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Controversial take here so everybody brace your butts: I think wildly proliferated fake news is real and a problem, it's not good to have unchecked yellow journalism, but I also think it's hilarious that the mainstream media is now frantically trying to use it to blacklist the alternate news sources that called them idiots for the past year while they confidently reported an idea of reality only tangentially related to actual reality. Listing Fox News and the Jacobin as clickbait fake news is pretty goddamn rich. Fake news is a problem that's not going to be solved by leaving it up to the drowning Fourth Estate that's governed primarily by interest in staying profitable--that's not a fault of journalism, that's a fault of capitalism, and as long as the news is run as a business it will always have incentives to compete with other sources of news. Which works to a point, as long as all the people involve agree they share an industry and a profession with certain standards. I'd argue that fake news isn't even in the same line of business as real news. Real news is trying to shame it out of existence as it usually does with blatantly false news sources, but they're behaving as if they're engaging with another corps of reporter and another news source business. What incentive does a Macedonian teenager writing political fiction for ad revenue have to respond to the Washington Post calling her a threat to the democratic process? If you want to kill fake news you need to educate people, but I think you also have to target it where it hurts: their bottom line. If they don't get paid, they won't turn out the volume that they do now. They don't have professional ethics you can attack, because they're not professionals, and they don't have a brand you can damage, because all they have to do is make up a new vaguely news sounding domain name and they're back in business. You have to take the reward away. Basically I blame Facebook firing their human curating team. Goddamn it, Zuckerberg, you made this a cottage industry.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:18
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 16:11 |
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