[seankenny]

Verified vs unverified.

You're bouldering in remotest Torridon and an airliner crashes into the opposite hill. After  along the cops you take a photo and tweet it, send it to the BBC, whatever. The media gets a hold of it and broadcasts "unconfirmed/unverified  reports" of an airliner crashing.

The cops turn up and issue a statement - this is a verified report, ie one tha usually has a degree of official backing.

Unverified doesn't necessarily mean unchecked. Journalists are supposed to assess and try to verify sources (they can't witness everything they write about) - and if you were filming your mate and the plane crashes in the background, your clip is a bloody good source.

Quite a few babies being thrown out along with bath water elsewhere in this thread.

[tomtom]

I think you'll find that the hacker group 'fuzzy bears' that are reputedly behind the fake news propagation are not hirsute large Russian gentlemen... but in fact a cover for a Lagerstarfish.con hacking boiler room operation.

[Oldmanmatt]

There's a distinction to be made between...

• Fake News which is just lies, with no basis beyond pushing a particular agenda (viz. recent US elections and a fair portion of the Brexit propaganda e.g. £350million/week lets spend it on the NHS)
• Accurate news about complicated situations the current situation in Syria being a good example.
• Satire see DailyMash/NewsThump/The Onion
• The Daily Mail

4 is easy to ignore and 3 should be easy to spot too.

[..]

Given what we currently know about how our brain functions, there is very little difference between 1 & 3. If satire or fake news are easier to memorise than some complicated or nuanced report (which they usually are) that's what we will recollect later rather .

From what I can gather partisan satire rot your brain to the same degree as fake news.

Yep, I read a great piece in either Cohen and Stewarts book or one of Dawkins (as an adjunct to a chapter on Extended Phenotypes, I think); about the degree that our perception of history is skewed by fiction.
How hard is it to picture Georgian/Victorian England, without Sherlock? Without Scrooge? Or a whole host of fictitious characters?


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[fried]

Endless adverts of snow falling at Christmas, fake frosting in the corner of windows....

[tomtom]

Endless adverts of snow falling at Christmas, fake frosting in the corner of windows....

That's all part of a climate sceptics elaborate misinformation plan...

[Oldmanmatt]

One of the main problems, has to be Twitter, even more so than FB; I would think.
Nothing but a constant stream of headlines without substance.
And exploited by the bullshitters.
Assuming Newsweek is still moderately reliable and that this accurately reflects the original report (actually, quite a lot of assumptions there, isn't there..):

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/12/14/donald-trump-goes-silent-after-newsweek-proves-trump-lied-about-college-degree-details/


All posts either sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek or mildly mocking-in-a-friendly-way unless otherwise stated. I always forget to put those smiley things...

[slackline]

One of the main problems, has to be Twitter, even more so than FB; I would think.
Nothing but a constant stream of headlines without substance.

For both Twatter and Farcebook headlines are splashed about but more often than not for actual news sources  they also provide substance in the form of a link to their full article.  These too need to be read critically...

The answer to bad speech is not censorship. The answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting very popular.

Short article based on the above

[tomtom]

Critical thinking is an interesting point/set of words to raise..

*pompus wanker alert* as a University lecturer, we spend three hard years getting our students to think critically. Much of their education/experience to that point seems based around things being right or wrong - about information being absolute (in a scientific way)... Its hard to get them to challenge what is written in a book or academic paper. Though to counter that argument - the now post google generation have grown up with a pretty well tuned 'shit filter' that can look at a page of search engine results and quickly sort the wheat from the chaff..

[slackline]

Though to counter that argument - the now post google generation have grown up with a pretty well tuned 'shit filter' that can look at a page of search engine results and quickly sort the wheat from the chaff..

Perhaps in the students you see, but it might not be the case for everyone...

Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online (the study started in 2015, before the current furore of 'fake-news').

...many of whom won't go on to University and get the critical thinking education your talking about but still read news.

In general computer literacy is pretty poor according to research done by OECD - Skills Matter : Further results from the Survey of Adult Skills

An abridged summary focusing on computer literacy is here and describes what the tasks involved in each of the skill level in this graph are...





Denzel Washington highlights the responsibility journalists increasingly don't take seriously