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pope quote

I thought somebody was trolling the article, and inserting fake news INTO the article about fake news, but it turns out the pope actually said such things:

  • "I believe that the media should be very clear, very transparent, and not fall prey — without offence, please — to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate scandal, to communicate ugly things, even though they may be true."[1]

Which has been paraphrased on wikipedia as:

  • Pope Francis said it was a sin to spread disinformation through fake news, calling it coprophilia and consumers of the fraud engaged in coprophagia.[23][24][25]

Suggest changing to:

  • Pope Francis said it was a sin to spread disinformation through fake news, calling it coprophilia (literally 'lovers-of-shit') and consumers of the fraud engaged in coprophagia (literally 'eaters-of-shit' or equivalently 'consumers-of-shit').[23][24][25]

I realize that the terms are wiki-linked, but the pope is not[citation needed] using the latin phrase in a way to suggest that the fake-news-purveyors are physically aroused by feces, he is using it in the metaphorical sense that such people 'like spreading shit around' in the form of their fake news reports. I would also accept inserting (literally 'lovers-of-feces') if that is considered "more encyclopedic" but to my mind it seems pretty clear that the metaphor centered around the phrase 'likes to talk shit' or similarly 'likes to spread shit around' loses the normal sense of the English slang, when you try to change it to 'likes to spread feces around'. For the sake of the metaphor, I think the four-letter literal translation is better than the five-letter literal translation. (If somebody who speaks Latin *and* modern Italian can weigh in here, on whether the pope is using the words in the metaphorical sense I suggest here, that would be appreciated.)

And of perhaps more importance, than getting the linguistic metaphor exactly correct, I suggest that "sin to spread disinformation through fake news" does NOT actually jive with what the pope said in the NPR quote I gave above, which specifically says that the pope wanted the media to stop spreading ugly scandalous things even though they may be true. That is a *much* broader brush than the pope attacking fake news, because the pope is attacking ALL scandalous tales of ugly things (e.g. morbidly gory stories about car wrecks and violent murders on the local news would come under the pope's definition of sin). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 16:01, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

I changed it. I agree that the previous language didn't conform to the sources, but the encyclopedic solution is to summarize the pope's comments, not to dissect them in such grotesque detail. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 18:25, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
Much better, thank you Dr. Fleischman -- "Pope Francis criticized fake news and compared it to coprophilia." However, while that matches what WaPo claims the pope said, I would still submit that this summarization is not a correct representation of what the pope said; first of all, he did criticize fake news, but he did not compare *it* to coprophilia, he compares journalistic sensationalism (even if true) to coprophilia. Or maybe junk food news is a closer fit than sensationalism, but the pope specifically said ugly/nasty scandals. And I still think the wikilink will give readers the wrong impression, and would prefer we summarize the metaphor properly. How does this change sound: "Pope Francis criticized fake news, and compared journalistic sensationalism generally to coprophilia (lit. 'lovers-of-shit')." Now, I do realize the WaPo headline claims the pope made the direct comparison, not the more general comparison, but the NPR cite which actually quotes the pope above, was very clear on the metaphor being made. The WaPo article gives almost the exact same quotation as NPR uses, but strips off the key portion: "I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into — no offense intended — the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things"....[2] eliding the next few words, that NPR kept, namely "even though they may be true".[3] I don't know whether WaPo made the error of omission, or the WaPo translation-service made the error of omission. But I think wikipedia should not follow WaPo's truncated quote, we should follow NPR's more-context-included quote. And if anybody has access to the original Italian, please check the full context. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 23:42, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
You might be right, but that doesn't really affect what we put in our article, as it's original research. We report what reliable secondary sources say and try to avoid our own analyses of primary sources. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 01:03, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
NPR is not a primary source. NPR gives the full quote. WaPo is wrong on this. They are using the truncated quote, which is nigh-identical to the NPR quote except for the truncation. The truncation changes the meaning, and the truncation explains *why* the WaPo headline is factually incorrect. This is not original research, this is pointing out that a particular WaPo story is not reliable because in this case, they did not fact-check their facts well enough. Pope quote they give, is not the pope properly quoted. Wikipedia needs to summarize the NPR piece, and disregard the flawed WaPo source. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 01:51, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
Per the above, the current WP summary seems misleading. As several sources are noting, the accusation of coprophilia (whatever he exactly intended to convey by its use) refers to scandal-mongering and salacious reporting, even when based on truth, not to fake news per se, although he also criticises "disinformation". One can't help but notice yet again the irony of relying on misleading reports from supposedly high-level media to build a moralising page about "fake news". Yes WP:RS prima facie accepts news reporting, but as noted ad nauseam, it is never the best source for anything. It's driven by bias and often full of errors. And once a clear error like this has been identified, it's fine to stop relying on the specific claim in question, regardless of more general acceptance of the wider "reliability" of the source in WP terms. N-HH talk/edits 10:11, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
The wikipedia summary *was* pulled almost straight from WaPo headline, so it is not DrFleischman's fault, it is WaPo's fault.[4] "Fake news ~= excited by feces." (based on an out-of-context truncated quote.) By contrast, NPR's people got the story correct, probably.[5] "Media's infatuation with scandals-whether-true-or-not ~= lovers of shit." 47.222.203.135 (talk) 17:39, 15 December 2016 (UTC)
The pope's comments were reported on by other reliable sources, so if there was something wrong with WaPo's interpretation then the discrepancy should be apparent when comparing them. Does anyone want to take a look? What I don't think we should be doing is interpreting the pope's comments directly, or going into extreme detail, especially in the lead section. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 17:17, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
Per DrFleischman, removed Pope Francis from the intro. As for the body text, we should rely on what reliable secondary sources say, and not stray into our own original research. Sagecandor (talk) 21:33, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
DrFleischman and User:Sagecandor, just compare the URLs of WaPo[6] versus NPR[7], and you can see the problem. They cannot both be correct, if they are referring to the same quote, and they both use almost exactly the same translation, but the WaPo version is prematurely truncated and thus out-of-context. This is not WP:OR, this is WP:Conflicting_sources. We can either say this: "According to NPR, the pope metaphorically compared scandal-obsessed journalists to a Latin word meaning lovers-of-shit (even when the scandals happen to be true)." Which is obviously, the pope's take that fake news per se is a symptom of a much bigger problem, that the average citizen is obsessed with scandals. Or we can say, as we did until recently, but no longer in wikipedia's voice: "According to WaPo, the pope literally compared fake news purveyors to those who become sexually excited by feces, and literally compared fake news consumers to those who eat feces." Which would be right on point for this article... if it were correctly quoting the pope! But we know, more or less, that the WaPo story is based on an incorrectly truncated quote from the pope, because NPR gives the fuller quote, in context. We should only use the NPR version, not the buggy WaPo one, is my strong advice. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 17:39, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Body prose at present has two sentences related to this snafu:

