Most of the misinformation and propaganda out there is presented as "opinion" on all networks. The very little actual news on Fox, for example, is always accurate (and actually pretty good), so not being able to call them out on that takes away from the entire effort.
Fox Polling is very solid. Most everything else...not so much.
Fivethirtyeight lists Fox News/Anderson Robbins Research/Shaw & Co. Research polling with an A rating. Their polls are generally unbiased and accurate. It even has slight Dem favor-ability.
They then list Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Corp. with a B rating and slight R favor-ability.
Most reporting is based on opinions, or is at least misleading in the sense that it tends to be reported from well defined perspective. The editorial decisions about what to report, what to not report, what to report as important or credible, and what to report as irrelevant or non-credible, can all be used to mislead the audience and misrepresent events. I can’t think of one mainstream news outlet that doesn’t do this, and I think all of them do it quite excessively.
The problem with trying to moderate this is that you can only do so from what your idea of which is the orthodox truth, and “propaganda” simply becomes any political speech that you disagree with.
We’ve seen plenty of attempts to regulate the truth throughout history. It was one of the most corrupt elements of the soviet system, and it quite literally Orwellian. The only person who can discern the truth is the individual, and any attempt to take that responsibility away from them can only ever end disastrously. This isn’t something we should be happy with Facebook doing.
That’s mostly a reductio ad absurdism, but even Plato didn’t believe that people had the potential to be ethical objectivists, and he certainly wasn’t a postmodernist.
Acting as an authority on which instances of political speech are true and which are false may be easier in some cases than others, but there’s no clear place to draw that line, and there’s no way to avoid imposing your own opinions on others.
You don’t need perfection. As long as you look for obvious objectively false statements you will reject quite a bit of propaganda / disinformation etc.
You pretty much do in this case, since propaganda writers will adapt around your filter. Furthermore you have the problem of determining objective fact to filter on, which is a massive problem itself, as can be seen from the need for a filter in the first place.
Good news is based on fact and biased by a narrative. People need stories to understand. Facts are hard to process and remember for most. But, fact checking whether opinion or satire* or news can be useful for the average person that doesn't have the time to fact check.
*satire passing as news with fine print is garbage meant to mislead.
The editorial selection of what to run, how long to cover it, and what the headline reads influences far more than anything else.
Which is why drudgereport is often the top of the list of sites D's want to regulate, even though Drudge rarely prints any original content.
And he links to way more left-leaning stories than you would expect, but grabs a buried right-leaning fact to re-title the link. Suddenly you're reading the story with the opposite expectation of what the reporter/editor often intended.
Equally effective is grabbing an over the top, inflammatory left-leaning fact (or quote or claim) to prime the reader with anger.
Both are extremely persuasive, without needing to change so much as a word of the linked text.
Edit: And of course the feed on fbook accomplishes much of the same for the opposing view, with slightly tweaked tactics, but the same overall strategy.
I think the UK has an extraordinarily bad track record of allowing freedom of expression. Regarding ofcom though, they actually perform very little regulation of accuracy and impartiality, most of their work is as an ordinary utilities regulator, much like the FCC. To describe their regulatory action of section 5 of their broadcasting code (the part related to accuracy and fairness) as “working fairly well” is generous. I’d say a better description would be “not really functional”.
It's completely failed to cope with the present crisis. And it doesn't stop the BBC having Andrew Neil, formerly of the Murdoch Times, Daily Mail and Tory house magazine Spectator as a leading political interviewer.
Worse, I don't think "fairness" is the correct standard - that leads to bringing in AGW deniers and anti-vaxers as "balance". The standard has to be Reithian: has this discussion contributed to the viewer's understanding of the situation? Repeating two opposing sets of talking points doesn't achieve that.
The rules you mention are completely non-functional.
What would it mean to prevent bias in TV broadcast? Bias can show up in all sorts of subtle ways. You can't really demand people don't have opinions. You also can't ask people to be totally free of bias given limited broadcast minutes, and so many news stories to cover.
