11-26-2016, 10:36 PM
(11-26-2016, 06:26 PM)hollodero Wrote: I thought about creating a similar thread. I don't see it that lightly. It's not about the voting alone, but also about what people start to believe.
Here in Europe there are tons of made up stories, mainly about refugees... how they have illnesses, how there are rampages, mass rapes, mass killings, how residents are ordered to give up living space for immigrants, how Sharia became the law of western countries, the media keeps things secret from its citizens and all that. It's BS, but not harmless at all, it creates hatred.
And it's willingly shared by the right-wing partys to mobilize the protest movement.
And - often Russia is somehow involved in those; and that's consequently what all the modern right wing movements have in common: They love Putin. There's much more to fake news than just Russian influence, of course. But we more and more become the target for Russian propaganda, and many fake news stories can be traced back to Russian influence; an aspect people are surprisingly casual about, here and in the US. Surprisingly casual.
I fuel that claim by wondering why it seems to be no biggie that Russia hacked into one of your major party's databases. Allegedly. Putin says it wasn't him, of course, and maybe people trust him more than the own government - and how devastating would that be. And how devastating is it that Russian espionage - allegedly - had a big part in your election's outcome. Just like they have a big part in building the "protest movement" with fake news - a goal they openly admitted to.
Sorry about the Russian angle, could not avoid it.
Fake news, Russian or not, are a cancer of the information age and I for one am very much for starting to think about what to do against them. Some kind of digital cachet for "news" maybe. But I don't know. I just know that it's a real concern.
Podesta's password was "p@ssw0rd", for goodness sakes.
So... I thought this was good reading, about stuff popping up on newsfeeds.
http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/#/
