Elon Musk To Fight Fake News, Rate Journalists' Credibility Via a Site Called 'Pravda' 314
Elon Musk took to Twitter today to announce his next project: a site called "Pravda" that ranks journalists' credibility and fights fake news. "Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication," tweeted Musk. "Thinking of calling it Pravda..." Musk continued: "Even if some of the public doesn't care about the credibility score, the journalists, editors & publications will. It is how they define themselves." A subsequent Twitter poll (exposed to mostly Musk followers) reveals that most people believe "this would be good."
Accredited journalist Mark Harris replied to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO with a copy of a Statement and Designation by Foreign Corporation form that names the Pravda Corp. "Er, he's not kidding folks," Harris tweeted. "I noticed that one of Musk's agents had incorporated Pravda Corp in California back in October last year. I was wondering what it was all about..."
GeekWire has catalogued a string of replies between Musk and Twitter users who are supportive/unsupportive of his plans.
Accredited journalist Mark Harris replied to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO with a copy of a Statement and Designation by Foreign Corporation form that names the Pravda Corp. "Er, he's not kidding folks," Harris tweeted. "I noticed that one of Musk's agents had incorporated Pravda Corp in California back in October last year. I was wondering what it was all about..."
GeekWire has catalogued a string of replies between Musk and Twitter users who are supportive/unsupportive of his plans.
So the public rates their credibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
The same public that can't differentiate -or simply doesn't care about- the difference between fact and fake news?
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There's no way this will be exploited or abused by anyone with any sort of agenda.
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Seriously. I like most of Musk's projects, but this is counterproductive.
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I feel about this "Pravda" project the same way I felt about him joining Trump's business council - "This is not going to end well."
Re:So the public rates their credibility? (Score:5, Informative)
The thing with Musk, you just never know. It could be a joke as in "the joke is a name to make fun of people who make false stories", or it could be "the joke is that the entire concept of the site is a joke".
That said, Elon being upset with people lying about him in the press is no joke. UAW and their allies particularly. One of the big ones recently was a campaign from a pro-union group called "Reveal" arguing, among other things, that Musk demanded that the factory not use yellow safety tape or have forklifts beep because it upset his aesthetic sensibilities. Which is something that can literally be proven false in less than a minute on Google Images or YouTube. And then when the falsehood was pointed out to them, of course they issued no correction, but just continued their attack-series-disguised-as-journalism.
Meanwhile, UAW still can't even get enough Tesla employees to sign that they even want a vote. Musk called for a vote on Twitter the other night. Sounds very confident that UAW would lose any vote by huge margins, as UAW dropped NUMMI like a hot potato during the recession to protect their Detroit base, there was double the injury rate when they were there, and nobody working for UAW anywhere gets stock options as part of their compensation.
I'm sure that the fact that UAW supporters have started harassing his girlfriend online didn't help his view on the manner any.
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I hope it's a joke, because it sounds like he invented GamerGate.
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Great example of the problem. We have a simple lie repeated until it becomes truth, and a campaign of harassment justified by it.
The only thing worse than bad journalism is bad crowd sourced "journalism". Let's not have and Pizzagate.
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A large number of new people started showing up and attacking her, not preexisting followers. At the exact same time that they started showing up on Musk's feed and attacking him. And for what crime? Literally nothing more than responding to someone who was repeating the UAW stuff, "he has never prevented them from unionizing it's quite literally fake news". Which is simply true.
The public knows (Score:2, Insightful)
The same public that can't differentiate -or simply doesn't care about- the difference between fact and fake news?
The public has for a long time now been calling out and correcting the media on all sorts of stories. The public, far from "not being able to differentiate" has a better track record of understanding what is real and what is not, than the press itself has for some time...
Re: The public knows (Score:3)
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Maybe that's secretly the point? That the average ignoramus is unlikely to pollute the site... at least until it's too late to do so. Then, like wikipedia, ordinary people find out about and start visiting it.