Given this starting point, you might begin by expecting people who make TV news to not publicly tell everyone about their own extreme political opinions. You might expect TV journalists not to belittle and insult major political parties.
You might expect these things, but you'd be disappointed because the Ofcom fails to enforce even this most basic of standards.
What was also reported was that during one Glastonbury’s many, many chants, Jon Snow joined in to bellow “Fuck the Tories” before noting that he was “supposed to be neutral”.
You might expect supposedly neutral journalists not to openly compare political decisions to drug epidemics:
Presenter: "At times there can be a perception that most of the headlines surrounding Stoke-on-Trent have a negative connotation, whether it be Brexit or the drug monkey dust"
You might expect broadcasters not to hire political candidates to referee complaints about political bias:
Ever wondered why your complaint of left-wing bias against the BBC wasn’t upheld? It could be because you were speaking to one Chris Summers on the phone. Via his Facebook we learn that Mr Summer’s isn’t too keen on his “dull, boring, grey, miserable, crap job – dealing with election complaints!” Would this be the same Chris Summers who is the Labour coucil candidate in Ealing?
You might expect that government enforcement would reduce allegations of bias to the status of supposition - they may not appear biased in public, but who knows how they are in private? But the UK doesn't even begin to approach this standard of enforced neutrality. All you have to do to prove it is read the Twitter feeds of the journalists themselves.
No, "most reporting" is certainly not "based on opinions." The only acceptable "opinions" expressed in straight reporting are the opinions of the people in the story i.e the subjects. To do otherwise is known as "editorializing" and has no place in a straight news story.
Newspapers have their own section for expressing the opinions of a writer and they are clearly labeled Editorial or OpEd.
It's bizarre to me that you want to be critical yet seem to lack a fundamental understanding of the thing you are being critical of.
Not OP, but I think I think I see what he means. I get headlines from NYT and WSJ on my phone and sometimes you see the same news story with a different headline.
For instance recently I saw these headlines (paraphrasing):
(WSJ) Unemployment Drops to Lowest Level in 60 Years
(NYT) Unemployment Drops, Continuing the Trend of the Last 8 Years
Are these headlines necessarily editorialized? No, but I do notice this trend somewhat regularly in major publications
> On August 3, 46 people were shot in El Paso, Texas.
> That same weekend, 51 people were shot in Chicago, Illinois.
One is not like the other.
The El Paso shooting was the result of one person, armed with semi-assault weapon, going into a Walmart and killing more than 20 people within a couple minutes.
The Chicago shootings resulted in seven deaths but were spread out among multiple cases and days.
Both are tragic obviously.
But the El Paso got wall-to-wall coverage because, in essence, it was a domestic terrorist attack.
> The Chicago shootings resulted in seven deaths but were spread out among multiple cases and days.
Naturally, smaller events have less coverage. But even totaling up the coverages for each Chicago event in less coverage than El Paso.
Most new outlets bias their reporting disproportionately. IDK what the relationship is. Cubic, probably. An event that is 2 as big gets 8 times the coverage. Three times as big gets 27 times the coverage.
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In any case, media frequently shows an unrepresentative perspective on reality. It is very easy -- indeed expected -- to change report reality based on the opinion of what should and should not be reported.
One example is that news organizations will often choose not to report on crimes when they're committed by racial group A even when they report on the same crimes when committed by racial group B.
Highlighting or minimizing demographic information of victims and assailants in crimes is a huge way news organizations insert their biases while still reporting factually accurate information.
Presumably the sentence that followed your quoted one:
> The editorial decisions about what to report, what to not report, what to report as important or credible, and what to report as irrelevant or non-credible, can all be used to mislead the audience and misrepresent events.
An amusing example of that phenomenon is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0], where a particularly shocking attack followed by a slow news season led to disproportionate reporting on shark attacks. There wasn't actually any more shark attacks than any other year, but try surveying people around then and they might think otherwise, even if all the reporting was only non-opinion, true statements.
