Inside a Fake News Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html

by my_first_acct • 10 years ago

39 43 10 years ago

nytimes.com

visarga2• 10 years ago

Just a different kind of spammers. News spammers.

tombone123• 10 years ago

True enough, but the damage is more nebulous and potentially greater. Also, will bag of words work well for news?

visarga2• 10 years ago

No, no, today we use bidirectional LSTMs with word embeddings. They work so much better.

nickff• 10 years ago

This may be a cynical take on things, but it seems to me that the 'fake news factories' figured out that the core product of a political website is confirmation of existing beliefs, then 'unbundled' it from everything else.

dilemma• 10 years ago

This is exactly how Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer designed their news products 100 years ago.

TazeTSchnitzel• 10 years ago

Well, political news have had a pseudo-legitimate form of this for a long time: opinion and comment sections.

Completely fabricated news is a step up, though.

astrodust• 10 years ago

Unbundled from reality. Tied to profit.

It's an environment where they can rapidly iterate on what the most "click-worthy" stories are and dial in the content to meet audience expectations.

This is worse than the pure sugar being fed by useless news organizations like CNN where their coverage has almost zero informational value. This is like heroin where it's actively feeding wild misconceptions.

tombone123• 10 years ago

I find it funny how globalism is leaking back into the US in unexpected ways; who would have thought twenty years ago that a Georgian citizen would take flak for derailing a US election by producing pulp news? It was always supposed to be the American eagle spreading its freedom to the world who gratefully welcomed it with praise, they weren't actually supposed to influence the US back!

beambot• 10 years ago

It's an environment where they can rapidly iterate on what the most "click-worthy" stories are and dial in the content to meet audience expectations.

Ha! That literally describes most websites... including some factors in the Google ranking algorithm. I guess that's what happens when damn-near every website on earth optimizes for user engagement.

tpeo• 10 years ago

If you see that much of a difference, you weren't being cynical enough.

harlanji• 10 years ago

Surprise! All for-profit companies exist with making money as the highest priority. As idealistic software engineers we're programmed to think of everything as a mission, but as soon as you look higher at most post-investment companies you'll see it's about money even if leadership doesn't believe that itself. There may be an ideological honey moon period but as soon as there's a bump/loss in confidence cash is king without fail. One counter example is a bootstrapped solo entity because there is no external authority/commitment to maximize shareholder value for anyone else, so they can burn money if they want.

A good way to confirm this in job interviews is to bring up B Corps in response to the founding/mission part of the pitch and watch them say it just hasn't been a priority. A B Corp is a certified for-profit company with a mission built in beyond quarter-over-quarter growth. If they really believe in their mission they should certify as a B Corp, if they're not and they're hiring with recruiters--implies some level of cash on hand, readiness to grow--it's lip service. I should note this isn't a deal breaker if they can pay, I just like to know who I am working with. In time I'd like to prefer employment from B Corps.

wallace_f6• 10 years ago

This whole war on fake news thing bothers me. It leads to giving unprecedented power to private corporations in controlling what people are able to see and hear.

The other thing is that the US media is far from perfect as well. I can point to plenty of articles in the BBC, NYT, the Economist and WaPo that are classified as News--not OpEds--that ignore science, are politically motivated, and would loosely qualify as "fake news," or at least OpEds.

During the election cycle, I know a lot of people that were personally very turned off by the DNC corruption, yet US media coverage was scarce. When I type "DNC corruption" into Google and DuckDuckGo, there are no results on the first page from major media outlets. When I search site:nytimes.com "DNC Corruption" the first result is from 1860. The second is "Can we trust Julian Assange...?" I could keep going, but the point is, this is terrifying.

Censorship by private corporations and government is not the answer.

rodgerd• 10 years ago

It leads to giving unprecedented to private corporations in controlling what people are able to see and hear.

You don't know much about Rupert Murdoch or Hearst, do you?

colordrops3• 10 years ago

What did the grandparent post say that indicates ignorance of Murdoch or Hearst? If anything I'd suspect the opposite.

wallace_f6• 10 years ago

Thanks for that. I am aware of who they are.

Ok so AFAIK what you are trying to say is that corporations, as well as media moguls, already have power in controlling what people say and hear. It's true that is already a problem. So why don't we try to stop it from getting worse?

The fact is the trend is towards people digesting news through filters such as Twitter, Facebook and Google. I don't want to see private corporations have unprecedented control in censoring the perceived choice of consumers in what they see and hear.

The war on fake news is lending to a theme towards censorship. I think most people are aware most news is already produced by a few major media corporations. I don't want to live in a world where everything else is considered "fake."

fatbird• 10 years ago

The NYT broke the story on Clinton's email scandal, and followed it continuously, long past other media outlets and to the point where it was getting criticized because the vast majority of its coverage of Clinton was dedicated to a single scandal to the exclusion of much other newsworthy reporting it could have done.

Your failure to use the right search terms is not evidence of media bias.

delinka• 10 years ago

"clinton email scandal" != "dnc corruption"

Also, your last sentence would be apropos had we been given GP's search terms and you rebutted with a set of terms that did indeed give the desired results.

wallace_f6• 10 years ago

Wow. The DNC corruption scandal began in summer of 2016 and involves Debbie Wasserman Schultz being removed from her position as DNC chair over the evident corruption with, "how to deal with Bernie Sanders" popularity (the DNC should be neutral actor).

