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The Terror of Fake News

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  • #61
    Originally posted by Doktor View Post
    What's a fake news?

    Is it a fake news quoting Trump saying he won the popular vote?

    Is it a fake news quoting the administration saying Russians did it?

    Is it a fake news saying there are WMD without any suspicions?

    Is it fake news saying that Serbians are guilty for everything bad that happened during the dissolution of Yugoslavia?

    The best cure for fake news is to cross-check the "facts" and to ignore those sites who in your view spread disinformation. After a while they will eventually run out of resources. Except for The Guardian/Soros-alike outlets who have their own foundations that keep them running.

    Dok:

    This article has some good examples of fake news. The term confuses people, and lately it's been used to cover any article that omits points of view or cites facts favorable to one side. But, as bad as they might be, biased or slanted reporting and opinion pieces are not what is meant by fake news. You'll see that when you look at the examples in the article, (which you may have already seen)... They're so obviously fake, alarm bells should go off in the mind of any well-adjusted, well-informed person, no matter their political leaning. They're effective click bait pieces because even doubters will check them out.


    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0c4b63b0da2ea
    To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

    Comment


    • #62
      Originally posted by JAD_333 View Post
      Dok:

      This article has some good examples of fake news. The term confuses people, and lately it's been used to cover any article that omits points of view or cites facts favorable to one side. But, as bad as they might be, biased or slanted reporting and opinion pieces are not what is meant by fake news. You'll see that when you look at the examples in the article, (which you may have already seen)... They're so obviously fake, alarm bells should go off in the mind of any well-adjusted, well-informed person, no matter their political leaning. They're effective click bait pieces because even doubters will check them out.


      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0c4b63b0da2ea
      So, what's this then?
      No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

      To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

      Comment


      • #63
        Originally posted by Doktor View Post
        So, what's this then?
        Looks like page of links to articles. Which one are you interested in?
        To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

        Comment


        • #64
          All of them say FB is forming a Fake News Police Department.
          No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

          To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

          Comment


          • #65
            Originally posted by Doktor View Post
            All of them say FB is forming a Fake News Police Department.
            They're working on it. Not going to be easy. Lot's of pitfalls.
            To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

            Comment


            • #66
              Originally posted by JAD_333 View Post
              They're working on it. Not going to be easy. Lot's of pitfalls.
              Hey, it is a club. Our house, our rules. That's the bottomline. Hope they will implement it nicely, but I have some doubts
              No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

              To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

              Comment


              • #67
                Breitbart has managed to piss off the German government in a really major way this time with the fake news they're spreading (see here).

                Actually only noticed because my - ultraconservative - local newspaper managed to turn it into a half-page article, complete with pondering a bit more indepth the repercussions on given the influence of "these people" on the next US government with Stephen Bannon onboard. There's calls for legal steps from German politicians against Breitbart and comparable fake news sources and their backers, starting from at least court injunctures against them and escalating from there to real measures. Two months ago Breitbart announced plans to expand with offices in Germany to "support the AfD" and in France to support Le Pen, making them legally vulnerable to be grabbed by the balls that way; they already have offices in London.

                The above issue is currently widely interpreted in Germany as what's to come for German-US relations with the Trump government. Some less conservative German media also - rather dangerously - already see Trump himself preemptively vindicated by the issue btw - in the sense that anything he's gonna do, he just does because fake news sources give him a wrong picture.

                Comment


                • #68
                  Am not saying there wasn't this article but:

                  A) Where is it? No link in the Guardian article and Google search fails me.
                  B) Breitbart has declined to comment.
                  No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                  To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                    A) Where is it? No link in the Guardian article and Google search fails me.
                    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017...church-alight/

                    There's a couple interesting German articles that take it apart pretty much paragraph by paragraph. Each paragraph has a kernel of truth which is then modified, twisted and embellished to create the kind of sentence that neo-fascist rag wants. Exactly the way propaganda is traditionally spun if you want to do it the right way. The KGB would be proud.

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      Originally posted by kato View Post
                      http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017...church-alight/

                      There's a couple interesting German articles that take it apart pretty much paragraph by paragraph. Each paragraph has a kernel of truth which is then modified, twisted and embellished to create the kind of sentence that neo-fascist rag wants. Exactly the way propaganda is traditionally spun if you want to do it the right way. The KGB would be proud.
                      We are so used to this kind of journalism, we don't even read news anymore without a computer and a pocket calculator. Well, some of us.

