And they wonder why we don’t trust politicians or the main stream media. Interesting article by Glenn Greenwald (of Edward Snowden fame), about an article in the Guardian regarding Julian Assange. Worth the time if you want to understand the background behind the fake news BS.
But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by the Guardian which recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how those false claims – fabrications, really – were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news. The purpose of this article is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to suppress content in the name of combatting it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.
To see how blatantly false is the Guardian’s claims, all one needs to do is compare the Guardian’s claims about what Assange said in the interview to the text of what he actually said.
If they want credibility when posing as Fake News opponents in the future, they ought to acknowledge what they did and retract it – beginning with the Guardian.
Glenn Greewald
Many of us use Snopes.com as proof that something is true or not true. But who is Snopes.
One of the websites Facebook is to use to arbitrate on 'fake news' is involved in a bitter legal dispute between its co-founders, with its CEO accused of using company money for prostitutes.
Snopes.com will be part of a panel used by Facebook to decide whether stories which users complain about as potentially 'fake' should be considered 'disputed'.
But the website's own troubles and the intriguing choice of who carries out its 'fact checks' are revealed by DailyMail.com, as one of its main contributors is disclosed to be a former sex-blogger who called herself 'Vice Vixen'.
Snopes.com will benefit from Facebook's decision to allow users to report items in their newsfeed which they believe to be 'fake'.
It is asking a number of organizations to arbitrate on items which are reported or which Facebook staff think may not be genuine, and decide whether they should be marked as 'disputed'.
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You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
Harlan Ellison