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The same public that can't differentiate -or simply doesn't care about- the difference between fact and fake news?
The public has for a long time now been calling out and blasting the media on all sorts of stories they don't like. The public, far from "not being able to read" has a track record of believing in aliens and conspiracy theories despite the press' attempts at clarification for some time now...
FTFY
In short, the public has proven a most untrustworthy source of determining anything real or accurate. Look at Pizzagate. Uranium One fantasies. The JFK assassination. Roswell. Aliens. The "fake" moon landing. The current focus on "fake news".
Now where's your list that supports you in any way?
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Re: The public knows (Score:2)
Yes, and the "media" report it in exactly those simplistic terms, which leaves the majority of the public - including, apparently, yourself - with a mistaken belief about what's going on.
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Re: The public knows (Score:3)
And now we've come full circle to the ignorance of the general public. However, despite your excellent demonstration, I still hold that he media isn't much better.
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As I said talking about BLM the other day, we need to stop seeing police abuse through a racial lens and view it through a human lens. Focus on the fact that police seriously violate everyones rights, not whether it's slightly more common for one group or another.
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Q and the red pill army.
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> I'm gonna need some references, if I'm gonna buy that...
The liberal narrative about Trump trashing MS-13.
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Good example. Calling someone an animal that stabbed someone over a 100 times, decapitated him, and removed his heart shouldn't be controversial.
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The same public that can't differentiate -or simply doesn't care about- the difference between fact and fake news?
The public has for a long time now been calling out and correcting the media on all sorts of stories. The public, far from "not being able to differentiate" has a better track record of understanding what is real and what is not, than the press itself has for some time...
I'm gonna need some references, if I'm gonna buy that...
You somehow missed that the trust in the press is on the decline?
Re: try new Donaldizole (Score:2)
Anonymous coward is anonymous, cowardly.
Re: try new Donaldizole (Score:2)
Blub, blub, blub...
You angry, brocephus?
Re: try new Donaldizole (Score:2)
Have you tried Preparation H? I hear it's good for butthurt.
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Meta-moderation by paid researchers should be able to differentiate between users who are able to identify credible news and those who are not. Then you simply adjust the algorithms to either ignore them or even reverse their recommendations.
Re: So the public rates their credibility? (Score:2)
Oh oh oh - can I decide who to hire as semi-official paid researchers? Oh, this will be FUN!
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Not all the public is so easily fooled; one of the things I like about /. is that most of us are very critical thinkers.
If his system allows people to rate the credibility of an article but then those users also have a credibility that gives them more or less weight I think the system can balance out. For example if I rate an article as very credible but then most people rate it as not very credible then my credibility would go down. Then when I rate other articles that rating has less impact because my ove
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Re: So the public rates their credibility? (Score:2)
The US is a lawless oligarchy.
And with that one short sentence you've done an excellent job of demonstrating that there are Slashdot users who aren't critical thinkers. Well done!
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Original paper [princeton.edu]
Re: So the public rates their credibility? (Score:2)
Bot poetry?
Or just a drunk Progressive Philistine?
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Re: So the public rates their credibility? (Score:2)
Perhaps your "facts" are less uncontroversial than you imagined.
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âoeNo one in this world, so far as I know â" and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me â" has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.â H. L. Mencken
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Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work. While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be. Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly is more important then accuracy.
Re:So the public rates their credibility? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why nobody pays much attention to them.
That's why most journalists aren't famous.
FTFY.
Re:So the public rates their credibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since Woodward and Bernstein, too many journalists have tried to create the news rather than just objectively report on it.
