Merkel says 'fake news' driving populism

[Damajin]

Part of me wants to say they can't be this naive, but they are. Yet the majority of me says they're not saying this for themselves they're saying this for all the other naive people out there:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/merkel-wa...110054526.html

Berlin (AFP) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Wednesday against the power of fake news on social media to spur the rise of populists, after launching her campaign for a fourth term.

Speaking in parliament for the first time since her announcement Sunday that she would seek re-election next year, Merkel cautioned that public opinion was being "manipulated" on the internet.

"Something has changed -- as globalisation has marched on, (political) debate is taking place in a completely new media environment. Opinions aren't formed the way they were 25 years ago," she said.

"Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls -- things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them."

Merkel, 62, said the challenge for democrats was to "reach and inspire people -- we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it."

She said she supported initiatives by her right-left coalition government to crack down on "hate speech" on social media in the face of what she said were "concerns about the stability of our familiar order".

"Populism and political extremes are growing in Western democracies," she warned.

Last week, Google and Facebook moved to cut off ad revenue to bogus news sites after a US election campaign in which the global misinformation industry may have influenced the outcome of the vote.

But media watchers say more is needed to stamp out a powerful phenomenon seen by some experts as a threat to democracy itself.

Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats are the odds-on favourites to win the German national election, expected in September or October 2017.

But she is facing a strong challenge from a resurgent rightwing populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has her liberal refugee and migration policy in its crosshairs.

It is currently polling at around 12-13 percent which could complicate the complex maths of coalition building after the poll.

All of Germany's mainstream parties have for now ruled out forming an alliance with the AfD.

So there you go kids, unless you support globalization and support Establishment politics and viewpoints espoused by Establishment news sources you're swilling fake news and regurgitating fake viewpoints and those fake news sources reporting on things which the Establishment disagrees with will more than likely need to be regulated in order to preserve the public order and protect all these squishy, fearful little toadies from the realities of their bureaucratic decisions and votes.

[Graeham]

She's been actively seeking to subdue legitimate news regarding the negative aspects of her poorly thought out refugee policy so it's of little surprise that she's trying to make use of heavy handed damage control. Fake news is indeed a problem - but when the mainstream media itself is guilty of it I can't help but wonder why she isn't drawing more attention to that simple fact.

[May90]

You really like putting words in people's mouths, don't you, Damajin? Fake news aren't exactly news (sorry for the pun), and it is good that finally this problem is becoming widely recognized. Has nothing to do with the contest of different political philosophies, just a problem of the limited reach of fact-checking activities.

[HandyTheRet]

Just heard an NPR interview where they found and talked to a man who ran multiple alt-right media sights, who openly admitted to publishing fake news for profit, where individuals could feed red meat media to the alt-right echo chamber. The narrative created around right wing conspiracies means these patently false statements are accepted into the zeitgeist of Left hate, and the extremists blast it out because they love the hate. Moderate Republicans see these crazy statements representatives have to make to denounce conspiracy theories created specifically for the purpose of forcing their target to address baseless accusations, because our sound bite culture eats it up. Fake science, fake scenarios, and not a grain of truth. What NPR did was a service to the people. The people need to understand the function of the fake news industry and the clientele they serve.

Meanwhile, I searched for the story on Google and it isn't published. Come on Mainstream Media, now's the time to get your shit together and pick up this interview!!!!

[Super Kami Dende]

Merkel is a fucking moron. Though this isn't exactly "new".

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You really like putting words in people's mouths, don't you, Damajin? Fake news aren't exactly news (sorry for the pun), and it is good that finally this problem is becoming widely recognized. Has nothing to do with the contest of different political philosophies, just a problem of the limited reach of fact-checking activities.

Oh it has, people have wisen up to the fake news bullshit that most of the mainstream sites post.

[Ravenblade]

She literally said that forming opinions and viewpoints works differently than 25 years ago, that "nowadays fake pages , bots, trolls can distort viewpoints [...] even though they are not the only cause for that." "[T]hat nowadays self-regenerating enhancements of opinions can occur through certain algorithms."

