Researchers call for large-scale scientific investigation into fake news

Roughly 60% of Americans consistently demand the government they call evil lie to them for their own protection, and academics are now jumping on the bandwagon, insisting on censoring the internet “for their own good”. I need more popcorn myself.

Who fakes newses the fake newsmen.

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Who cares, when everyone is talking and nobody is listening?

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As far as I am concerned it’s all fake news to be honest.

CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. As far as I can tell they all lie, they all misrepresent, they all have an agenda.

Want to fix it? Find a way to make a law that requires “news” or “journalist” sites operate as not-for-profit or non-profit. Whichever one is less capable of being usurped for financial gain.

Yeah that won’t work. Some will claim censorship, and others will be unfairly punished because they probably are just doing the best they can to report and inform without giving blatant bias and agenda.

Conan O’Brien does a regular piece, where he has his staff record hundreds of talking heads all spouting the same propaganda verbatim, and I’m a big fan of every class in America starting out the new school year by watching a few examples, of course, in the name of instilling patriotism.

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Personally the only solution I see is division. As in dividing civilization/society up into smaller, more manageable groups.

Remove the ability for a few people to have an enormous amount of power over an enormous amount of other people, and the problem goes away.

Problem is, for that to work the largest countries in the world, in fact most of them, would need to be divided into smaller organizational groups.

Not happening.

That’s pretty much what Hitler said, and one of his first acts in office was to make it illegal to crack jokes about the Nazi party.

I want them divided up into smaller, democratic organizational groups so that the “people in charge” can be held accountable.

The more power a government official has, and the more distance they have from their constituents, the less accountable they are.

Right, people who insist the government they call evil lie to them and who consistently vote for whoever advertises the most have a clear grasp of the economics of democracy.

Didn’t say it was a perfect idea.

I’ve no idea how to solve that particular problem. We have governments to be in charge because most people can’t be bothered to spend a significant amount of their time influencing how society runs.

Pretty much. I’ve just basically started not formulating opinions until the story has been resolved. Too many people take “breaking news” bullshit too seriously, and then they make up their mind before they even get enough information to form a logical conclusion.

Then you have the really bad ones, like Breitbart, Dangerous, InfoWars, Huff Po, Buzzfeed, Salon, etc. Those I just completely ignore.

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Thank you very much for not just listing the conservative ones. I consider myself somewhat conservative (to sum it up in a bumper sticker, I want gay married couples to defend their pot plants from the government with guns) and it gets my goat when this discussion comes up and people act like the right are the only ones lying through their teeth.

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I go for the source myself, so long as academics refuse to acknowledge they are responsible for this mess or we’re all screwed as far as I’m concerned.

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Which is kind of my point. A group of people who hold power, are being irresponsible and not held accountable, and the world is suffering as a result.

Call it what you will, intelligencia, government, corporations, religion, etc. The name changes but the symptom stays the same.

Power should always be kept in check, or held down in some way.

The people teaching all these idiots how to build cheap nuclear reactors that meltdown are my more pressing concern.

I was unaware of that problem. Why are they not teaching how to build liquid fueled reactors that can’t meltdown because the fuel is already molten?

It can leak yes, but in doing so loses energy because the fuel is spread out and that diminishes the reaction rate.

Thorium, Liquid Fueled Fast Reactors, etc. are the future. At least until fusion becomes viable.

They were in a hurry to increase production, with weapons being the number 1 manufactured export of the largest exporter in the world.

When did this start happening? I need some specifics if I am going to discuss this intelligently.

Which I am more than happy to do. I find nuclear energy absolutely fascinating. If I was stronger in maths I would happily seek a career in that industry.

During the sixties the US modified some of their new submarine nuclear power plants and sold them to the Japanese, who built cheap nuclear power plants on the most earthquake and tsunami prone island in the world. The executives were indicted on corruption charges and for violating every safety regulation in the book, including stacking their spent fuel on top of the reactors. Fukushima is still pouring radioactive waste into the pacific, because even their best shielded robots are lucky to last a few minutes inside the reactors.

Yeah.

I find that the people in charge of something should know something about what they are in charge of.

All too often it seems that they do not. I’m dealing with that problem where I work.

Seems like Fukushima needs to be filled with concrete and lead or something. Not a nuclear engineer so I have no idea what could be done about it.

I do know enough to say that water has a remarkable ability to absorb radiation. IIRC a shelter surrounded by gallon jugs on all sides would be enough to block the radiation from fallout during a nuclear war.