The real life effects of fake news part 2

Jon said:

If you haven't been following it, Trump supporters on Reddit have been fanning the flames that this pizza place was involved in child tracking and it has caused this (so far)


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant/

A North Carolina man was arrested Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots, D.C. police said. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” a false election-related conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton that spread online during her presidential campaign.

The incident caused panic, with several businesses going into lockdown as police swarmed the neighborhood after receiving the call shortly before 3 p.m.

Police said 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., walked in the front door of Comet Ping Pong and pointed a firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee. The employee was able to flee and notify police. Police said Welch proceeded to discharge the rifle inside the restaurant; they think that all other occupants had fled when Welch began shooting.

Welch has been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. Police said there were no reported injuries.

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Bodhisattva said:

The ping pong pizza place traffics in hipsters, and the dude thought they said "toddlers." Common mistake.

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Bodhisattva said:

The ping pong pizza place traffics in hipsters, and the dude thought they said "toddlers." Common mistake.

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Liberal columnists, wounded that so much of the public ignored their overtures first on Brexit and then on Trump, claim good, decent, supposedly ‘elitist’ journalism must now assert itself. Our role in ‘seeking the truth’ must be ‘harnessed with steely determination’, says one. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour says the ‘tsunami of fake-news sites’ is an affront to journalism and the thing that journalism helps to facilitate: democracy. We must now fight ‘hard for the truth’ in this world where ‘the Oxford English Dictionary just announced that its word of 2016 [is] “post-truth”’, she says. Numerous hacks have been despatched to Macedonia and Russia to confront the fresh-faced youths who run these fake-news sites for cash. ‘How teens in the Balkans are duping Trump supporters’, says one headline. ‘Russian propaganda effort helped spread “fake news” during election’, says another. The image we’re left with is of dastardly Easterners suckering stupid Westerners and undermining the democratic tradition, and now pain-faced, well-minded columnists must stand up to this foreign threat to reason.

It’s the fakest news story of the week.

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Tidewater said:

I saw so much BS from HuffPo, NBC, Salon and Vox this election cycle ("Trump is a devil-worshipper," "Trump kicks puppies for fun.")

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CharminTide said:

Can you cite some examples from these sources? I read some of those and didn't see anything of the sort.

Meanwhile, Infowars, endorsed by the president-elect, actually did run stories claiming that Clinton and Obama were demons and smelled of sulfur.

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Tide1986 said:

met·a·phor
ˈmedəˌfôr,ˈmedəˌfər/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
"“I had fallen through a trapdoor of depression,” said Mark, who was fond of theatrical metaphors.

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Oxford Dictionaries last month selected post-truth — “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” — as the international word of the year, and for good reason.

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Displaced Bama Fan said:

The man behind the Denver Guardian and many other fake news sites is a registered democrat in California.

Things that make you go "Hmm."

http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/23/the-man-behind-denver-guardian/

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During the run-up to the presidential election — fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says. "It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election."

Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait...

At any given time Coler says he's got between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them that wrote the story in the Denver Guardian that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right wing conspiracy theories.

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My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

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CharminTide said:

A ton of fake news sites were run by people against Trump. You really need to read the NPR interview in your link. They just went where the money is, and these people repeatedly say that the left simply isn't baited by fake news to the same degree as those who lean right. Which is why fake news from the right dominated this election cycle. In essence, more of those on one side cared about facts than on the other. That isn't me saying it, it's the people running these for-profit fake news empires.




Here's another interview with one:

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CharminTide said:

A ton of fake news sites were run by people against Trump. You really need to read the NPR interview in your link. They just went where the money is, and these people repeatedly say that the left simply isn't baited by fake news to the same degree as those who lean right. Which is why fake news from the right dominated this election cycle. In essence, more of those on one side cared about facts than on the other. That isn't me saying it, it's the people running these for-profit fake news empires.




Here's another interview with one:

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sabanball said:

Maybe its not that one-side cares more about facts than the other but consumption is more "topic" driven . One could see how in the near future "fake news" stories relative to "secret" white supremacy organizations and events could trigger the Left.

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NationalTitles16 said:

Or it could be that they are terrible at trolling the left.

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CharminTide said:

So, in other words: no.

I find it interesting that the outlandish, hyperbolic examples of left-leaning "fake news" was, in reality, actual fake news produced by the far right. And yet they're being presented as equivalent.

But that's none of my business. /kermit

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Tide1986 said:

It must really suck to be out community organized by conservatives.

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CharminTide said:

It might. But fake news that fits a narrative or "topic" is still fake. That's true whether it's occurs on the right or the left.


A possibility. There are a few fake stories on the left that stuck. But with Trump, reality was often enough to get the left outraged. Perhaps he was a unique figure that didn't leave much space for truly hyperbolic and false allegations?

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