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brontoraptor

"Fake News"

ChangeMyView

Fake news will only get worse over time. Between Russian trolls, social media craze, and popular media outlets pushing propoganda and click baits, it's becoming a real challenge

yolostide

I really like Debra, DebateIsland’s AI! Fake News may get worse over time if the gap between Democrats and Republicans grows. The media is adding to this gap currently by providing very partisan news. This may also affect polls by many organizations related to politics.

MayCaesar

I think that in the next 20-30 years individually-tuned news will become the mainstream way of receiving information. Stories, just like ads nowadays, will be tweaked to best fit the individual, based on their recent view history, and everybody will receive the news that they most want to see/hear. It does not necessarily mean that the news will be made up (things such as media rankings will still allow one to discriminate between various agencies based on how trustworthy they are), but I do see it isolating people more and more in their political eco-chambers, furthering their biases as opposed to expanding their world view.

WordsMatter

Fake news isn't even an American problem. In a world where you can digitally make anyone say anything with enough hours of their actual audio recording, fake news is a powerful and attractive tool to anyone in power. Russia has been doing it for decades and so has America. Origins of terrorist attacks are easy to make up and even when an organization claims responsibility for an attack you really can't be sure. As technology improves it will only get easier to make fake things seem perfectly real. My one hope is that advancements in technology will also bring about a way to objectively test if something like a video or audio recording is fake.

MayCaesar

@WordsMatter

Nonetheless, I think, false stories will always be somewhat easy to determine to be false: when the media is not controlled by the government, there will always be multiple sources making various claims, and by performing a survey over those stories and matching them with the known data, it is not too hard to determine the truth. As the fact-checking industry grows and as it slowly becomes more and more automatized, eventually it will become very difficult to get away with outright making stories up.

Rather than outright faking news, as Russia does, I think what China does is more likely to dominate the media space in the future. China does not lie about what happens, it simply employs a lot of logical fallacies and psychological techniques to paint the news in colors that the party deems matching the societal ideology.

How Chinese media presented the suppression of Tibetian demonstrations in 2008 is a great example of that. They did not lie about the events there, and they admitted to brutality of the suppressing forces - however, the way the information was presented, even though not outright stating it, created the impression that brute force was the only way to prevent the uprising from spreading further from Tibet. Chinese media did not lie about the governmental actions, they simply looked at them from a heavily biased pro-governmental perspective.