                      P.S. What's with the fireworks throwing at people up there?
                      Last edited by Doktor; 07 Jan 17,, 22:49.
                      No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                      To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                      Comment


                      • #71
                        Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                        P.S. What's with the fireworks throwing at people up there?
                        Tradition for decades. Actually used to be a lot more common.

                        Injuries tend to be pretty minor, so it's not considered more than a nuisance. Most burns and such coming into emergency services on NYE are self-inflicted accidents. It's also not that special a night regarding number of injuries, at our local hospital it's usually the same number as during evenings of the annual autumn festival or for walpurgis night. The midnight shift - 10 pm to 2 am - on NYE is actually considered a doozy as barely anyone comes in during that time.

                        Fireworks have also gotten tamer, and more standard-commercially-sourced. 25 years ago my neighbor still used to bring out his blank-firing cannon for NYE. Helped push it up the steep driveway from the garage some years with a couple other guys from the neighborhood, damn thing weighed over 50 kg.

                        Overall doesn't even make the news most years except for more spectacular stuff. Short recap for NYE 2016:
                        Drunk woman driving into a group of people in Berlin; fireworks thrown into an ambulance in Duisburg, injuring one; firefighter severely injured by rocket fired directly at him in Augsburg - and continuing work; two people causing a forest fire on a mountain setting a hundred hectares aflame and injuring themselves seriously, with a hundred firefighters and five helicopters deployed; a guy in Nuremburg injuring himself and eight others when a home-built mortar using Czech fireworks exploded; two fingers found in an underpass at a train station by random passerbys and later attributed to a person who lost them when fireworks exploded in his hand. Oh, and Bild ran a pretty small, unnoticed story about a 16-year-old arrested for throwing fireworks at a 4-year-old child. Who wasn't injured.
                        Last edited by kato; 07 Jan 17,, 23:49.

                        Comment


                        • #72
                          Weird stuff. Over here, every year someone loses a finger or experience a serious palm injury.
                          No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                          To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                          Comment


                          • #73
                            Hospital here is more concerned with drunk people climbing on roofs to see the fireworks better and then falling off, crashing through skylights or similar. Have had some people here killing themselves that way every 2-3 years.

                            More recent development is that people use pistols to fire flares at other people they're pissed off at - had two cases this year around here, in one some kids were firing at a tram, in the other some mid-aged guy at a group of people. Perps in these cases typically end up either in hospital or in a jail cell. Oddly this flare thing only happens on NYE, despite flares for handguns not being only-available-around-NYE items like other pyrotechnics.

                            Comment


                            • #74
                              Look inside the National Inquirer or one of its tabloid cousins at the supermarket and you won't find a single reputable company with an ad in it. Now the same silent censure is being aimed at some internet news sites, like Breitbart and InfoWars. Will it work?


                              http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/op...ml?ref=opinion

                              How to Destroy the Business Model of Breitbart and Fake News

                              By PAGAN KENNEDY JAN. 7, 2017

                              One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

                              Why would an environmental science program want to be promoted on a site that denies the existence of climate change? Mr. Phillips figured — correctly — that Duke officials did not know where their ads were appearing, so he sent a tweet to Duke about its association with the “sexist racist” site. Eventually, after a flurry of communication with the environment department, he received a satisfying resolution — an assurance that its ads would no longer show up on Breitbart.

                              Mr. Phillips had just engaged in a new form of consumer activism, one that is rewriting the rules of online advertising. In the past month and a half, thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on what you might call “hate news” — a toxic mix of lies, white-supremacist content and bullying that can inspire attacks on Muslims, gay people, women, African-Americans and others.

                              In mid-November, a Twitter group called Sleeping Giants became the hub of the new movement. The Giants and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys.

                              The advertising world is vast. Although the big brands, for PR reasons, may redirect their ad dollars, there are many advertisers who covet...
                              Nina D 1 day ago

                              BTW, Breitbart has provided this rebuttal to this article- http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...es-aims-b...It...
                              More NY Times fake news propaganda. Try reading some Breitbart articles before making stupid, unfounded accusations.


