breaking news and fake news - the wash post's russian power grid hackers story
I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day. What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers. I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time. To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news" perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the public. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-wa... Kalev
Kalev, Your points about the process of news making are worth considering. But conflating what the Post did with a discussion of fake news is a bit off-base. The major difference is, despite conspiracy theories about major papers such as the Post, Post reporters do seek out the most empirically evident story possible. They do look for facts. Fake news, on the other hand, seeks to deceive, and to persuade its audience towards more extreme ideological points of view. And motives matter. -Robert
On Jan 1, 2017, at 2:48 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.
I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time.
To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news" perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the public.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-wa...
Kalev _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Robert, that's actually one of the fascinating aspects of all of this - how you define "fake news". If you dive back into the history of propaganda theory, you'll find some fantastic work on why defining "fake news" is so hard - the same set of facts can be used by well-meaning and earnest reporters to support wildly different conclusions. Paul Linebarger's classic "Psychological Warfare" offers a fantastic primer on this. If we define "fake news" as solely that news which the person writing it knew at the time to be solely and entirely false without any basis in fact and start looking at the legal definitions of things like "libel" then that's one avenue of approach. But, the discussion that's happening in journalism circles right now is really centering on a much broader definition of false and misleading news. Even on this very mailing list people have mentioned the alt-left and alt-right as "fake news". Some of that certainly falls into the category of outright libel, where the person writing it has posted elsewhere that they do solemnly swear that they know what they are writing to be exclusively false and devoid of any fact and recognize it to be libel. Yet, much of the alt-left and alt-right reporting that is being labeled as "fake news" is simply a highly partisan or skewed interpretation of a common set of facts, where if you talk with the reporters (and I've talked with several) they firmly stand behind what they've written and believe it to be solid journalism based on objective empirical fact. The difference is that when you turn to the Post/NYTimes/etc's journalism, there is an expectation of rigorous fact checking and a placement of "getting the story right" above "getting the scoop" and being the first to print. We all know that isn't always the case and that journalists take short cuts and papers make mistakes. But, the focus here is that we need to have more transparency on how the media functions. When papers like the Post and Times no longer treat their online stories as "print" and instead treat them as living documents to be edited over time and constantly rewritten, that raises all sorts of questions of how we trust and understand the information we consume, especially given studies on online sharing that show how much of what we share is shared based purely on the headline and lede, rather than a full careful reading of the entire article. Setting aside conspiracy theories, the bottom line is that we need much greater transparency in the journalism world - we can't just say "trust the Post" or any other outlet - we have to start thinking critically about how the things we take for granted like the inverted pyramid actually serve to enable and power false and misleading news ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/10/the-inverted-pyramid-and... ). Kalev On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Robert Tynes <nativebuddha@gmail.com> wrote:
Kalev,
Your points about the process of news making are worth considering. But conflating what the Post did with a discussion of fake news is a bit off-base. The major difference is, despite conspiracy theories about major papers such as the Post, Post reporters do seek out the most empirically evident story possible. They do look for facts.
Fake news, on the other hand, seeks to deceive, and to persuade its audience towards more extreme ideological points of view.
And motives matter.
-Robert
On Jan 1, 2017, at 2:48 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.
I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time.
To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news" perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the public.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake- news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on- russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/
Kalev _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/ listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Two words: Yellow journalism. When you are competing in a world where people want sensational news AND sensational news brings lots of traffic and hence money, print "baseless claims" and worry about facts later. To win in this hyper-competitive market, you have to be the first to report on the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine and accuse the Spaniards for doing it. Moreover, as Kalev notes, one person's truth is another person's fake news. People don't consume information bits that are dichotomously true or false. They consume stories that come with a context -- who, why, how, where, when -- and the reader's cultural context and interpretations (or if you prefer, confirmation bias) determine whether the stories are deemed true or false at large. On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 12:53 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
Robert, that's actually one of the fascinating aspects of all of this - how you define "fake news". If you dive back into the history of propaganda theory, you'll find some fantastic work on why defining "fake news" is so hard - the same set of facts can be used by well-meaning and earnest reporters to support wildly different conclusions. Paul Linebarger's classic "Psychological Warfare" offers a fantastic primer on this.
If we define "fake news" as solely that news which the person writing it knew at the time to be solely and entirely false without any basis in fact and start looking at the legal definitions of things like "libel" then that's one avenue of approach. But, the discussion that's happening in journalism circles right now is really centering on a much broader definition of false and misleading news.