Re:So the public rates their credibility? (Score:4, Interesting)
Its usually higher in the food chain the problems occur. A friend of mine worked for NewsCorp and was consistently mortified at how his stories would be edited to hell and back to put this weird conservative spin on things , often to the point of straight up reversing the meanings of sentences. An example he gave was one where a particular politician had announced a raft of policies that would likely have been quite popular. A number of quotes from politicians of both side generally supportive , except one who completely hated it. By the time the story got past the editor, all the supporting quotes where removed, the bit about the politician who opposed it had been moved to the first sentence and the story retitled "Nationals condemn irresponsible Spending bill", making the story about a minor party conservative disliking a bill by a senior Labor party member, instead of it being about the bill itself. My journalist friend resigned in protest soon after. Alas, in Australia, its either work for Murdoch or join the welfare queue
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My journalist friend resigned in protest soon after. Alas, in Australia, its either work for Murdoch or join the welfare queue
I know a few Journo's from Australia. Unless you land a nice job on the ABC (which is hard to do) most Journo's move into Marketing (AKA Corporate Communications) as that is a more honest career than writing for the papers. At least you're only lying by omission when writing advertorials than lying though your arse writing for The (un)Australian.
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Re:So the public rates their credibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
AlanBDee confided:
Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work. While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be. Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly is more important then accuracy.
As a former computer industry trade journalist and columnist, I agree with your assessment of what has come to be called "mainstream media" journalists. Most of them try to get their facts straight.
What complicates their effort is both time pressure considerations (which is to say deadlines and the constant quest for "scoops"), and the standard "three sources" requirement for news stories. The second of those generally means having to include quotes from critics, and there are a lot of those in the auto industry, when it comes to Elon Musk.
(Which only stands to reason, since Tesla is a major disruptive force in that industry, and Detroit has been playing catch-up ever since reality caught up to their pet journalists' confident prediction that Elon's company would fold before he shipped a single car.)
And, speaking again from experience in the trade journal industry (albeit in a totally different sector), those guys - and they're almost all guys in the auto industry version - have the same ethical problems that I found many of my former tech colleagues had. To put it bluntly, a lot of them are basically whores.
There are very different standards in trade journalism than there are in the mainstream version. For one thing, there's bribery, both direct, and via major advertisers (who are the exact same companies about which these people supposedly provide objective coverage) bringing pressure to bear on these rags' publishers to run stories that are favorable to them. For instance, I was fired from my first job at McGraw-Hill's LAN Times when the pubilsher gave the editor who had hired me the boot, and replaced her and her staff with a bunch of ex-PC Week clowns. The first I heard about the new regime was a call from the new Features editor, who opened by telling me, "We want to coordinate content in the back of the book with the News section."
"So, you're telling me you want me to write columns about the latest dot-zero release of Microsoft's crapware, or Intel's me-too networking gear, instead of writing about Internet policy and technology - which is what I was hired to do to begin with?" I replied.
"I wouldn't put it like that," he responded, "but, yes, that's basically what we're looking for."
When I declined to accept the invitation to spread my legs for the magazine's advertisers, I was informed that my services would no longer be required. A year later, McGraw-Hill dispatched the useless, smudgy Xerox of Network World that LAN Times had been transmogrified into to a farm upstate.
So, I went to work for a different mag - which folded after 3 issues - and eventually wound up at Boardwatch, where I spent six glorious years, before the bumbling idiots at Penton Media did the same clueless thing to it that McGraw-Hill had done to LAN TImes. (That happened just months before the first dot-com bubble kerploded, taking most of the computer trade pub industry with it - including the animated corpse of Boardwatch, btw.)
But, a couple of years before that happend, I got so sick of the advertisers dictating content, that, in a column headlined "Crystal Blue Persuasion" [starkrealities.com] (from November, 1999), I closed with a whole section addressed to PR people on how properly to bribe me to write about their clients' products or services.
(What I did not do - what I would never do - is to promise that what I wrote would be flattering. That's something that whatever gadget or service I'm writing about has to convince me it deserves And most of 'em don't.)
You should read it, when and if my ISP gets its Apache fu
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Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work. While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be. Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly is more important then accuracy.