                              “We’re focused on Breitbart News right now because they’re the biggest fish,” a founder of Sleeping Giants told me. (He requested anonymity because some members of the group work in the digital-media industry.) Eventually, Sleeping Giants would like to broaden its campaign to take on a menagerie of bad actors, but that would require a much bigger army of Giants, and “it has only been a month since we started doing this,” he told me when I talked to him in December. Then he added, “This has been the longest month of my life.”

                              He said that he noticed something had gone wrong with internet ads in November when, just out of curiosity, he visited Breitbart News. Like Mr. Phillips, he was gobsmacked by what he found there. His version of Breitbart was plastered with the logos of Silicon Valley brands that courted tech-savvy, pro-diversity millennials. “I couldn’t believe that these progressive companies were paying Breitbart News,” he said.

                              So he created a Twitter account called Sleeping Giants that would allow him and his fellow activists to anonymously interact with advertisers. Then they sent screenshots to companies like Chase, SoFi and Audi to prove that their ads appeared next to offensive content. Within hours, they received their first response, and they realized that they had stumbled across a potentially powerful tactic.

                              “We are trying to stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars,” reads the Sleeping Giants profile. “Many companies don’t even know it’s happening. It’s time to tell them.” They say it’s not about taking away Breitbart’s right to free speech, but about giving consumers and advertisers control over where their money goes. The group’s Twitter page offers a simple set of instructions to anyone who wants to follow suit. Step 1: “Go to Breitbart and take a screenshot of an ad next to some of their content.” Step 2: “Tweet the screenshot to the company with a polite, nonoffensive note.”

                              The activists’ back-and-forth with companies reveals a fog of confusion surrounding online advertising. Many organizations have no idea that their ads may end up next to content they find abhorrent.

                              You might blame this — in part — on robots. According to the research firm eMarketer, American companies are now spending more than $22 billion a year on “programmatic ads,” the kind of advertising that is bought with little human oversight. Joshua Zeitz, vice president of corporate communications at the ad-tech company AppNexus, explained to me how this automated ad buying works. When you click on a link, “in less than a second, a call goes out, and algorithms and automated software bid in an auction to put their advertisement up on your page,” he said. “So maybe the Nabisco algorithm wants to put an ad up there; so does Macy’s and so does Honda.” The algorithm that places the highest bid wins the chance to appear on your screen.

                              Programmatic ads can also follow individuals around the internet, based on their browsing history, as happened with Mr. Philips. A single targeted ad could cost just a fraction of a penny, but the pennies add up to a billion-dollar industry.

                              Even when ad placements are automated, companies still have the power to control whether neo-Nazis or fake news hucksters profit. In fact, it’s actually rather simple for companies to impose ethical policies, according to Mr. Zeitz. Indeed, his own company (which handles programmatic advertising for other organizations) recently decided to get out ahead of the issue by removing Breitbart News from its advertising marketplace. “We’re not banning them because they’re alt-right or conservative. We banned them from our marketplace because they violate our hate speech policy, which prohibits ad serving on sites that incite violence and discrimination against minority groups.” (Breitbart has said that it condemns racism and bigotry “in any form.”)

                              He pointed out that brand-name companies had already figured out how to keep their ads from flowing onto porn sites, because “you really don’t want your ad for a breakfast cereal next to a hard-core pornographic video,” and so “there are tools in place that allow companies to control where their ads go.” A company can block a specific site like Breitbart News from its ad buy. Or it might pick a “white list” of sites that align with its values.

                              But to do that, companies would have to forgo the sites designed to deliver exactly what they want — a big audience for little cost. In November, NPR reporters interviewed Jestin Coler about his fake-news empire. Mr. Coler and his team stage-crafted their sites to look like local newspapers and then planted fantastical headlines and fictional stories that attracted more than a million views. Though the news was fake, the ads were real. Mr. Coler wouldn’t tell the reporters exactly how much he made off advertising, but he intimated that his revenues ranged between $10,000 and $30,000 a month.

                              Such “entrepreneurs” have an outsize influence on our political sphere. BuzzFeed News reported that, during the last three months of the election, hoax stories outperformed real ones on social media. Thanks to people enthusiastically sharing pro-Trump headlines cooked up by clickbait farms, in the bizarro-world of online advertising, the fake can be more profitable than the real.

