9 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2017
    1. you can think of the hoax as meeting a demand technology creates

      As long as we are careful not to think that the technology created a demand as a necessary outcome of the technology alone. I may be overly sensitive to things that come across as technological determinisim, but...

      The technology is developed and deployed in a cultural, social and economic landscape and so if the demand for hoaxes arose out the technology, better to say it arose out of the deployment of that technology in that specific landscape.

  2. Jan 2017
  3. Dec 2016
    1. Poe’s law also played a prominent role in Facebook’s fake news problem, particularly in the spread of articles written with the cynical intention of duping Trump supporters through fabrication and misinformation. Readers may have passed these articles along as gospel because they really did believe, for example, that an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton’s private email server died mysteriously. Or maybe they didn’t believe it but wanted to perpetuate the falsehood for a laugh, out of boredom, or simply to watch the world burn. Each motive equally possible, each equally unverifiable, and each normalizing and incentivizing the spread of outright lies.

      Both Vectors

      Fake news was spread by both people who believed it and people who thought it was funny. Interestingly, it was spread on both vectors simultaneously.

      Poe’s law also played a prominent role in Facebook’s fake news problem, particularly in the spread of articles written with the cynical intention of duping Trump supporters through fabrication and misinformation. Readers may have passed these articles along as gospel because they really did believe, for example, that an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton’s private email server died mysteriously. Or maybe they didn’t believe it but wanted to perpetuate the falsehood for a laugh, out of boredom, or simply to watch the world burn. Each motive equally possible, each equally unverifiable, and each normalizing and incentivizing the spread of outright lies.

      For some purposes it doesn't actually matter whether people believed it or not -- and this is where it gets interesting. The spreading of lies as hoaxes or lies as disinformation both undermine the idea of truth, and, as the author states, the "normalizing and incentivizing of outright lies.

  4. Nov 2016
    1. Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.

      This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.

    1. This is a modern update to a classic confidence game—find a risky scenario with limited possibilities, bet on every single combination, and then hide your failures.

      Today, all possible outcomes can be posted to any website that allows accounts to be set to private, or that isn't likely to be noticed. After the fact, the incorrect results can be deleted before making the account public.

      This post points out that this trick could be used to "predict" election results, making it appear that they were fixed ahead of time. So it's potentially very dangerous.

  5. Jan 2016
    1. Honestly, there are very few that don’t make me fear for humanity. But I would say some of the more evolved, entrenched conspiracy theories have been particularly mind-boggling to me – things like Jade Helm or Sandy Hook truthers. I mean, these people have constructed a truly nightmarish fantasyland for themselves. How do we address that? How do we continue to dialogue with them?
    2. For me, what has become far more frustrating is a certain unwillingness to believe the debunk. I would see readers share links to the column on Facebook, telling their friends that a story or rumor they had posted wasn’t true. And the friends would come back with something like “you trust the Washington Post, that liberal rag???!?!?” It’s like a total unwillingness to engage with actual evidence.
    3. A lot has changed. For one thing, hoax news has become industrialized on a scale that it never was before. There are dozens of websites, most less than 18 months old, that exist only to propagate real-looking fake news stories. On top of that, as I say in the column, it feels like the tenor of fake news has changed. Where once these hoax stories were merely sensational or ridiculous – like your standard clickbait, basically – many now exist to exploit preconceived notions and biases. (Needless to say, that’s not a development that’s confined to fake-news sites or Internet hoaxers, either – it’s a problem we see across a wide swath of Internet media.)

      As well as talk radio and most television news.

    1. Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.

      Fake "news" sites and some bloggers have noticed that people will click links to controversial stories -- even if they are completely fabricated. So they make shit up, and idiots read it and share it.