Attempting to define fake news as an "accuracy" problem is like trying to define ransomware as a mere coding bug caused by a typo.
Unfortunately the smarter ppl are still party fanb (Score:3, Interesting)
> the smarter people will deem them as non-trustworthy
Unfortunately, in my experience even "the smarter people" are most often fanbois of one of the political parties, and specifically of whichever mouthpiece the party assigns at the moment.
Slashdot commenters, as a whole, probably have a median IQ somewhat higher than the average, yet most of the comments here about anything *remotely* political are obviously driven by the party line. Commenters routinely contradict themselves when asked a couple of que
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Slashdot is a place for ideas not truthiness. Plenty of peddlers of truthiness come to slashdot only to leave disappointed not truthiness here, only ideas, good, bad and indifferent and what slashdotters can do with them. Spread them challenge them, tear them to pieces, distort and abuse them, what ever they fuck they want to do with them at their leisure for fun, for shits and giggles and for profit (don't steal ideas though, that is naughty and super lame and pathetic, make use of sure but don't claim the
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Wish McCain stuck with his 1st VP, Lieberman (Score:2)
> (our team is the country, not one's political gang)
Indeed. When John McCain ran for President, he first asked Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, to be his running mate. A bipartisan ticket of two moderates would have been interesting. Depending on their leadership skills, they might have pointed the nation more toward what you're talking about, being Americans more than Republican vs Democrat. Of course, McCain ended up with Sarah Palin as his VP running mate, for "reasons".
Sticking with Lieberman against th
Biases. (Score:2)
So he will judge based on his biases. If he agrees with the position, positive karma. Otherwise, negative. Just like pretty much every other news outlet.
Yeah, just like this, but replace "standards" with "news." https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
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Russian newspaper? (Score:3)
Re:Russian newspaper? (Score:5, Informative)
WHOOSH (Score:5, Insightful)
You, like many other humorless Slashdot scolds, seem to be unable to grasp that Pravda in the name is a direct reference to the Russian newspaper that is literally a mouth of the state - Musk's Pravda is a pointed reference making a dig at modern "news" which has in effect become a mouthpiece of the Deep State, which as he says is layered in lies that wish to be promoted by the elite.
There's a few other people who understand what this refers to, but alarmingly few otherwise intelligent Slashdot people seem to get the joke. The rot has gone deep indeed.
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What are the chances that this crowd sourced truth ends up promoting Brietbart and RT as the most trustworthy sources?
WHOOSH Redux (Score:2)
Oh, a lot of us are quite able to grasp that it's a direct reference to the USSR propaganda publication of the same name, whose name was incredibly ironic in practice.
Names for projects tend to be prophetic, if nothing else because they say a lot about the expectations and opinions of the people who started it and will influence those who join in later. (This is a good reason to choose names with positive connotations, or use made-up words.) Naming something aiming to push for the news media to be more cr
When digging through the layers of irony (Score:2)
... you have to stop at just the right point to see it like this.
"Pravda", a Russian newspaper named after the Russian word for truth, was used by the government to distribute their version of the truth.
Now why should Elon Musks project, apparently ironically given the same name, not follow in the footsteps of its namesake?
I have yet to see a "Fact Finder" or "Anti Fake News" project that is unbiased (if that is even possible), many of them are among the worst in terms of propagating biases.
Re:Russian newspaper? (Score:4, Informative)
Why not use something more universal, like 'Veritas'?
Because there's already a "Project Veritas", which is led by one of the few people who has actually been caught commiting voter fraud [talkingpointsmemo.com], and which been caught multiple times [rationalwiki.org] deceptively editing footage to make perfectly legal interactions seem nefarious, and in some cases to look like the exact opposite of what actually happened.
Fixed it for you.
