Fake news (aka propaganda) has always been with us, just not in the hands of so many little people. Now it appears the genie’s out of the bottle and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men might not be able to put it back in…
“Fake news is here forever, study says”
by Fox News Staff
The New York Post
October 6, 2017
Fake information will pervade mature economies in the next few years, a new study has noted.
By 2022, most people in mature economies will consume more false information than true information, according to the study from research firm Gartner.
This trend will be fueled, in part, by “confirmation bias,” that “leads all people to seek out, select and value information that parallels what they believe and expect to be proven true,” the study”™s authors, Magnus Revang and Whit Andrews, found.
And even improved artificial intelligence (AI), which companies like Facebook and Google are working on, won”™t be able to stop it, a separate study by Gartner found. “Counterfeit reality” or fake content, will “outpace AI”™s ability to detect it.”
Generating false information will always cost less than the cost of detecting it. “False information will consequently outpace true information where there is economic or political interest to purvey it,” Revang and Andrews wrote. Read more.
Cameron Harris
Earlier this year, I argued that the conservative movement did not merely have a Donald Trump problem””it had a media problem. As Trump slouched toward the nomination he was backed by a conservative media that had successfully created an alternative reality bubble around his candidacy. When Trump claimed that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the attacks on 9/11, for instance, callers to my show lined up to provide supporting evidence the only source of which was an echo chamber of partisan bloggers; listeners chimed in with evidence they had seen on Facebook linking Ted Cruz”™ father to the JFK assassination. Of course, we know the origin of that “evidence” was the National Enquirer. Crowd-sourcing has its limits.