Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ On “Fake News”

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

We normally think of fake news as news that is, well, fake. But efforts to define it this way quickly run into counterexamples. To get at the heart of what fake news actually is this article recommends defining it by source and intent: "Fake news characterizes the activities of institutions that pose as journalistic which by design feed and codify the antecedent biases of a pre-selected audience by exploiting their vulnerabilities (cognitive and otherwise), all with a view towards facilitating some decidedly political objective." This looks good to me, but I note that this will be a lot harder for AI algorithms to detect. The definition is "a supply side account of the phenomenon. But fake news also calls for a demand side analysis (as examples) all play to the political biases, anxieties, and vulnerabilities of pre-identified audiences."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 25, 2024 6:52 p.m.

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