<story><title>Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)</title><url>https://twitter.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gregmac</author><text>Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is &lt;i&gt;if it&amp;#x27;s correct&lt;/i&gt;. If you take the time to verify and&amp;#x2F;or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem.&lt;p&gt;However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what&amp;#x27;s going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as &amp;quot;fake&amp;quot; and continue using the one that most aligns with what they &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; the time should be.</text></item><item><author>hirundo</author><text>&amp;gt; Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news”&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they&amp;#x27;re always somewhat different, and so you&amp;#x27;re no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks.&lt;p&gt;Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks.&lt;p&gt;But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I&amp;#x27;m not at all sure that&amp;#x27;s true of news sources.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>And a stopped clock is right twice a day. So all the stopped clock merchant has to do is wait for the clock to line up, then shout from the rooftops that they have the right time.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not enough to be correct by coincidence, process matters. We see this often enough in scientific papers where the statistics come into question. News process is different, especially given how sources work. Not everyone is willing to be recorded, and recordings are increasingly untrustworthy anyway, so at some point you have to start believing that the reporter heard person X say Y.&lt;p&gt;The worst part of the whole fake news fiasco has been people using the (very real) problems of the established media as an excuse to switch to consuming &lt;i&gt;total nonsense&lt;/i&gt; from fabricated sources.&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, time itself is a social construct. Not just in the sense of relativistic time, but in the sense of how we came to move from individual local clocks (&amp;quot;decentralised time&amp;quot;) to using time from the communication network which had to coordinate internally (&amp;quot;railway time&amp;quot;).</text></comment>
<story><title>Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)</title><url>https://twitter.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gregmac</author><text>Building on that analogy, the trouble with one clock is you only know what time it is &lt;i&gt;if it&amp;#x27;s correct&lt;/i&gt;. If you take the time to verify and&amp;#x2F;or set it against an accurate time source, then this is no problem.&lt;p&gt;However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what&amp;#x27;s going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as &amp;quot;fake&amp;quot; and continue using the one that most aligns with what they &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; the time should be.</text></item><item><author>hirundo</author><text>&amp;gt; Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news”&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like when you have one clock, you know what time it is. When you have two clocks they&amp;#x27;re always somewhat different, and so you&amp;#x27;re no longer certain of the time, and have less faith in clocks.&lt;p&gt;Fake news has always been with us and the internet just propagates it along with everything else. Contrary to the claim that the internet legitimized it, it made us more aware of how common it is, delegitimizing all news sources in the way that multiple clocks delegitimize clocks.&lt;p&gt;But clocks at least can be made quite accurate. I&amp;#x27;m not at all sure that&amp;#x27;s true of news sources.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NeedMoreTea</author><text>In attempting to dismiss the point Bill Gates gets it partly right. &amp;#x27;you&amp;#x27;ll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says &amp;quot;Hey go read this&amp;quot;...&amp;#x27;, and says so as though it is some arbiter of quality as they would have verified first.&lt;p&gt;Not that people generally verified that much anyway, but if it comes from &lt;i&gt;people&lt;/i&gt; we trust and like we probably don&amp;#x27;t engage natural scepticism. Not like you might if you doubted the source, or heard a wild claim on the news. The friend has become the source, and reinforced the veracity. The sharing model did that. It probably also explains the amplification effects of social.&lt;p&gt;So I suppose the meta question is did they pick a side, or was it picked by the random connections within the peer group?</text></comment>