Even on this very mailing list people have mentioned the alt-left and alt-right as "fake news". Some of that certainly falls into the category of outright libel, where the person writing it has posted elsewhere that they do solemnly swear that they know what they are writing to be exclusively false and devoid of any fact and recognize it to be libel. Yet, much of the alt-left and alt-right reporting that is being labeled as "fake news" is simply a highly partisan or skewed interpretation of a common set of facts, where if you talk with the reporters (and I've talked with several) they firmly stand behind what they've written and believe it to be solid journalism based on objective empirical fact.
The difference is that when you turn to the Post/NYTimes/etc's journalism, there is an expectation of rigorous fact checking and a placement of "getting the story right" above "getting the scoop" and being the first to print. We all know that isn't always the case and that journalists take short cuts and papers make mistakes. But, the focus here is that we need to have more transparency on how the media functions.
When papers like the Post and Times no longer treat their online stories as "print" and instead treat them as living documents to be edited over time and constantly rewritten, that raises all sorts of questions of how we trust and understand the information we consume, especially given studies on online sharing that show how much of what we share is shared based purely on the headline and lede, rather than a full careful reading of the entire article.
Setting aside conspiracy theories, the bottom line is that we need much greater transparency in the journalism world - we can't just say "trust the Post" or any other outlet - we have to start thinking critically about how the things we take for granted like the inverted pyramid actually serve to enable and power false and misleading news ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/10/the-inverted-pyramid-and... ).
Kalev
On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Robert Tynes <nativebuddha@gmail.com> wrote:
Kalev,
Your points about the process of news making are worth considering. But conflating what the Post did with a discussion of fake news is a bit off-base. The major difference is, despite conspiracy theories about major papers such as the Post, Post reporters do seek out the most empirically evident story possible. They do look for facts.
Fake news, on the other hand, seeks to deceive, and to persuade its audience towards more extreme ideological points of view.
And motives matter.
-Robert
On Jan 1, 2017, at 2:48 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.
I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time.
To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news" perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the public.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake- news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on- russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/
Kalev _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/ listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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On Jan 1, 2017, at 17:38, Yosem Companys <companys@stanford.edu> wrote:
To win in this hyper-competitive market, you have to be the first to report on the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine and accuse the Spaniards for doing it.
<decaffeinated rant> Yes, that's a sad but decades-old consequence of the need to fill up a 24/7 television 'news' cycle. First to report something (anything!) and be half-right is better than being third to report with total accuracy. If there's not enough hard news, fill in opinion that can masquerade as news as well (some do it better & more integrated than others.) It's all about attracting viewers/readers/advertisers and $$$$ --- a practice which only muddies the information environment further and does not provide a useful public service or foster an informed citizenry. As a result there's far too much noise and gaffleblabble and not enough serious analysis. 'News' on (American) TV, in nearly every case, has become infotainment at best and tasty-bite-sized morsels of barely-useful pablum at worst Apart from scanning the headlines to find out generally what's going on in the world, most news (at least in the US) is a bleepin' farce. Politcians exploit this regularly, improved upon it in 2016, and I'm sure will have it perfected into a fine art form over the next 4 years. Throw in the "fake news" and "post-factual" considerations/accusations of the present day, and the public news-o-sphere becomes a greater cesspool and further devoid of utility as a tool to inform the citizenry than it already is. (And let's not forget the need to develop individual qualities like critical thinking, knowledge of history, etc, etc. too) There is also the problem of large media entities practicing 'access journalism' by simply functioning as stegranographers for government PR talking points -- ie they prefer to maintain cozy access and "exclusives" with the sources of power than risk being independent-minded and potentially banished to a less-intimate circle of access. (I see this all the time on stuff here in DC, including on cyber.) This is tied, I think, to what I said above about the business needs for a constant supply of hot news streams. (Which, come to think of it ... if a single tweetstream can drive a 24-hr news cycle, we are in a world of hurt.) I daresay the US media would be wise to read & heed Rosen's advice from last week, but sadly I doubt they will ... http://pressthink.org/2016/12/winter-coming-prospects-american-press-trump/ and http://pressthink.org/2016/12/prospects-american-press-trump-part-two/ ... although at least some sources are starting to politely push back and call shenannigans on blatantly false statements made by politicians even hours apart, and citing side-by-side evidence. So there's *some* shift in coverage starting, but much more needs to take place. But that will only go so far these days -- fact-checking is meaningless if everyone feels entitled to their own facts. ;/ (Disclosure: In the US if I want US-produced TV news, it's PBS Newshour, which doesn't go for sensationalism or offer on-screen octoboxes facilitating shouting matches. For global TV news, I'll go for BBC, France24, or al-Jaz.) </rant> That said ... to change the subject completely, happy new year, AORistas! - rick
To add a bit of context to this. The Post finally provided comment to me defending their article, saying that they had contacted the utility prior to publication but did not hear back, that the very first version of the article noted this, and that they updated the story immediately upon the utility's press release refuting the Post's story. However, I spoke with the utility itself this morning who informed me that the very first contact of the Post to the utility was 10 minutes *AFTER* publication of the article. You read that right - the Post made no attempt of any kind to contact the utility until AFTER publication (the original article noted there were only two possible utilities that could have been hacked and mentioned its name, so it wasn't like the Post didn't know which utilities it could be or that there were 100's of possibility utilities). Typically journalism norms teach you to reach out for comment *prior* to publication, not after publication. Moreover, the Post claimed that the very first version of the article stated that the utilities had been contacted for comment, yet the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows that this statement was not added until an hour later (after which the utilities actually had been contacted). The Archive also shows that the story was not updated until more than an hour after the utility issued its statement refuting the Post's story, rather than immediately, as the Post claimed. While I'm sure there are journalists who believe it is completely fine to publish a story and then after publication go back later and contact the parties involved and ask for comment, that is one of the things that leads to false and misleading stories propagating. For those on this list interested in web archiving, I thought it was also quite fascinating that the Post told me that they change article headlines but do not archive any of those historical headlines when changing them - they simply wipe over the previous version and have no internal records or archives of the past versions. Quite fascinating and raises the question of what kind of archiving major newspapers do for their online platforms or if IA is really one of the only archives of online news. You can see more detail in my new piece out this morning: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/02/how-the-washington-posts... Kalev On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Richard Forno <rforno@infowarrior.org> wrote:
On Jan 1, 2017, at 17:38, Yosem Companys <companys@stanford.edu> wrote:
To win in this hyper-competitive market, you have to be the first to report on the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine and accuse the Spaniards for doing it.
<decaffeinated rant>
Yes, that's a sad but decades-old consequence of the need to fill up a 24/7 television 'news' cycle. First to report something (anything!) and be half-right is better than being third to report with total accuracy. If there's not enough hard news, fill in opinion that can masquerade as news as well (some do it better & more integrated than others.) It's all about attracting viewers/readers/advertisers and $$$$ --- a practice which only muddies the information environment further and does not provide a useful public service or foster an informed citizenry.
As a result there's far too much noise and gaffleblabble and not enough serious analysis. 'News' on (American) TV, in nearly every case, has become infotainment at best and tasty-bite-sized morsels of barely-useful pablum at worst Apart from scanning the headlines to find out generally what's going on in the world, most news (at least in the US) is a bleepin' farce. Politcians exploit this regularly, improved upon it in 2016, and I'm sure will have it perfected into a fine art form over the next 4 years. Throw in the "fake news" and "post-factual" considerations/accusations of the present day, and the public news-o-sphere becomes a greater cesspool and further devoid of utility as a tool to inform the citizenry than it already is. (And let's not forget the need to develop individual qualities like critical thinking, knowledge of history, etc, etc. too)
There is also the problem of large media entities practicing 'access journalism' by simply functioning as stegranographers for government PR talking points -- ie they prefer to maintain cozy access and "exclusives" with the sources of power than risk being independent-minded and potentially banished to a less-intimate circle of access. (I see this all the time on stuff here in DC, including on cyber.) This is tied, I think, to what I said above about the business needs for a constant supply of hot news streams. (Which, come to think of it ... if a single tweetstream can drive a 24-hr news cycle, we are in a world of hurt.)
