The Rise of Progressive 'Fake News'

[Denzil_DC]

...

If progressives are looking to be shocked, terrified, or incensed, they have plenty of options. Yet in the past two weeks, many have turned to a different avenue: They have shared "fake news," online stories that look like real journalism but are full of fables and falsehoods.

...

Brooke Binkowski is the managing editor of Snopes, the English-speaking internet's most important rumor-debunking site. It is her job to sit around and look at some of the most popular falsehoods on the web all day. Earlier this week, I asked her if she had seen a spike in the amount and popularity of fake news aimed at liberals.

...

She emphasized that there's no equivalence between the falsehoods coming from the American left and the right in the past two weeks. Individual Democrats on Facebook may cling to pleasant stories and wishful thinking, but the Republican White House press secretary spouts off lies beneath the presidential seal. On Thursday, Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to the president, referenced a terrorist attack that never happened.

But a preponderance of fake information ultimately harms the political cause that absorbs it. It’s also bad strategy: Michael Walzer writes that the left’s task at this moment in history is "to help hold the center." ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/viva-la-resistance-content/515532/

The rest of the article is an interview with Binkowski, exploring what she's observed, from blatant clickbait to satire (too often accepted as truth by the unwary) to outright misinformation exploiting an understandable tendency for desperate wishful thinking.

[Bill USA]

1. the article itself is fake news. Title: "Rise of Progressive FAke news" doesn't site any Progr fake

news examples.

Now the left has its own panoply of wishful thinking. Twitter accounts purportedly operated by disgruntled government employees—@AltNatParSer, @RogueNASA, and the extra dubious @RoguePOTUSStaff—have swelled in number to become a shadow bureaucracy. Conspiratorially minded Medium posts insist to anyone who will read them that the real story of the Trump administration is even more layered and nefarious than it seems. And satirical news of poor quality has gotten passed around as a weird story more than once. (Queen Elizabeth II didn’t actually say she could kill Donald Trump with a sword.)

The Queen Elizabeth story was from the Daily Mash a satirical website. No examples of progressive sites passing alonng fake news were given.

all you have to do is read that intelligence report on the Trump campaign and Russia and you could get "shocked, terrified, or incensed".

http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14194986/russia-hack-intelligence-report-election-trump

[Denzil_DC]

2. I don't think that's a fair assessment of the article at all.

We've had examples of some of those sites and stories it mentions getting quite a lot of attention on DU itself.

Of those the article refers to, I can recall twitter accounts like @RoguePOTUSStaff and Palmer Report (classed as tending to "clickbait" rather than outright fakery) getting quite a lot of coverage and sparking wishful discussion.

And how often have we seen satirical posts where the voices pointing out that a story's not factual have been drowned out by those freaking out about it as if real?

And how often are the GD posts that get the most reads, replies and recs the ones with the most clickbaity titles? That's not a new development, of course.

The article explicitly states that the problem with progressive outlets isn't anything like as bad as it is with the right - "no equivalence" - but describes an observed trend. There's no room for such complacency in the current environment, where truth's negotiable.

[yurbud]

3. Do you think there's a difference between satire mistaken for news and misinformation MEANT

to be taken seriously?

[Denzil_DC]

4. Yes.

Though you'd have to know the motivation of whoever originated it. But either means that myths can spread as if they were facts.

Heck, I'm still seeing people on DU claiming that Conway said she hadn't slept in months, when she clearly said she hadn't slept in in months! It's a trivial example, but I'm not going to get into listing others as I think enough people here are aware and on the alert about checking up on, and if necessary challenging, stories that are just too satisfying.