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Ariella
Ariella
2/2/2017 11:55:38 AM
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Re: Personal Responsibilty
@Adi I looked up the story. It's here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton-cameron-harris.html?_r=1 So he actually made $22K, but he didn't sell at the highest possible point:

In late October, with the inevitable end of his venture approaching, Mr. Harris sought an appraisal for the web domain that by then had vaulted into the web's top 20,000 sites. An appraiser said that given the traffic, he could probably sell it for between $115,000 and $125,000.

But Mr. Harris made a costly mistake: He decided to wait. Days after the election, denounced for making the peddling of fake news remunerative, Google announced that it would no longer place ads on sites promoting clearly fabricated stories.

A few days later, when Mr. Harris checked his site, the ads were gone. He checked with the appraiser and was told that the domain was now essentially worthless.

 

 Interesting story, but in the interest of balance, I want to share a link from Slate (not a RW outlet by any stretch of the imagination) that ran this at the end of last year: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/11/29/conservatives_aren_t_the_only_ones_who_believe_fake_news.html:

Green Party candidate Jill Stein has raised at least $6.2 million for a doomed recount effort in three critical Electoral College states. She's done this by feeding into the theory that the election might have been hacked by Russians or other nefarious actors—a claim for which there is no direct evidence. A report by New York Magazine's Gabriel Sherman airing the claims of a group of computer scientists and election lawyers who believe the election may have been tampered with spread like wildfire on liberal Facebook last week, prompting further calls for a recount. That group's circumstantial proof was quickly debunked. And while there are good governance reasons to do a paper recount, even the academic being cited by Stein in her court filings has said he thinks it's unlikely the election was hacked.


The article goes on to offer some other examples.

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Ariella
Ariella
2/2/2017 9:06:56 AM
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Re: I really don't see a solution
<the optimist in me -- and he's in there, somewhere > Lol @mendyK I think you have the makings of a book there with  a title like "How to find your inner opitimist." People do tell themselve stories they want to believe, that's true. Is that a universal and innate part of the human condition? Likely so given the fact that you can categorize a number of cognitive biases. 

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Adi
Adi
2/2/2017 8:46:06 AM
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Re: Personal Responsibilty
elizabethTV - Rothenberg described a similar event in his speech, where a 23-year old named Cameron Harris posted  fake story about "tens of thousands" of fraudulent votes for Hilary Clinton being found in an Ohio warehouse. He added a picture of a warehouse (apparently in Birmingham, here in the UK), said it was from Ohio, and posted it on a fake newspaper site he built after picking up a URL for $5. From advertising that he sold on the site, he made $5,000 --for about five hours work. 

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Michelle
Michelle
2/1/2017 7:29:25 PM
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Re: I really don't see a solution
That's so true. Connecting the world has resulted in a huge volume of misinformation unseen before. I spend a lot of time scrolling and rolling my eyes over some of the things I see on social media. Outrage!

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dmendyk
dmendyk
2/1/2017 9:39:35 AM
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Re: I really don't see a solution
Regarding that sunken feeling, "fake news" probably started right around the time our ancestors started communicating. At its heart, it's called lying, and lying is part of our DNA, so to speak. And the lies we tell are probably most often to ourselves. The optimist in me -- and he's in there, somewhere -- figures we've made it this far, and we're doing pretty well despite it all. It's just disheartening when the darker forces take their turn at bat.

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Ariella
Ariella
2/1/2017 9:14:17 AM
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Re: Personal Responsibilty
@ms.akkieneni There are different forms of fake news. Some are just speculation when all the facts are not yet in while some are absolute fabrication to fit a favored narrative. In the former, the context is not fully known, while in the latter it is is but deliberately cropped, so to speak, to present the picture the reporter chooses to believe or just believes to be  more dramatic and so more newsworthy. I'd be tempted to put misleading headlines into that category, too. So often, I see headlines that claim something that is not in the least substantiated by the body of the article. 

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Ariella
Ariella
2/1/2017 9:10:43 AM
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Re: I really don't see a solution
@Michelle in the real 1984 -- not the book -- we were limited in how quickly fake news could spread because we didn't have the internet. That's not to say that all newspaper, radio, and TV news had to be completely accurate. I'm sure that there were some unverified reports then as well as political slants that were allowed to color the news. But you didn't have hundreds of millions of individuals sharing their own take on the news, often with shopped or deliberately misidentified photos offered as proof. Social media really extends the ramifications of the quote whose origins are still a bit unclear (see http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/) "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the turth is putting on its shoes." In fact, it now travels all around the world, and has already convinced half of it by the time the correction goes out and gets almost no attention. 

 


 

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Michelle
Michelle
1/31/2017 10:33:36 PM
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Platinum
Re: I really don't see a solution
And we're back to 1984
...nothing stops humans from inventing and promulgating false nexuses in the truth network.

or Skynet or something

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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
1/31/2017 10:15:00 PM
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Platinum
Re: I really don't see a solution
Michelle,

Machines can and do spot discrepancies between texts, and coherences as well. They're getting to be able to do that with pictures and graphs. Eventually they'll be able to cross the boundaries between words and pictures and graphs and equations and compare there.

But either humans will have to tell machines "And here's the true stuff to which everything must correspond through chains of all lengths" or else the machines will have to say "the chains of correspondence knit and knot together very thickly right here, so provisionally we are declaring this set of statements/pictures/etc. to be facts or laws."  And both processes are ever more subject to corruption; nothing stops humans from lying to machines (except other humans, who first must catch the liars), and nothing stops humans from inventing and promulgating false nexuses in the truth network.

The only difference is that instead of being sunk without the help of the machines we will be sunk with the help of the machines, I'm afraid.

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Michelle
Michelle
1/31/2017 10:07:59 PM
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Platinum
Re: I really don't see a solution
@John Can the machines help us? Machine learning? AI?

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