Clinton's use of a private email server began in spring 2015.

They are related, but hardly not even the same thing.

Thanks for that comment about using the right search terms. I'll try to use "the right search terms" next time. /s

tombone123• 10 years ago

Censorship by private corporations and government is not the answer.

You yourself complain about lack of reporting about an issue, lack of truth, and then you go on to celebrate the spreading of lies? Fake news are basically just lies so opposing them is to spread truths, and to call efforts to spread truth "censorship" is 1984 logic.

Also, as I'm sure others will point out, FB and google already arbitrarily restrict content on their platforms so there is nothing "unprecedented" about it. There really isn't much of a case that filtering fake news is different banning from Simpsons clips or music remixes.

wallace_f6• 10 years ago

I think the words you are looking for are Double Speak when you refer to "1984 logic." Anyways, the fact that there will be people who might say something stupid is not reason to further restrict the right to free speech.

You can actually use that as a litmus test for free speech: There will always be stupid, awful, and racist people, and if they don't exist you know they lost their right to free speech.

I'd rather be free from tyranny than have a few bad apples--either way we're going to have the bad apples anyways.

It is actually unprecedented. Clips from the Simpsons being banned may have been banned on broadcast TV, but it does not mean someone could not upload that clip to Youtube (you do get the point, don't go into some strawman argument about copyright laws).

augustt• 10 years ago

1860? What are you talking about?

site:nytimes.com DNC Corruption
Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign DNC Post - The New York Times (Jul 24, 2016)
D.N.C. Hack Raises a Frightening Question: What's Next? - The New ... (Jul 29, 2016)
Released Emails Suggest the D.N.C. Derided the Sanders Campaign ... (Jul 22, 2016)
After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore ... (Jul 28, 2016)

devoply• 10 years ago

Perhaps this is fake? Perhaps not. Who controls that? http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/pizzagate-4chan-un...

Media claims its fake: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pizzagate-shows-how-...

jklinger410• 10 years ago

Just because they play both sides of the field doesn't add credulity to the objectivity of their coverage.

I am so jaded to believe that both sides pay them for coverage. Either in money or political favors.

wallace_f6• 10 years ago

I tried the same search with DuckDuckGo and got the same results as what I posted.

trobertson• 10 years ago

You'll note that those results all start appearing in July - after the DNC shoved Sanders out of the race. When the corruption was relevant, the "reputable" media was silent.

orblivion2• 10 years ago

I think that bad establishment news and "fake news" being relevant at the same time isn't a coincidence. The lack of trust in the establishment news sources opens a market for alternatives. However working outside the establishment is inherently the Wild West, so what you're going to get may well be even worse on average. But it's very important to keep around because some of it will be much better for certain topics, and it'll at least keep the establishment in check.

colordrops3• 10 years ago

Exactly. I'd be worried if sources like The Real News Network or The Intercept got erroneously lumped in with "fake news".

edblarney2• 10 years ago

'Fake News' is not an 'alternative'. It's literally fake.

'Pope endorses Trump' - fake.

'Trump molested three children from Texas' - fake.

'Americans invade Canada' - fake.

There's a problem with 'actual fake news' not just 'biased news'.

CNN - despite it's bias - is still mostly a decent news site.

Go to CNN.com, Fox.com, MSNBC.com - and look at ALL of the links. It's mostly just boring, factual news.

strathmeyer• 10 years ago

Gee why are you completely ignoring what the article is about??

wallace_f6• 10 years ago

I remember a certain criticism of Trump's: "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it," campaign. So the argument went that Trump's phrasing cleverly drew attention from whether or not building a wall was a good idea, and created redirected discussion to a straw man argument about whether Mexico should pay for it.

Right now the media coverage appears as: "fake news is _____ insert headline," like "motivated by profit," is the focus of the article. It's the same as Trump's clever phrasing: What is assumed is that there exists this problem with fake news, and it's bad. The debate has been shifted about why fake news exists, or what to do about fake news, the debate in the media was never about "is it right to try to suppress fake news, or does that lead us down a slippery slope?" Same tactic. Don't fall for it. Clearly the big media corporations have not just political pressure (which is undisputed) but a very obvious profit motive behind squashing out alternative news.

generic_user• 10 years ago

It looks like the 'real news' is going to go down with the ship because the only response they have to discretization of there reporting is to double down on there false narrative.

I stopped reading mainstream media and watching TV many years ago because I consider 80% of what they report to be misleading, misinformation and yes 'fake news'.

The corporate media has finally lost the ability to control the public discourse. That was the only real value they still had to the handful of oligarchs that own them.

Nazi Frogs, Russian hackers, Fake news factories and what ever else they come up with next is not going to save them.

andrewclunn• 10 years ago

So how is this different from say SNL perpetuating the false notion that Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house? Call it satire and you're free to propagandize all you want. Only after the anointed candidate of the power lost, must we examine the means by which propaganda (specifically that we find unfavorable) is disseminated. Fake news is the crop you reap when you show mass censorship. Trying to double down on the censorship will only hasten your irrelevance.

eropple• 10 years ago

It's almost as if satire isn't propaganda at all. Weird, that.

yyhhsj0521• 10 years ago

So, real-world Onion News?

icomefromreddit• 10 years ago

'Fake News' took our jobs!

pryelluw• 10 years ago

Well, how is this different from the old supermarket tabloids? I vividly remember bat boy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_(character)

Inside a Fake News Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’

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