I daresay the US media would be wise to read & heed Rosen's advice from last week, but sadly I doubt they will ...
http://pressthink.org/2016/12/winter-coming-prospects- american-press-trump/ and http://pressthink.org/2016/12/ prospects-american-press-trump-part-two/
... although at least some sources are starting to politely push back and call shenannigans on blatantly false statements made by politicians even hours apart, and citing side-by-side evidence. So there's *some* shift in coverage starting, but much more needs to take place. But that will only go so far these days -- fact-checking is meaningless if everyone feels entitled to their own facts. ;/
(Disclosure: In the US if I want US-produced TV news, it's PBS Newshour, which doesn't go for sensationalism or offer on-screen octoboxes facilitating shouting matches. For global TV news, I'll go for BBC, France24, or al-Jaz.)
</rant>
That said ... to change the subject completely, happy new year, AORistas!
- rick
Hello All ! Following this very interesting discussion, I would like to ask if "fake titles" or "fake headlines" is a part of the fake news issue. Biased news headlines is not a new issue (http://umich.edu/~newsbias/he adlines.html) as many people don't bother reading the whole article, and also because the writer of the article is not always responsible of the headlines! *Regards, * *Yohanan Ouaknine * *PhD candidate * *Bar Ilan university, Israel* On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 10:53 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
Robert, that's actually one of the fascinating aspects of all of this - how you define "fake news". If you dive back into the history of propaganda theory, you'll find some fantastic work on why defining "fake news" is so hard - the same set of facts can be used by well-meaning and earnest reporters to support wildly different conclusions. Paul Linebarger's classic "Psychological Warfare" offers a fantastic primer on this.
If we define "fake news" as solely that news which the person writing it knew at the time to be solely and entirely false without any basis in fact and start looking at the legal definitions of things like "libel" then that's one avenue of approach. But, the discussion that's happening in journalism circles right now is really centering on a much broader definition of false and misleading news.
Even on this very mailing list people have mentioned the alt-left and alt-right as "fake news". Some of that certainly falls into the category of outright libel, where the person writing it has posted elsewhere that they do solemnly swear that they know what they are writing to be exclusively false and devoid of any fact and recognize it to be libel. Yet, much of the alt-left and alt-right reporting that is being labeled as "fake news" is simply a highly partisan or skewed interpretation of a common set of facts, where if you talk with the reporters (and I've talked with several) they firmly stand behind what they've written and believe it to be solid journalism based on objective empirical fact.
The difference is that when you turn to the Post/NYTimes/etc's journalism, there is an expectation of rigorous fact checking and a placement of "getting the story right" above "getting the scoop" and being the first to print. We all know that isn't always the case and that journalists take short cuts and papers make mistakes. But, the focus here is that we need to have more transparency on how the media functions.
When papers like the Post and Times no longer treat their online stories as "print" and instead treat them as living documents to be edited over time and constantly rewritten, that raises all sorts of questions of how we trust and understand the information we consume, especially given studies on online sharing that show how much of what we share is shared based purely on the headline and lede, rather than a full careful reading of the entire article.
Setting aside conspiracy theories, the bottom line is that we need much greater transparency in the journalism world - we can't just say "trust the Post" or any other outlet - we have to start thinking critically about how the things we take for granted like the inverted pyramid actually serve to enable and power false and misleading news ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/10/the- inverted-pyramid-and-how-fake-news-weaponized-modern- journalistic-practice/ ).
Kalev
On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Robert Tynes <nativebuddha@gmail.com> wrote:
Kalev,
Your points about the process of news making are worth considering. But conflating what the Post did with a discussion of fake news is a bit off-base. The major difference is, despite conspiracy theories about major papers such as the Post, Post reporters do seek out the most empirically evident story possible. They do look for facts.
Fake news, on the other hand, seeks to deceive, and to persuade its audience towards more extreme ideological points of view.
And motives matter.
-Robert
On Jan 1, 2017, at 2:48 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.
I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time.
To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news" perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the public.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake- news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on- russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/
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I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
I don't know. Not that I particularly want to defend the Washington post, but there is surely a difference between fake news and a mistake. Mistaken/inaccurate news is bound to happen. People always will leap to conclusions, group loyalties and filters will be reinforced, and publications will seek eyeballs and repetition; that is how they make money. That is normal practice in the info society. The article was corrected, but the point is still pretty similar, computers were likely to have been hacked, and this could be a problem. Fake news is news which once falsified is never corrected, but is regurgitated over and over again - because it is not about 'accuracy' but about strategy. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing this email.
participants (6)
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Jonathan Marshall -
kalev leetaru -
Richard Forno -
Robert Tynes -
Yosem Companys -
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