It's related to the Chinese Robber fallacy. Here's a great blog post[1] which demonstrates the fallacy using news stories about cardiologists.
These are fun examples, but I'm sure you can think of it with a partisan bent about your favorite topic and news source.
There is a pretty big difference between a lie by omission and just spreading false information.
By your definition any news would always be false because they didn't include the entire history of the world in their story.
You aren't being realistic. There are people and organizations that are just spreading completely false information with the intent of deceiving people.
Lets say a publication only reports violent crime and rape committed by black people with vivid descriptions of the acts. All reports are 100% factual. Would you say that it is legitimate news?
By my definition it is generally not possible for an entity to be an effective authority on what is or is not false or misleading. You could think of contrived examples which you could get nearly everybody to agree to as false, like claiming the sun revolved around the earth. But that’s not what’s being discussed. What’s being discussed is establishing Facebook (or other entities) as the ministry of truth.
> There is a pretty big difference between a lie by omission and just spreading false information.
I don’t see how there is, and I don’t see how you’d be able to prove one over the other in many cases. Pick any mainstream media outlet, and you’ll find a significant group of people who claim they’re “just spreading false information”. Pick any truth that you personally hold to be unassailable, and chances are you’ll find a significant group of people who will describe it as “just false information”.
Trying to regulate the truth is an incredibly dangerous rabbit hole, which if done effectively, can only possibly end up with a central authority (or group of authorities) imposing their own views on others.
The only reason anybody could think this was a good idea, is if you think that people should not have the right to think for themselves, form their own views, and come to their own conclusions about the truth.
This project assesses the factual accuracy and political bias of a large number of articles (and by extension, the publishers of those articles).
It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual, and that's a big part of what good journalism is.
A verifiable fact is a verifiable fact and no matter how many people believe otherwise, it's still a fact.
Certainly this is not the whole issue and publications may introduce bias through selection, presentation and opinion, which is why it's important to scrutinize the publications.
I don't think Facebook is the right place for any of this to happen, but it's where the eyeballs are, so it's impossible for it to _not_ happen on Facebook in some form. I think Facebook will fail because there is no way to do this algorithmically. At Facebook scale you can only do things algorithmically.
We should dismantle Facebook and get our news from a federated set of relays which syndicate content from a diverse set of publishers whose objectivity is audited by independent third parties who publish clear and transparent guidelines and findings.
A web browser in which you've bookmarked the Associated Press, NPR, the WSJ, and the BBC is a decent start for the average person, as long as you don't also bookmark Wonkette or InfoWars.
So you don’t believe that you can use facts to mislead people, nor that you can mislead people without presenting anything as fact?
If you report a story, using only the facts that support your narrative, and omitting only the facts that don’t support it, have you lied? Have you reported propaganda?
What if you report a story, without reporting anything as a fact? What if you report “anonymous sources claim ___”, or “___ is being criticised for ___”, or “a verified document describes ___”. None of those reports involve any facts at all, nor any verifiable fictions.
What if you simply disagree on what the facts are?
What if you intentionally misinterpret something, in an effort to debunk it. If I make a mostly true statement, but use an obvious hyperbole, or get a minor detail wrong, am I “just using the English language as intended”, or “just spreading false information”.
> What do you think of the Media Bias Chart?
I think if you tasked 50 different research teams with producing their own chart with the methods they deemed best, that you’d get 50 different charts.
> It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual
We have always had the ability to enforce authority on others. That doesn’t mean we have had any success in creating authorities to be the arbiter of truth. In fact, we have a long history as a species of failing miserably at doing that.
Easily verifiable outright lies in the media do happen, but the cases where this is so black and white are incredibly uncommon, and that’s not what these systems are trying to deal with. I mean, recently “conspiracy theories” have become a target for moderation. Do you know what a conspiracy theory actually is? It’s any theory that two or more people conspired to do something. How much recent news reporting would fit that definition?