  • He compared salacious reporting of scandals, whether true or not, to coprophilia and the consumption of it to coprophagy.[168][169][170][171]
  • The pope said that he did not intend to offend with his strong words, but emphasized that "a lot of damage can be done" when the truth is disregarded and slander is spread.[169][171] (emphasis added)

The first sentence is factually correct, I believe, and matches the NPR source. The second sentence is sourced from WaPo, and is factually incorrect I believe, because of the truncated pope quote that the WaPo story relies upon (missing "even when true"). I suggest rewriting (or temporarily removing) the second sentence, just like the intro-sentence was removed. According to the other source #171, the interview was conducted in the Spanish language, which was either first printed in or physically held in Belgium, was then translated into Italian, and was THEN translated into English, for our consumption here. We need to tread carefully, please. Here is the 'official' english translation of the interview from the vatican, I finally found, which may count as WP:RS since it is a government, and certainly counts as WP:ABOUTSELF for what the pope actually said.

The key portion, with respect to 'the greatest damage' is as follows: "A thing that can do great damage to the information media is disinformation: that is, faced with any situation, saying only a part of the truth, and not the rest. This is disinformation. Because you, to the listener or the observer, give only half the truth, and therefore it is not possible to make a serious judgement. Disinformation is probably the greatest damage that the media can do, as opinion is guided in one direction, neglecting the other part of the truth. And then, I believe that the media should be very clear, very transparent, and not fall prey – without offence, please – to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate scandal, to communicate ugly things, even though they may be true. And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, it can do great harm."

We cannot reasonably paraphrase that as "[pope] emphasized that 'a lot of damage can be done' when the truth is disregarded and slander is spread." The vatican plainly says instead that "saying only a part of the truth, and not the rest... give only half the truth... is probably the greatest damage that the media can do... neglecting the other part of the truth." The pope is talking about propaganda and/or media bias, aka half-truths. Contrast with 'disinformation' as opposed to 'misinformation'. If you prefer USA-based journalists to the vatican, here is USN&WR which got the story correct, although the author used a rhetorical question as a clickbait headline.[8] (CNN,[9] like NPR,[10] was 'close' but partially missed the boat.) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 18:12, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

