I've had similar experiences on Facebook. Facts don't matter. Even when linking to proof that something is fake news, the fake news doesn't get removed or addressed.
This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading:
This has me deeply, deeply concerned. The election is one thing, but what happens if/when elected officials start screwing with something like Social Security, resulting in a generation of people who had their tax dollars deferred, but saw no benefit when they retired? In a post-fact world, I'm not convinced that the people will take action against such a thing.
Saves Medicare for current and future generations, with no disruptions for those in and near retirement.
For younger workers, when they become eligible, Medicare will provide a premium-support payment and a list of guaranteed coverage options – including a traditional fee-for-service option – from which recipients can choose a plan that best suits their needs.
Is the world so radically different in this regard now? I'm not disagreeing outright, but I still think that lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time. Remember the chain e-mails that were oh so popular prior to social networks? And before that, before electronics, there must have been a lot of bullshit that was spread in the written word on paper and before that by word of mouth. The fake news business is largely the same old thing in new wrapping IMO.
With communication enabling faster communication with greater reach, there might be more noise, but is it worse in terms of percentage of communication?
The feedback loop is much tighter now. The more outrageous a story is, the more people click it, and the more money that story makes. You can immediately measure the effect (the Macedonian teenagers quickly zoomed in to the more gullible Trump supporters, because they made more money).
In the past news sources had a reputation to protect, so crazy stories were confined to tabloids and some radio shows. Now all these stories just pop up in peoples streams, without anything to distinguish them from stories from reliable sources.
Couple that with the fact that, even with trustworthy sources, you can paint an inaccurate picture just by editing which stories you present (which Facebook is incentivised to do and actually does), and I think the problem is much worse now.
> lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time
Yeah, but they were never shrugged off. Even the worst charlatans insisted they speak the truth; they didn't just go "meh, maybe it's not true after all, what is truth anyway".
Were they PAID at scale to do so in the past though?
That's the frightening part. The financial incentives in the system are all screwed up. These kids are doing it purely for the easy dollars; they don't even care about the politics at all.
It's like schoolyard taunts, except the kids are getting paid for who can come up with the most viral rumour. Something seems deeply, deeply broken about this at a systemic level that's different than say, people spreading misinformation to others they know by word-of-mouth.
The only difference is that you need to pay lots of untrained people to lie on Facebook, while you needed to pay just a couple of highly trained people to lie on a newspaper.
This article about how Macedonian high school students are behind a lot of the fake news is worth reading:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...