Any system that attempts to strip people of their right to critical though (which is what this is) is doomed to fail in the exact same way that every such system implemented throughout history has.
Interesting times, and a slippery slope. These fairly square rules will surely cause other uproars as it invites back the alt-right with their tongue-in-cheek fascism. And the Facebook algorithms seem embarrassingly incapable of nuance, like this Tommy Robinson debacle: the mere mention of the name "Tommy Robinson" in a post (in Sweden) renders your profile inactive for several days or indefinitely. In other countries the post is simply deleted. In other words, any other person called Tommy Robinson would not be able to have a FB presence.
I'm no fan of Tommy Robinson but this is worrying as FB has become more of a utility for online discussion and publishing. The problem is partly technical, but ultimately it is caused by the fact that Facebook doesn't have a value system of it's own. They need to follow the bidding of the powers that squeeze them the most.
Where are you getting this information that mentioning Yaxley-Lennon's alter-ego gets the post deleted? Appears to be nonsense to me, I have seen plenty of posts with that name in them.
Can't blame you for finding this strange, it has not been reported widely since Tommy acquired his well deserved pariah status. But you will find it on the second page or so using a internet search provider of your choice, predictably on unsavory pages that also might call for the death of large portions of the worlds population solely on basis of their beliefs. You efforts might lead to tweets like these:
https://twitter.com/blondesoulbird/status/115134913120768409...
But I can also assure you this happened to the moderator of a group I'm in (he did it as a test to check the veracity of the claim). He typed "test Tommy Robinson" in a post to his friends. His account was disabled for 3 days.
Certainly not the case in the UK, I literally posted "Just testing: Tommy Robinson" yesterday after seeing your reply; post was left intact, friends can view and comment, and I'm not locked out of Facebook.
We wouldn't allow the American government to behave this way, but somehow it's okay if a big corporation takes control of a large portion of communication and enacts these draconian rules. But it's a private totalitarian state. /s
At least when the government does it, you have a presumed outlet of voting for one that doesn't. When a corporation does something you have no outlet if it has an effective monopoly or they all do it or you just have negative net worth and cannot possibly vote with your dollars.
Otoh, governments can detain, arrest, or kill you and your family. Regardless of whether you can vote.
Both corporations and governments have a history of bad behavior. But I warrant the government ledger has much worse capacity to do me harm, as well as a few orders of magnitude more deaths caused by their decisions.
An exemption for satire makes sense. There's even an existing legal framework for it, as it's an exception to defamation. Opinion, however, seems much more difficult. How do you handle an opinion that relies substantially on a provably false assertion?
The example in the article seems like it could be handled:
> That op-ed argued that global-warming climate models have been inaccurate and that the risks of climate change is overblown.
Included in that sentence are an assertion of fact (yes, climate models have been inaccurate. This is not controversial, and it's also not really as useful to the argument as the author thinks it is) and an opinion that, while I disagree with it, is still an opinion. For purposes of discussion, assume the article contains no other information. There shouldn't be any kind of "false" designation assigned to it, because nothing in it is provably false.
However, imagine the article said something like "Atmospheric CO2 has declined since 1978, global-warming climate models have been inaccurate, and the risks of climate change is overblown." The first statement in that sentence is provably false, yet the article would still constitute an opinion piece. Is there a framework for handling that?
The way things have been trending, I'd anticipate something like a label for satire and a label for "opinion, was not not fact checked" (which would apply to any piece that could be considered an op-ed), and fact checks applying to anything purporting to be news.
To be honest, setting a rule that anything that purports to be "BREAKING" will be fact checked at least to the extent of "the contents of this article cannot be proven entirely factually correct" would be a pretty big step forward and potentially reduce the virality of outright disinformation.
Why should there be a framework for handling this? Facebook, perhaps better than any other publisher or newspaper or public utility, puts the actual name of the guy writing this dribble front and center. Before you can even read the title of the article, you are exposed to the source. Facebook only warrants that the source that published this article indeed did so. It should be up to the reader, not facebook, whether or not to trust them. Facebook engages in no moral hazard by making it clear who wrote what.
