posted about confirmation bias, you might want to include how much social media has played into the idea of people creating echo chambers of 'real' fake news and how that exacerbated the issue. @tkoham seems like an invaluable asset for this though.
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In a way, one could also discuss a fine interaction between how demand shapes a product and how a product shapes demand - from a fake news perspective. An interesting tangent to that venue is, whether plenty people are more interested in quality content or reinforcing their bias through shock-value, and why this is economically viable to do for fake news sources, and whether this business should be considered some kind of fraud or not, like selling medication that doesn't work (snake oil). Is there a difference between satire, performance art, hogwash, snake oil, and fake news?
In the perspective of modern social networks, there is also the individual moral choice on whether or not I should tweet or share a link to something with other people, and what will I become by doing so (what will be my function/role in doing so, what will be my impact, and whose errands will I be going). The simple individual moral choice on whether I should carefully think through my communication to other people or not - who am I, why am I speaking, and what do I want to achieve.
It has been recently covered on L1News that you could tweet a flashing gif to attempt causing a seizure on an epileptic person. It is not ok, but should it be illegal to willfully do so? Where does the border go between that, and posting an anger-trigger? Where does the border go between that and posting and repeating false and fraudulent information to trigger some other peculiar emotion (satisfaction?), instead of anger?
If censoring fake news is attack on freedom of speech, then isn't also overwhelming the political discussion with fake- and non-topics also an attack on freedom of speech by the effect of silencing what we were about to say, and what we would have said, had our attention not been hijacked and stolen from us by a fake topic?
(To myself, I am treating fake news as an information-malware or information-virus capable of entering a person's mind and wreaking havoc on their train of thought, one tiny step at a time. It only takes a tiny doubt at the right moment to miss a target completely, and sometimes you only have one chance.)
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Also another big one that's in the fake news is using statistics and not taking into account causation v correlation.
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