Frankly that's hard to dismiss, social media effectively make similar use of the same mechanisms which offer you the same filtered ads containing only products and links which would most likely interest you. Some people know how to make clever use of this by creating false news by sometimes creating entirely new informations or altering existing informations to fit their agenda and reselling them. Unless you are an avid reader of a broad set of sites with different viewpoints from all spectra then you are in fact living in a filtered bubble which supports your views and your interests only. Ironically that is regardless your policitical affiliation. Maybe it's just me and I am too oldschool but I don't have problems listening to different viewpoints even though I am alarmed about the amount of junk people nowadays believe in. From chemtrails, flat earth, evil GMOs, jews mindcontrolling the world, reptiles living within hollow yet flat Earth to refugees being stuck in a rigor raptus, Merkel being a nazi zombie queen and Germany having each square millimetre packed with evil non-white people from abroad. All thanks to "I read it on Facebook" and "I saw it on Youtube".

[Smauldy]

There is plenty of fake and opinion news out there when it comes to politics. People have to be smart enough to see the difference between fact and opinion when it comes to any news they read.

Example:

News site 1: Obama stimulus plan put in place in attempt to bolster economy.

News site 2: Obama on verge of destroying economy with radical stimulus giveaway.

One is a fact, and one is an opinion.....but it's amazing how many people will take the opinion as a pure fact and go out and vote based on that opinion provided by the "news" they were watching. It really is a huge problem.

[Deleted]

There are fake news on both sides of that argument. erhaps she should start by going after the established news media to rebuild the peoples trust and respect for the work they does, but no matter where you go the media reports what they want to report and from whatever angle serves them best or fits the station's/journalists' veiwpoints.

[Surfd]

Something someone on another forum I am on posted in regards to this, seems rather timely and relevant:

So... I tend to think we need to back up and think about this more on a societal level. ccing Tim O'Reilly on this too, since I know he's also very concerned with this broad issue. [Tim O'Reilly's article: https://medium.com/@timoreilly/the-h...ec#.tw6nq1kc6]

Type I. Fake or at least slanted news exists because there is a propaganda motive. We could call this the Breitbart/DailyKos/etc model. The pattern: partisans who generate slanted stories in order to draw partisan eyeballs. Often, there's not much to factcheck; also often, it's actually lying through the sin of omission, rather than by affirmatively stating falsehoods. Limiting this stuff runs afoul of free speech considerations, and any rebroadcaster (such as FB) effectively ends up taking sides in engaging in any transmission limitations. Worth noting that some forms of this may well be externally provided propaganda, as in the Russian dezinformatsiya model.

Type II. Fake news exists in part because there's a profit motive. The pattern: stories that are invented, and designed to appeal to a target demo. The FB/Google approach is to choke off the revenue model, and this may well be fine. But... this sort of fake news is often part-sourced from type I.

Type III. Fake news today also exists because of what we might call grassroots memetic warfare. A brief dip into something like /r/the_donald will show that there's plenty of false stories and plenty of slanted media being generated by the "centipedes." There a lefty equivalents. These source off of the prior two. They are also free speech, but they are coordinated into what are effectively media campaigns, forcibly publicized using social media tricks and gaming of search algorithms. I would additionally note that there has been plenty of evidence that the groups that engage in this are often directed without their knowledge, by troll ops, social media seeding, and the like.

Type IV. Fake news exists in the form of manually retransmitted "facts" passed around in the form of opinions and retellings by individuals who are partisans. The issue here is that they draw from all of the above sources, and are the most credible precisely because they are passed around via the friend network, thereby dramatically increasing their credibility. Of this are echo chambers built. The real issue is that factual, authoritative, and neutral providers become untrustworthy for Type IV individuals, thereby removing any way to counter the false information.

If I had to rank the societal danger of these, in order, I would rank them in precisely this order.