Fact checkers would have me believe that we are constantly victims of Russian disinformation campaigns. I think the worth of fact checkers has already been concluded.
The truth is that you should be aware of the general bias a publication has. Also how they can be linked together via parent companies. If you have multiple sources with different bias, you should be fine.
The WSJ for example belongs to the Murdoch conglomerate. There are a lot more of those. Of course it is unknown how much influence there is on their editorial board. But still important to keep that in mind.
I agree. The concept of a fact checker seems extremely flawed to me. Beyond just reporting the news the media is suppose to also fact check it. And to be fair they claim to do just that, but it turns out they have biases... So the solution to that problem is add another layer? What do we do when it turns out they also have biases? Add another layer? A fact fact checker?
I rather have no fact checkers at all personally. I'd prefer to live in a world where everyone distrusts the media than a world in which everyone trusts a few bias reports claim to be the arbiters of reality.
This is the thing - while there does appear to be a foreign covert disinformation campaign, it's dwarfed by the domestic "legitimate" disinformation put out by Murdoch and other press outlets. Or people like Alex Jones.
True. I am not disputing there aren't any efforts to manipulate voters. I would be surprised if there were not. But the relevancy that the media tried to transport just wasn't adequate.
I genuinely believe that many just have been played, but that could have been mitigated by providing at least a somewhat believable perspective.
In India lots of fascist facebook groups post under the cover of satire to escape scrutiny. They'll be like "kill all muslims :D" - the smiley at the end supposedly means its 'satire'. This is gonna be a godsend for them!
Welp, that's a shame. That will make their fact-checking stuff completely useless, as the majority of "news" shared that tends to get people riled up seem to be opinion pieces.
And here we go.. Funfortunately, most of the misinformation I hear is presented as entertainment. I am fine with it, if like SNL it is clearly labelled as satire, and not done as if it was news (as one network it seems to me often does). Sadly, there are many who watch that network, and shows like its shows, who believe what they are hearing to be the gospel truth. This is to the point of a man arming himself with an assault rifle (another problem, but I won't digress more than that) and shooting up an innocent pizza parlor that the entertainment show in question accused of some of the most heinous crimes in our judicial system.
We put labels at the bottom of cigarettes to warn people. Why can't we put a header at the bottom of such programs: "Satire, Not News, Not Factual".
Btw, I would love to see that banner on the bottom of The Daily Show as much as I would on The Rush Limbaugh Show, as both sides of the Red/Blue divide are guilty of this to some extent.
There has been an explosion in "the onion"-like fake news sources that say they're satire somewhere on the site, yet by reading the article without that context one would have no way of knowing unless they fact-check. The articles have very little, if any, of the kind of humor that defines satire. They usually publish fictional pro-GOP headlines that are often shared on social media with strong reactions from uninformed commenters.
Not flagging these articles with an appropriate label pretty much ensures that this whole facebook-based fact checking feature is nothing more than a vaporware PR campaign.
The most aggravating thing is that this should be a trivial fix!
If certain sources are being excluded from the system, mark them as such. It doesn't have to be a value judgement or dismissal. Just tagging "opinion or satire, not fact-checked" would be a huge step up. Beyond any topical debate, it's general good practice to make that sort of distinction. "Evaluated, nothing found" and "not evaluated" are fundamentally different: one is false, the other is null. Failing to distinguish them is either a serious oversight or an intentional weakening of an evaluation system.
I can't believe you pulled a "both sides" line comparing The Daily Show and The Rush Limbaugh Show. This is not apples to apples.
Perhaps Rush's (or to use a more current example, Tucker Carlson's) viewers are so twisted that they no longer recognize what a comedy show is. That doesn't mean we become just as unreasonable as they are. It's not The Onion's fault when someone "eats the onion".
Aren't people who watch the Daily Show under the false impression that the setups for punchlines are real news? Why would anyone knowingly watch them butcher the news just to make the punchlines work?
