Calling YouTube fake news is a travesty. It's actually just not news at all.<p>Before I gave up and unfriended them, I used to try and debate some FB friends that believed in chem trails, flat Earth, and other ridiculous things. I wasn't arguing against logic, reason, or science. I was arguing with YT channels Richie From Boston and others ( I wont link it; that rabbit hole is left to the reader).<p>The last thing that was said to me before unfriending was "i see what you're doing. That's real low energy, man."<p>I think arguing for the public's hearts and minds has more to do with the former than latter.
Ever since last winter I am a bit cautious when articles like this pop up. I was on a conference where one of the handful tracks was fact checking, and a keynote speaker used images like the one in the article to illustrate how news media has failed during the 2016 election. One image that specially caught my attention was a word cloud made from polls about what voters knew about each candidate, and the speaker made a big point that all the major scandals was missing from Trumps side but the Clinton side was full of it.<p>This rang all kind of warning bells, so I went and looked up the source and suddenly it made all good sense. The polls was done between the start of the preliminaries (which happen to be around the time wikileaks started publishing their stuff) and ended a couple months before the election day, and all those "missing" scandals about Trump that made international news are all more or less during those last couple of months. In that context the word cloud perfectly matched more or less everything what international news had been writing about the two candidates during the preliminaries and shortly afterward before the election campaign had really started. The researchers even noted this in their original paper, pointing out that if the polls had been done closer to election date then the data would look very different.<p>I could have used many of the same material to hold my own keynote about how news has successfully informed the public correctly. I notified the conference organizers, but I doubt it had any effect since the message followed the political tides right now. People want to believe that fake news caused the election results, and that is to me a very worrying. First we need to establish if it did, and it seems that everyone is skipping that step.
I posted this before but after reading about all this "fake news" phenomena, I came across this TEDx talk by Sharyl Attkisson: "How Real Is Fake News?" [1]. She's a former reporter for CBS News and in the video, she explains where the term comes from, who's behind it and what the long-term consequences are. If you have 10 min of free time, give it a watch.<p>She also gave another amazing talk on corporate astroturfing and media manipulation [2]: "Astroturf and manipulation of media messages"<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU</a>
> He discovered a trove of exposed Cambridge Analytica tools in the online code repository Github, long before most people knew the shady, defunct data firm’s name.<p>Anyone know what this is about?
Sigh, I admire the data analysis stuff this guy does and it's nice he tries to track how many people follow Russian made accounts or what not, but I feel the article/mindset here is still the same as in every political article recently:<p>People only voted for Trump because they were 'tricked'.<p>It's like media folk and political pundits cannot fathom the idea that the political system is simply broken for many people. Yes it's likely trolls and state sponsored propaganda helped, since a situation where people are so heavily divided is easy to stir up controversy in.<p>But at the end of the day, what was on offer in the recent election? Four years of 'more of the same' or someone who claimed to overthrow the system. A choice between an insane person and a bunch of career politicians with no charisma.<p>Just feels like it's a constant set of searches for a nefarious conspiracy rather than accepting that the current system isn't offering much to anyone outside of large corporations and that people were getting sick of it.
Did this guy pay for this article? It's a pure personal branding/ego piece about a guy who watched a lot of YouTube and had also happened to write for Washington Post (owned by Amazon) and The New York Times, known for publishing absolute reprehensible garbage op-ed pieces justifying atrocities perpetuated by neoliberals while ostensibly still being on the left.
> It’s Albright’s research that helped build a bruising story in The New York Times on how the Russians used fake identities to stoke American rage.<p>OK, so Albright has done outstanding work. His map[0] is mind-blowing.<p>But there's another key aspect: This isn't new. For sure, Russian propagandists are using the Internet very effectively. However, Russian influence on US culture and politics goes back many decades. Communist groups in the US during the 30s-60s. US anti-war movements in the 60s-80s. The anti-draft movement, with heavy Quaker involvement. And the Soviet-American Friendship Society. That Ramparts article about Johnson and JFK's corpse.<p>And since the 90s, they've been focusing more on the radical right. Pushing distrust of the US government. I saw that developing in cypherpunk communities. But I wasn't sure, until RT appeared.<p>And by the way, I'm not arguing that Russia isn't justified in doing all this. It's arguably just defense. Because the US does it too. In Afghanistan, supporting the Taliban. In the Balkans. In the Ukraine. In Chile. I mean, they broke up the Soviet Union, and one aspect was propaganda.<p>Anyway, just sayin'.<p>Edit: I'm not arguing that those were all Russian front groups. Just that they were Russian influenced. And here's another example: Mad Magazine :) Also, the US did the same. I mean, the US promoted modern/abstract art as a Cold War weapon!<p>Edit: I'm not making this up.[1] Also, re support offered to the JFK campaign.[2]<p>0) <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook#img-4" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-de...</a><p>1) <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/russia-facebook-race/542796/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/ru...</a><p>2) <a href="http://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/" rel="nofollow">http://time.com/4851449/trump-jr-russian-kennedy-history/</a>
Speaking of news. Anyone know why CNN "leaking" debate questions to presidential questions was quickly forgotten. Atleast with Russia we somewhat know who the enemy but who is behind insidious actors who are leaking questions and why are they doing it. Was it really just one bad actor?
It's quite strange to complain about YouTube and call its front page" fake news. That's pretty much like blaming "television" is fake news.<p>Youtube is a carrier, rather like UHF frequency is a band for transmitting carriers. Your television can show anything, depending on which channels you choose to watch. YouTube service also contains just about anything, and there's no such thing as a "YouTube front page" like you have front page of a newspaper. It's your own front page that comes up, based on what you've previously been interested in.<p>If you are interested in fake news, you'll see fake news in YouTube. Just like if you're interested in supermarket tabloid stories, you'll buy National Enquirer and read that. It's your choice.