Re:Russian newspaper? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a joke from Soviet Russia, though probably an obscure reference in 2018. They had two main newspapers, Pravda which means "Truth" and Izvestia which means "News". Pravda was the official voice of the communist party and Izvestia was the official voice of the soviet government. In English the joke would be "There is no truth in News, and there is no news in Truth." The current day newspapers are fairly unrelated.
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So, by your measure anyone who has a favorite pet whom they feel an emotional link with 'Is in a relationship with it'?
There are a LOT of pet owners who would easily fit in to that basket, children who cry for days after loosing their first goldfish, lapdogs that are looked after like children.
Of course you need to imply something bordering on bestiality, with some insanity thrown in, in those situations? Interesting.
Or perhaps you just drink the koolaid of the US media a little too deeply - Edison spent a
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"I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a fe
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Or perhaps he has actually read Tesla's own words, which document the various issues Tesla had with mental health. Incidentally, if you check the timeline? Edison's smear campaign against Tesla definitely looks to have been a significant factor in Tesla's decline there.
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I don't think that's lost on him. What I wonder is if he's interested in Truth or whether he's interested in Party Line. Picking the name he did I wonder what his intent is.
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Grimes is blowing up Elon's brain. (That is probably a very enjoyable experience)
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Read more about it here...
https://www.pravda.ru/news/wor... [pravda.ru]
or the google translated version for the comrades you can't speak russian here...
https://translate.google.com/t... [google.com]
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Pravda is not just Russian newspaper. It is chief propaganda newspaper of the Communist party since 1912, i.e. even before Russian revolution.
So, Americans would hate this site, because it is something Russian, most Russians would hate it because it remind them of communists and Soviet times, and Russian communists hate Musk anyway, because he "stole" what they think biggest communist government achievement - human space flight technology.
Branding (Score:5, Informative)
WTF? Any body old enough to remember the USSR will see "Pravda" and immediately associate it with the USSR's mouthpiece. It's Russian for "truth", and was the butt of many jokes in the USA during the Soviet era. What's Elon thinking here?
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Elon Musk seems like he's really good at messing with people in humorous ways. I mean, an eccentric billionaire's gotta have hobbies, right?
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Surely he's making a deliberate reference, which he assumes or intends to be an ironic reference, which time will tell whether merely turns out to be prophetic.
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Not unlike Soylent
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WTF? Any body old enough to remember the USSR will see "Pravda" and immediately associate it with the USSR's mouthpiece. It's Russian for "truth", and was the butt of many jokes in the USA during the Soviet era. What's Elon thinking here?
Yep. And he's going to get mountains of free press for it. It's "edgy".
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What's Elon thinking here?
That people would get the joke. Evidently he's wrong.
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Pravda also means justice, and Istina also means Truth. In some Slavic languages, Pravda only means Justice.
"Every time the word "pravda" comes to my mind, I am exhilarated by its stunning beauty. Such a word is not, apparently, to be found in any [ot
I blame Michael Moore (Score:5, Insightful)
I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in a theater (not my idea). I'd heard of this Moore guy but never seen any of his stuff. I guess I'm more of a critical thinker than most folks but I was struck by:
Moore never makes any claims. He never stands flat-footed, looking into the camera and says, "I believe... and here's evidence of that". A clear claim can be refuted or disproven. If you make no clear, direct claims no-one can prove you wrong.
His film was all supposition, innuendo, insinuation, interspersed with quick shots of Moore looking into the camera with a "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more..." expression.
And people left the theater really believing More had made claims and then backed them up with evidence.
So much of the "fake news" is written in s similar manner: " believes that...", "...is linked to..." (what does that one mean, anyway?), etc.
But I blame Michael Moore for conditioning people to read this crap and really believe they have been given hard facts where there are none. And the press so often write like this now. I think the "news" writers today have grown up with this and don't even realize that's not how you're meant to cover the news.