Watching the Daily Show when you follow the news is like watching an observational stand-up focus on weird contradictions in everyday life when you already know the un-intuitive aspects of the matter that cause the discrepancy they're riffing on. Except a bit more depressing, because it means either their writers are bad news consumers, or are just changing shit to be more convenient to their joke structure.
Fun part is the Daily Show still runs segments that get next to zero airtime on Fox or are put out with enough lies and disinformation to question my own sanity.
Doesn’t the responsibility ultimately lay on consumer of said entertainment to ascertain this? Seems like the bigger problem we’re facing here is a mental health problem.
I'd find that more reasonable if Facebook said "we're not fact-checking anything, work it out yourselves", or tagged these articles as "exempted from fact-checking". Offering to flag false stories creates an expectation which is violated when you fail to distinguish "true" from "unchecked".
Separately I don't think we should equate mental health with mental hygiene here. Mental health might make the difference between "believing untrue things" and "showing up somewhere with a gun and no particular plan", but it's hardly a precondition for accepting wildly improbable and untrue claims.
What's your solution to that "mental health" problem? More education? Smart pills? Inpatient counseling?
I'm all for personal responsibility, but particularly when unwitting consumption can have society-wide negative effects, the responsibility lays on society to take steps to mitigate the consumption and damage.
One was created to prevent a second Nixon and birthed and covers for the Trump presidency, now under impeachment on many many counts of clearly illegal and unethical behavior. The other has a series of awarded reporters and does not run baseless opinion shows half the day.
There may be some overlap, but the comparison is mountain vs molehill level unfair.
Scott Adams claims that about 30% of people in a society just do not get humour / satire and take things at the first degree, particularly if it reinforces their convictions.
If it is true, and I think he may have a point, there would be some value in labelling humour or satire as such. It sounds ridiculous, but like it is ridiculous to have a label “not suitable for your pets” on a microwave!
> Scott Adams claims that about 30% of people in a society just do not get humour / satire
Satire, snark, and sarcasm have to be least effective way you could possibly choose to communicate. You are absolutely begging to be misunderstood and misquoted, either genuinely or maliciously, and then it's nigh on impossible to explain yourself as all your excuses just sound like like it-was-a-prank-bro.
Another huge problem is that satire is often used as cover for telling not-quite-truths. I listen to satirical radio programmes (we have a lot of those in the UK) and sometimes I think they're really bending the truth quite a bit to get the joke and their criticism isn't really fair. That'd be fine if these people weren't simultaneously actual political activists who the next night are saying they're making genuine political arguments, and if people didn't think it's-funny-because-it's-true. I'm pretty sure some of them do satire just to get away with attacking without having to back any of it up, and so they can absolve themselves from responsibility when challenged.
Quite often, I think really I'm just listening to some nasty bullies.
All-in-all, I think satire is a bit toxic for everyone involved.
Were you intending to demonstrate self-satire, or was it an accident? _A Modest Proposal_ alone should make the case for the effectiveness of satire, which is closely related to the even more time-honored reductio ad absurdum. The problem is that there's a lot of bad satire, and false satire, but that's a problem with almost every form of speech/writing that's not completely dry, flat, and colorless. It's true of analogy, allegory, metaphor, hyperbole (like yours when you say "least effective way possible"), poetry, etc. They're all abused. They're all prone to misunderstanding. Effective communication is hard. Don't mistake personal preference for a general rule, or present it as such.
I think satire is different from just being ineffective, in that it actively opens yourself up to malicious mis-interpretation. Its failure mode isn't just your audience being confused or missing the point.
Like the comedian in the UK who said she wanted to throw battery acid at politicians. It was (probably 90%) satire. But when challenged if she said she thought you should throw battery acid all she can say is yes with a weak-sounding defence of 'but it was just a prank.'
Scott Adams became world famous writing a cartoon full of snark and satire. These are perfectly valid ways of communicating and in fact they make up a significant chunk of human communication.
