[beginningguava]

This is just legacy media trying to regain power. Fake news has been around forever, look up Yellow Journalism.

The difference now is that the 5 multi-national corporations that controlled nearly everything we saw and heard are losing their monopoly on what information reaches the population.

Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to democracy, I wonder what changed?

[azemetre]

Telling likely voters to vote for your candidacy is drastically different than telling people Climate Change is a Chinese hoax or that thousands of men, woman, and children seeking asylum are terrorists.

[mc32]

But it’s also false to claim most are women and children and that most are fleeing violence (most are men seeking economic sdvantage) and that entering illegally deserves as much rights as people who’ve applied legally and have waited decades. It’s also false to insinuate the Obama admin didn’t use teargas against wannabe border crossers. And it’s also false to insinuate it’s illegal. France, just the other day had suppressed a demo against taxes in Paris using teargas but no one’s outraged at that. Teargas is used as crowd control in many euro countries.

[simonh]

I'm generally pro-immigration, but you're right and make valid points. I'm a UK citizen but we face similar problems in nature if not magnitude. My position is that controlled, proportionate immigration is good for the country (UK, but generally too) both culturally and economically and should follow legal due process.

My main criticizm of the Trump administration's handling of the situation, as an outside observer, is that they are persistently and maliciously bypassing due process (muslim ban imposed arbitrarily even on legal residents while people were in the air, separating children from their parents, etc). Frustration and revulsion at these actions naturally throws a sharp spotlight on whatever else the administration does with regard to immigration, and rightly so. As I said, you're probably right on those incidents, but it's also fair to say that the degree to which a tactic is used also matters, and they deserve every single bit of enhanced scrutiny they face on this issue.

[loveyourmother]

The fact that people are downvoting you for just point out hypocrisy is sad.

[sparkie]

Can you cite somewhere where somebody has said that thousands of men, women and children are terrorists?

I've heard claims that there are terrorists among the thousands of men, women and children seeking asylum (or work).

Fake news is not just made up stories. It is also misrepresenting the words of other people to support your political motives.

[phdinfunk]

However, the united states government has got at least a 70 year history of being just as bad as the effects of fake news.

https://www.democracynow.org/2004/3/17/haitis_history_noam_c...

Or see the 70s and 80s and South America, or our reasoning for invading Iraq in the 2000s, or the 1960s and Vietnam. Or the 1953 coup d'etat against Iran because BP was going to lose their investments. And, and, and....

The answer isn't trying to create another hegemon of "real" news, like it was in the good old days of monoculture. The answer really is in what the person above said, people have to be more discerning. Also, the problem really isn't "new" because it really wasn't 'better' in the past -- just invisible to most of the people who are wringing their hands about this in 2018.

[nabla9]

Fake news and yellow journalism are not the same thing. Yellow journalism is just sensationalism, entertainment and bad journalism.

Fake news is deliberate disinformation for propaganda purposes.

[coldtea]

Nope, yellow journalism peddled extensively in "deliberate disinformation for propaganda purposes" as well.

It's not just something like sensational stories or gossip columns that's yellow journalism. It was used for political purposes to scare the population, attract voters, and so on...

[DFHippie]

Using electronic media to influence opinion isn't all "big data". Obama didn't use massive deception, for one thing. Putin's program involved lots of people pretending to be people they weren't to say things that weren't true. These two campaigns aren't different sides of the same coin, as you imply.

[naiveai]

It's almost as if every piece of technology is a double edged sword. Anything that can be used to disseminate information can also be used to disseminate disinformation. It's the nature of things like this.

[apozem]

> Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to democracy, I wonder what changed?

Obviously you are implying that Obama voters dislike "big data" and social media because Trump won. This is lazy strawmanning.

Perhaps we are unhappy with the role the internet played in the 2016 election for other reasons? Perhaps it is bad when voters are fed objectively false stories? Perhaps a democracy is only possible with an informed populace that uses common facts and a shared reality?

[throwaway42501]

It isn't a strawman for so long as individuals with a certain brand of politics presuppose their own immunity to disinformation and a tacit monopoly on what is factual and what constitutes being 'informed'.

That the propaganda self-described 'progressives' consume tends to come from sources with a greater degree of social prestige and more subtle ways of misleading through omission and clever rhetoric doesn't make it anything but propaganda.