There has always been fake news...yellow journalism, whatever; and it was always in just as much abundance. If you study history it becomes abundantly clear that most of man's terrible actions to one another is the result of fake news. Heck - this study is fake news; crafted to deliver exactly what the researchers wanted to find.
Fake news has always existed. The only difference between today and hundreds of years ago is who had the most reach. Back in the past only the church and royalty had the power to spread (fake) news. Nowadays anyone can go on social media and do the same.
Fake news has been with us for a long time.. Along with various religions/churches and superstition/customs, humans had always believed in various level of fake things.
This "fake news" thing goes all the way back to the founding of our country (USA that is). It has always been a problem. And the solution now is the same as then - be critical and know thy source.
I’d love to see a follow up of basically the same study with different kinds of fake news. If you looked at the 18 fake and 18 true headlines used here, it’s mostly stuff like “woman found 15 years dead on Clinton property” and “trump makes gun comments that anger french.”
I’d like to see whether this same effects generalize to the “zomg: coffee cures cancer” sort of scientific illiteracy bad reporting.
Fake news started hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The recent hysteria about fake news started roughly 48 hours after the Presidential election results.
The earliest centralised news was local kings, lords, whatever, instructing the town crier or scribe what to tell the people. You'd be nuts to think it had anything to do with facts.
As civilisation developed, and we had things like the Roman Empire, it was the same deal, except different senators or others would pay criers to spread stories in different sectors, usually their own or a competitors, to sway things one way or another. Remarkably similar to today. And yes, it was fake news. Such as telling citizens that the Carthaginians were baby-eating deamon worshippers, to get people to support a war to wipe out an economic rival.
Then we had governments in WW1 portraying Germans as monsters in those silly posters, inventing horrific crimes against humanity.
Then we had all the media telling tall tales about Saddam Hussein and his secret invisible nuclear chemical weapons in cartoon trains in the desert where they didn't even have railway lines, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead innocent people who never harmed the USA, and the destabilisation of the Middle East for decades.
It has always been nonsense.
So when you're evalutating the credibility or utility of random internerds and their "news", just be mindful of what you're comparing them against.
This is a very historically-ignorant view. Every culture and state since the beginning of time has manipulated information to suit its needs.
We don’t even need to back that far: the beginning of the Iraq war, not even twenty years ago, was rife with “fake news.” The fact that the buzzword didn’t exist doesn’t mean that the phenomenon didn’t exist.
lets be real here, isn't it obvious that where there is freedom to do and say what you want in a setting anonymously or even not...a high chance of fake news. Lets be realistic fake news is not new, its just spreads faster on the internet. People have used fake news all throughout history to drive agenda.
I think one needs to be very intentionally oblivious to not notice the qualitative difference between fake news of the past and fake news right now.
Fake news in the past always had an identifiable source, because there was still an institution, a company, or someone with their name on the door between reader and publisher. As it stands, no such barrier exists any more. Things can be inserted by malicious actors into the debate, and they spread automatically simply because they have the tendency to 'go viral', something entirely absent in the past. That has added a completely new set of problems.
>Blame people for believing most of anything they're told
Precisely because it is very much in everyone's nature to suffer from these mechanisms it makes no sense to blame ' the people'. What does this imply, a great re-education of everyone? Obviously the only thing we can change is the companies, institutions and rules that determine how we consume the news, not how human brains disseminate them.
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