Reading comments like yours is somewhat bewildering to me. It seems like you're pushing philistinism as a virtue.
This has not been my experience. People, especially the ones these days, are bored to tears by facts. They don't care.
However, by pointing out absurdity in a way that invokes a positive state of being, welled crafted humor can not only get the point across more efficiently but propagate more effectively if people choose to retell the joke.
Satire is effective influencing method. The additional benefit is avoiding the requirement for reliability and responsibility because it's not real journalism.
In the US The Daily Show established satirical ha-ha as effective method to deliver news and discuss politics for younger generations.
It started as pure satire but turned into real institution people used to learn about the world. The spinoffs like The Colbert Report and related shows from people who worked in the show is impressive: The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn
, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Break with Michelle Wolf and Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj all continue using similar framework.
In the right the effective satire seems to come mainly in the form of internet trolls. It's more hostile, less intellectual. It's for people who see hostility as funny. Despite being very crude, this kind of satire can have huge influence.
I'm glad you brought this specific quote from this specific author, because to me it presents some very interesting questions.
On one hand, I used to follow Scott Adams' blog when he made that assertion and a couple other ones. His point, if I remember correctly, boiled down to "I'm going to present an obviously wrong idea, argue in favor of it, and see where it takes us". In this context, his assertion about people not "getting" humor referred to people taking his hypotheticals for a fact even though he clearly labeled them as "but what if...?". The example that comes to mind is when he argued "What if we assumed that men are rapists by nature, and modeled society around this fact?" and people attacked him for "affirming" that all men are rapists.
On the other hand, he has become one of the stronger Trump supporters I've ever seen (which is not necessarily bad), pointing out how everything he does is a great calculated move to what I consider a delusional extent (which is kind of bad - his POV currently seems to be "by asking Ukraine to investigate his opponent, Trump was doing the country a service"). By reading his blog, I got more and more the feeling that his "what if" questions were not an academic thought exercise, but rather a way to push some toxic beliefs he holds while having the plausible deniability of "it's just a hypotetical".
So my point being: this quote by Scott Adams can go both ways. Maybe he's right and humans are very bad at understanding humor and/or satire, and my two points are in no way related. But I wouldn't rule out the other possibility: that humans are actually very good at spotting what's behind the mask, and that those 30% of people are those who didn't fall for his trick and rightfully called him out for it.
I can't help thinking that his support for Trump is more like an intellectual challenge than any personal convictions. He is quite open on the fact that he disagrees with much of his policy. But his view on the persuasion aspect is interesting.
If you want to hold an opinion which is viewed by society as dangerous, presenting as just a hypothetical, might allow you to reduce your criticism, while still openly stating it.
Given all opinions are based around what you would do in a hypothetical circumstance, the limits should be pretty low.
Also, there's a strong difference between satire and hypothetically asserting that rape is innate.
I'm already looking forward to serious articles that are going to be ironically labeled as satire (obviously again misunderstood by some percentage of the population)
For what it's worth this is new, and intentional. In 2016 Haim Saban, Clinton's top financial supporter, purchased The Onion and immediately transitioned it to an outlet for propaganda under the guise of satire. [1] They rapidly went from running articles like 'Hillary Clinton Tries To Woo Voters By Rescinding Candidacy' [2] to "Why Don't People Like Hillary Clinton?" [3] with reasons such as suggesting in allusion to her being a woman (twice), because she's smart, or verbatim because she "Suffers from unfortunate speech impediment of sounding like a capable, self-possessed woman".
Scott Adams also claimed that women are treated with deference for the same reason children and mentally handicapped people are[0], so you'll have to forgive me for not giving too much credence to his unsourced statistics about the incompetence of a large fraction of humanity.
Scott Adams is a commentator and humorist, not a researcher or academic. Most reasonable people don't expect others in such a position to cite statistics and evidence, just as we don't shout "citation needed" every time a comedian makes a joke and doesn't mention a study proving their punchline is indeed funny because it's true.