Re:I blame Michael Moore (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I blame Michael Moore (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is confirmation bias. Michael Moore didn't convince anyone who didn't already agree with him, but he convinced idiots that their opponents had just been disproved. Today's fake news works the same way, it doesn't really fool anybody of a different ideology but it strengthens the partisan echo chamber so that fewer people ever step outside of it. Kind of like religious dogma in that the more absurd it is the more your faith is enhanced by believing and the less likely you are to question anything in the future.
(For the record, I'm as liberal as non-communists come but could never stand Moore.)
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"...is linked to..." (what does that one mean, anyway?)
In scientific reporting it means that a correlation was found. It is often and easily misconstrued as a causal relation, either by the reporter or the reader.
But I blame Michael Moore for conditioning people to read this crap and really believe they have been given hard facts where there are none
If everybody does it, it can hardly be one man's fault.
The simple problem is that the human psyche has certain weaknesses which are being exploited more and more effectively by more and more industries, usually for profit. Unless there is sufficient selection pressure towards what a for profit industry should deliver, it will inevitably evolve towards
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Moore never makes any claims.
Of course he did. A quick youtube to get help recall some info, in the first few minutes there are plenty of verifiable claims, here's a couple:
1. The networks all called Florida for Gore. The first call for Bush came from Fox where the lead guy running the numbers at Fox was Bush's cousin.
2. Florida 's governor was his brother
3. Bush's head of campaign was also in charge of vote counting and was responsible for hiring a firm to 'clean' the voter rolls of mostly black voters
4. Moore then highlights some
Content vs title (Score:3)
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Things that have the word 'truth' (Pravda is truth in Russian) in the title or name, usually have very little of it in its content or substance.
It's the same reason the Fox tabloid dropped "Fair and Balanced".
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I'm getting tired of this (Score:2)
There seems to be no shortage of tech CEOs who have the emotional maturity level of 12-year-old boys.
But we already knew that about Elon - it's been evident for a couple years [fastcompany.com]. He may be brilliant, but he's also a self-entitled whiny crybaby.
I'm not a shill :) (Score:2)
I've turned off local and regional "if it bleeds it leads" nonsense for decades. For my ($0) money, Reuters world news is about as relevant and impartial as it gets.
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Reuters world news is about as relevant and impartial as it gets.
Ahhh, yes. The outfit that reported about China sending a probe to the Dark Side of the Moon. [reuters.com]
Would you like to have another guess?
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Fine. I'm guessing about 3". Who is more impartial?
Who watches the watchers? (Score:2)
As the saying goes, there's no truth in the news (Score:3)
There's no truth in the news and there's no news in the truth.
It has a better ring in Russian, since the two leading organs were Pravda (truth) and Izvestia (news).
Will it allow you to rate CEO's too? (Score:2)
Who rate the raters? (Score:2)
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How about the truth score is moderated by awarded journalists and editors who are well-known for casting light on corruption, and wish to maintain that reputation? That's about as good as one could hope for. Of course, such an effort would be better created by, say, Reporters Without Borders, than a random billionaire.
Truth by popularity (Score:3)
EU tried and failed. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The way to fight "fake news" is education (Score:4, Insightful)
Teach people to seek a broader view by comparing different accounts, to keep in mind the source of a news story and its possible motivations and biases, to analyze texts for their true information content, presented facts, rhetorical devices and omissions, and most of all teach them to think for themselves.
Also everyone should be aware, that our view of our world is incomplete and be ready to reevaluate and adapt our world view when new facts are presented.
In the end the people will build their own opinions anyways, the best we can do is give them the tools to use reason in the process.
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Alex Jones writes for The Onion now?
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Congratulations.
Time to go outside to the real world, and get a life perhaps?
You should thank them.
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When a big project is going badly, it's a lot of fun to start other projects.
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Wrong. A CNAME record must have no other resource records of other types like MX or NS records so you can't create a CNAME for a domain name. BIND will give you the error:
"rndc: 'reload' failed: CNAME and other data"
Also, RFC 1912 says "A CNAME record is not allowed to coexist with any other data."