                              Ezra Englebardt, an advertising strategist, joined the Sleeping Giants campaign because he believes it creates much-needed transparency in the online advertising world. When lots of people share photos of the ads that they’re seeing on their own screens, it becomes possible to get some sense of where the ad dollars go, he said.

                              Still, the post-truth reality makes it difficult to measure the scope of the problem. Breitbart’s editor in chief told Bloomberg that despite these bans, his company “continues to experience exceptional growth.” However, public Twitter communications and news accounts prove that advertisers are indeed fleeing the site.

                              More important, the screenshot activists are forcing companies to pick a side. After pressure from consumers, Kellogg’s became one of the first big brands to announce that it would remove its ads from Breitbart News. In retaliation, Breitbart called for a boycott, and the cereal brand seems to have suffered from the uproar on social media. At the same time, it received lots of good press for taking its stand; in early December, many consumers announced that they would reward the company by making all-Kellogg’s donations to soup kitchens.

                              I expected that other companies would want to trumpet their own Breitbart departures. It seemed an easy win for corporate P.R. to distance itself from Klan-rally-like riffs like this one — “every tree, every rooftop, every picket fence, every telegraph pole in the South should be festooned with the Confederate battle flag.” (Telegraph poles!?)

                              But when I reached out to several organizations that seemed to have joined the ban, they didn’t want to talk about it. A bank and a nonprofit group did not respond to my queries. Two companies — 3M and Zappos — declined to talk about the matter. A Patagonia spokeswoman said that her company did not advertise on white-supremacist sites — but she would not comment on the screenshots that activists had sent to Patagonia in early December showing the company’s logo on Breitbart’s Facebook page. Warby Parker was the most forthcoming; a representative pointed me to a statement that thanked a Twitter activist for inspiring its own ban on Breitbart.

                              In the behavior of some of these companies, you can detect the way our norms have already shifted. In the old normal, it would have cost little to stand up against neo-Nazi slogans. But in the new normal, doing so might involve angering key players in the White House, including the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who has hired the former editor of Breitbart as his senior adviser. Mr. Trump recently proved the damage he could do to a company by criticizing Lockheed Martin on Twitter; soon after, its stocks prices tumbled.

                              Still, a new consumer movement is rising, and activists believe that where votes failed, wallets may prevail. This struggle is about much more than ads on Breitbart News — it’s about using corporations as shields to protect vulnerable people from
                              Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

                              Nicholas Reville, a board member of the Participatory Culture Foundation who has worked with the Sleeping Giants, pointed out that businesses benefited from embracing diversity: “You have to be inclusionary if you’re going to try to sell to a very large audience.” And he pointed out that consumer activism might be especially effective because so many people feel they have no other way to express their opposition to Trump-ian values.

                              The founder of Sleeping Giants agreed. “It’s scary to say it, but maybe companies will have to be the standard-bearers for morals right now,” he said. He added that most corporations embrace policies (on paper at least) that prohibit racist bullying and sexual intimidation. Even if President Trump flouts these rules, corporations may continue to uphold them. “We’ve all seen employee handbooks where they have codes of behavior,” he said. “Maybe that’s all we have to fall back on now.”

                              Pagan Kennedy is the author of “Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World” and a contributing opinion writer.
                              To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

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                              • #75
                                Originally posted by JAD_333 View Post
                                Look inside the National Inquirer or one of its tabloid cousins at the supermarket and you won't find a single reputable company with an ad in it. Now the same silent censure is being aimed at some internet news sites, like Breitbart and InfoWars. Will it work?


                                http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/op...ml?ref=opinion
                                If you go to Breitbart or it's extreme left equivalent The Daily Beast you'll see their advertising revenue is generated almost purely by click-bait.
                                The New York Time's revenue is generated almost entirely by big brand advertisers, the interwebs companies almost entirely by click-bait. Click-bait doesn't care about politics, only traffic, because that's the fundamental structure of internet advertising.
                                It's very unlikely big-name advertising brands refusing to advertise or anti-site-campaigns would have any significant impact on either Daily Beast or Breitbart.
                                In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

                                Leibniz

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