Even if Scott Adams wrote something legitimately offensive, that article, like everything on Jezebel, has an obvious agenda and uses language that rip-snorts while tip toeing around the points Scott was making. If anything, it's made me more sympathetic to him because the obviously bigoted author can't stand the fact that a "white male" said something contrary to the women-are-wonderful stereotype.
Then maybe he shouldn't be using made up statistics to reinforce his arguments. He can't just spout bullshit and be immune to criticism because he's not a true "x".
I'm not saying that he's immune to criticism or that he's even right. I'm saying that I don't find Adams using "unsourced statistics" to be a compelling reason to believe that he's wrong, and it's generally lazy argumentation when people criticize non-academic public figures for not providing statistics for the things that they say. It's really better to just argue for exactly why Scott Adams is wrong. Sure, proving a falsehood is more difficult than making falsehoods and people shouldn't be making false statements in the first place, but that's the way of the world.
In the case of Scott Adams, it's especially not fair to say that he's wrong without actually providing a reason why because, as a person who has been writing humorous comic strips for decades, he's in a position to provide his intuition as to how many people don't understand humor. Whether his belief is actually correct is a matter for discussion. It might be one thing if Joe Dirt off the street was shouting that 30% of people don't understand humor, but it's not unreasonable for someone who writes humor for a living to provide his judgment on how people respond to humor. Scott Adams doesn't write the funniest stuff in the world, but at least give the guy some credit for his experience instead of just pointing out that he doesn't have proof.
An argument only holds if its premises are true. "Scott Adams claims X" is very weak evidence for X. He's a cartoonist with a history of making flimsy, self-flattering pronouncements.
Let's see some actual research supporting the notion that a third of the population reads and interprets satirical content as straight fact.
which I find ironic given that you present your personal opinion about that person as if it were a fact. Maybe we should all start cleaning up in front of our own doors first whenever we feel an urge to not criticize (which would be okay) to bad-mouth other people.
In addition, you also do exactly what the comment you replied to ask you not to, seemingly without having given its content any thought whatsoever.
More, Scott Adams didn't say anything here. You merely read a comment from someone making a claim about what he said, in a short sentence. So you don't even have anything from the person you talk about himself. On top of that that claim would not be worth any severe criticism in the given context. Even if it were shown to be wrong, so what? It does not seem to me like anything substantial hinges on it, even if you took it as just a tongue in cheek kind of comment. Anecdotal evidence from reading online forums and discussions seem to indicate that the described phenomenon indeed exists, how many people are involved and if it's always the same ones or not don't seem to me to be of great importance since no quantitative predictions are involved.
I see a lot of misinformation and disturbing amount of bigoted content posted as humor, presumably to sort of normalize that bigotry by slipping it into various online communities as humor.
I have a domain "madeup.world" that I was thinking on putting up a fake news site called "Real World News Today" given the domain, I was wanting to try to make it obvious. However, there are times where even the Onion feels a bit real, and I don't think I have any faith in actual media.
Maybe I'll put up genuine commentary, I just don't have the time or inclination to deal with it.
I like Snopes for fact checking but they lost a lot of credibility when they tried to "fact check" a Babylon Bee article that was obviously satire. (Babylon Bee is clearly labeled as satire and humor, sort of like The Onion or Duffel Blog.) Later Snopes tried to partially walk it back, but unfortunately the whole incident gave justification to those who claim that fact checkers are biased and pushing a left-wing agenda on Facebook.
Well, there's really nothing to prove. You didn't make the claim that 'the earth is flat'. Instead you made the claim that 'My [papito's] opinion is that the Earth is flat'. There is no reason to disbelieve the latter. It is clear from your own statement that your opinion is that the Earth is flat. There is no reason to counter that statement.
This is why facebook has no obligation to do anything. Facebook's entire platform is to allow various entities to self-publish their opinions. If it is clear that this is your opinion on hacker news (where the anonymous username is actually relatively obscured compared to facebook's real name policy and name placement), then it is extremely clear on Facebook.