The proposed method of attack on the problem focuses on Type II. But the real concern at a societal level is that Type IV flourishes when there are no independent respected arbiters. For example, Type III people are persuaded that Snopes, PolitiFact, and similar are actually biased partisan organs -- you can go look at the places where they hang out, and see them run campaigns against them.

Type I is vulnerable to competing ideas, as are all others. But they're protected speech. They are also vulnerable to authoritative respected voices who provide the full picture.

Type II is vulnerable to legal resource, though it's pretty weak; to financial attacks, which is what FB and Google are talking about.

Type III, being a sort of grassroots free speech in organized form, is basically a brainwashing effort by the brainwashed. Facts no longer penetrate this group; those who do it for cynical partisan motives don't care about facts since they privilege ends over means. Those who do it because they are swept up don't believe any of the previously authoritative factcheckers. This type is only vulnerable to a) counterpropaganda intended to cause schisms or peel off some members b) censorship on a net-wide scale c) incredibly slow consensus and bridge building (which has a high likelihood of failure) d) re-establishment of independent truth metrics which they actually trust.

Type IV also needs those independent truth metrics.

If I had to boil that down...

Type I: You can't close down Breitbart or DailyKos. You could try to legislatively bring back something akin to the Fairness Doctrine, or somehow create a definition of news that is enforced by statute that all outlets of a given size must conform to, but this will be rightly classed as governmental censorship unless there are serious safeguards on it to prevent its capture by government itself. Re-establishing the virtue of the non-partisan authority is absolutely critical.

Type II: Macedonian kids, sure, you can label them liars. The people lost to factual reality won't care about your labeling. But the sites can be brought down if they don't get revenue.

Type III: You MUST tackle the troll army and memetic warfare. You can't shut down the sites. There's no easy answer. But THIS, make no mistake, is what really wins, and is the hard one. How do we, as a culture, avoid an Alex Jones, and at the minimum keep them culturally on the fringe? Filter bubbles must die, and that may well involve major changes to how we think of social media today.

Type IV: falls into place when the general level of disinformation falls. Partisanship will still be there, but fundamentally the only way to solve Type IV is to ensure that there's a common informational foundation.

As a side note... I also think that it may be that social media systems, being communication systems, simply shouldn't be also permitted to have a curation function like top trending. Think of it as a Glass-Steagall for Internet media. Should communications channels be also allowed to provide information atmospheres? It means they inevitably bias the communication they carry. I'm increasingly of the opinion that each of our social media systems *does too much* and is also *too big* even within one given domain.

And before someone goes off defending their favorite partizan echo-chamber, please consider that fake news is a growing problem for every color of the political spectrum.

We used to sort of rely on the MSM to fact check and vet news before posting it, now, considering that 100% made up bullshit stories get pulled and posted to major news outlets and somehow make it past all forms of vetting, it makes one seriously question the integrity of any news, regardless of source.

This shit is a cancer, and it needs to die ASAP.

[Deleted]

She's a few hundred years late to the party.

[Trumpcat]

And Merkel's media friends showing a sad picture of a mother with kids as the face of the Islamic migration is absolutely not giving false ideas, and is definitely not fake news to swing public opinion in a certain direction. Because filling the European cities with a vastly incompatible culture and people who have no intention to let go of that culture is the greatest democratic achievement post WW2.

Her charrade is sad, but what's disgusting is the amount of people, and I know such people personally, who fervently believe they show compassion and cherish the "cultural enrichment" of Europe. Fools. It will not work.

[shadowdasher]

Who decides what is "fake news"?

[Surfd]

Who decides what is "fake news"?

Pretty sure that to answer that question, one would first have to have a proper definition of what is "news". And considering the shit we get now-a-days, I am fairly certain that nobody really knows what properly constitutes "news" anymore.

[May90]

I don't know what is worse, this fake news shit or the fact that the governments of Sweden and Germany try to hide news that they find "problematic" towards refugees and immigrants. Or deny to give us actual facts so we can fact check :P

But I bet you would love living in a authoritarian nation, as long as it is the "proper" side that's in charge.

You've heard that they do that on one of those fake news, didn't you?

[Deleted]

And Merkel's media friends showing a sad picture of a mother with kids as the face of the Islamic migration is absolutely not giving false ideas, and is definitely not fake news to swing public opinion in a certain direction. Because filling the European cities with a vastly incompatible culture and people who have no intention to let go of that culture is the greatest democratic achievement post WW2.

That´s not the fake news this is about. It´s about news articles like "Obama is a kenyan/muslim/terrorist/literal demon" (fun fact, every single one of these accusations appeared as news on certain online sites). It´s not about dressing something up nicely it´s about things that are objectively wrong or not real hence fake news

Her charrade is sad, but what's disgusting is the amount of people, and I know such people personally, who fervently believe they show compassion and cherish the "cultural enrichment" of Europe. Fools. It will not work.

We have (a lot) more muslims at my workplace than any other religion and it works perfectly fine.

[Graeham]

Pretty sure that to answer that question, one would first have to have a proper definition of what is "news". And considering the shit we get now-a-days, I am fairly certain that nobody really knows what properly constitutes "news" anymore.

Interesting point!

In the past a lot of the news people received was based almost entirely around local happenings with the occasional grand affair - such as the appointment of a new monarch - that could be fairly easily verified.

Nowadays, however, the 'news' is flooded with stuff that nobody really needs to know or has such a laughably biased agenda ranging from harmless to more sinister. The Kardashians are a great example, I find. Why, exactly, do they take up so much space in the mainstream media? Well, keeping them relevant ensures they make a profit - which in itself is a case of the system being exploited for personal gain for a select few.

[Hiricine]

Who decides what is "fake news"?

I much prefer the ad with just the loafer. The guy jumping looks rediculous.

[Graeham]

We have (a lot) more muslims at my workplace than any other religion and it works perfectly fine.

The key point there is that they're working and presumably integrating, no? That isn't a case for a lot of the people being criticised.

[Nadiru]

Ideological extremism usually breeds value of the middle as people avoiding partisan extremism physically meet up in places and trade stories. That's not how it works anymore. That's no longer possible because of social networks. You see, when you disagree with someone, you don't have to physically move yourself. You just block a person. The end. Do this hundreds of times...block a post here or there...and you create an echo chamber of things you like.

The middle has fragmented into individuals. Unreachable individuals. Totally inoculated from the partisans. Which means there is no way to rally that middle to attack enemy partisans. This is how the right lost in the 1950s. They let the socialists rally the common emotional ground (with the help of highly consolidated mass media) with the unaligned to pound the right into submission. The right still hasn't recovered from that. A small group of partisans amplified their influence by winning over the unaligned. Those small groups became the owners and savants of media outlets today.

The left didn't physically exterminate the right. They still exist. So they have to add more and more power and urgency to their mass media narrative. This is done to stave off diminishing returns of the true believer. But the paradox is that the number of true enemies has dwindled to nothingness. The mass media engine is so hysterical about saving itself that it is exerting tremendous amounts of energy to attack like 4 racist people in Georgia. This is just diminishing returns. The DNC has worked overtime to include more minorities to scale to. Gays, muslims, etc. Just to have new contexts to repeat their success. But it hasn't been working so well.

The guy you really ought to look at is Cass Sunstein, and his works.

[May90]

Interesting point!

In the past a lot of the news people received was based almost entirely around local happenings with the occasional grand affair - such as the appointment of a new monarch - that could be fairly easily verified.

Nowadays, however, the 'news' is flooded with stuff that nobody really needs to know or has such a laughably biased agenda ranging from harmless to more sinister. The Kardashians are a great example, I find. Why, exactly, do they take up so much space in the mainstream media? Well, keeping them relevant ensures they make a profit - which in itself is a case of the system being exploited for personal gain for a select few.

Things like Kardashians just follow the principle, "Shout 1000 times, and someone will take a look what the fuss is about". They have little worth in themselves, but the media have been talking about them for ages, and now many people follow them, "Hmm, everybody talks about them - there must be something in it!" Strangely, such a brute force advertisement actually turns out to work!