When there is a conflict among reliable sources interpreting a quote, we can go one of two ways. Either (a) we can describe the conflict, giving appropriate weight to the conflicting interpretations, or (b) we can simply provide a direct quote and avoid the conflict. My preference here is (b) since (a) seems excessively detailed for an article that's not about the pope or how the news media interprets him. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 00:58, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
Yes, this is a rare case where describe-the-conflict is something we should avoid, at least in body-prose (maybe we can put in a footnote describing the problem-souces later). Because I think that WaPo just purely screwed up, and based their story off a truncated or otherwise malformed quote. NPR got the metaphor mostly correct, and USN&WR got it entirely correct (by verbosely quoting lots of the Pope's actual words). The mainspace sentence which I believe is quoting only the inaccurately media sources, is this one: "The pope said that he did not intend to offend with his strong words, but emphasized that 'a lot of damage can be done' when the truth is disregarded and slander is spread." Suggest we just cut that for now. I will work on a footnote, that we can add to the tail end of the coprophilia sentence, which explains to people that are reading WaPo or the independent or one of the other places which accused the pope of saying something that the vatican's official translation makes pretty dubious, what the pope is supposed to have actually said (via the usn&wr cite and/or via the vatican wp:primary source which I don't believe screwed anything up in the translation). Thanks for your help with this. I find it annoying when sources conflict, and in an article on 'fake news' it is especially crucial that we get the gory details correct. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:46, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Desperately needs a rewrite

Boy, where do we start.

  • Plenty of WP:UNDUE weight on personal opinions and specific viewpoints: the introduction itself is comprised of opinions/suggestions by a handful of news outlets, the European Parliament, Sweden, Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and the head of MI6. Outside of their personal opinions, there is very little on the actual content or history of "fake news", no alternative points of view and no adequate summary of the article's content (which is the main purpose of the introduction).
  • This continues in the body of the article. An entire section has been devoted to the studies of one Adrian Chen and a follow-up by Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts. Only a passing mention of the backlash against PropOrNot, which has been threatened with lawsuits.
  • The sources from that same section have been cherry picked. WITN is used twice to support the subtle assumption that pro-Trump accounts are universally pro-Russian, while the source states that "Many people who spread false news have no connections to any foreign power". The same is valid for the Guardian citation. The article there gives interesting information on Israeli, Chinese, Ukrainian, North Korean and British spinning and online trolling. Instead, only the part referring to Russia has been used. Few reasons to believe that the rest of this page doesn't quote in a similar selective fashion.
  • A good chunk of the "Impact by country" section contains opinions and reactions with little encyclopedic weight. The entire subsection on Germany is made up entirely of Merkel's statements. Many of the remaining subsections deal with individual cases. The subsection on India is the only one with a meaningful representation of the effects of fake content and the government's reaction to it.
  • Yellow journalism has existed since the dawn of mass media and has included faked interviews and completely unverifiable statements. Yet this article gives zero commentary on the similarities between the concept of fake news and yellow journalism. Instead, it has a strong political angle with obvious anti-Donald Trump and anti-Russian sentiment. Also, for an article that deals so much with Russia and Donald Trump, there are no reactions by either the Russian government/media or Trump himself. No reason not to stick a POV tag.

These are just a few examples. The whole article reads like someone's extensive, biased personal research. It is in desperate need of rewriting, and I'll be glad to receive some constructive feedback. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 16:24, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

The article draws from about 200 secondary reliable sources. Maybe you can suggest some additional secondary sources that meet the criteria of WP:Identifying reliable sources. Sagecandor (talk) 16:32, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
I see you're new here. I did not mention anything about the reliability of the sources. The problem is the way they are used, the tone in the article, and the structure of its content. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 16:38, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
If you could suggest some additional secondary sources that meet the criteria of WP:Identifying reliable sources to back up your claims, that would be helpful. Sagecandor (talk) 16:43, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
WP:UNDUE, WP:CHERRYPICK, WP:LEAD should work as "reliable sources to back up my claims" for now. Get familiar with how things work before resorting to fallacies. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 16:54, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
(1) The article relies on about 200 sources bringing together multiple different sources of information on many countries globally. (2) Might be a POV assertion here, as nothing is "cherry picked" but rather judiciously quoted sparingly from cited sources. (3) As per WP:LEAD, the intro should: The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. Which it does. Sagecandor (talk) 16:57, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Once more, there is no issue with the amount or quality of the sources. The issue lies in their usage. A good deal of the article is about a supposed Russian propaganda effort behind fake news, yet there is not a single argument stating otherwise. That makes the article politically charged and non-neutral. The introduction is not a concise overview of the article's contents, but considering the overall lack of focus, that's not surprising. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 17:03, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps you could suggest some additional secondary sources that meet the criteria of WP:Identifying reliable sources which offer a response from the parties you've mentioned above, where they talk about fake news websites, we could then add that to the article. Sagecandor (talk) 17:07, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Plenty of those already used can be used to balance it out. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 17:09, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Which ? Sagecandor (talk) 17:09, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Tourbillon, you may very well be right on these issues, but we won't know without evaluating the reliable secondary sources that exist to see if what's included is representative (and therefore neutral). I think that's why Sagecandor is asking you for reliable secondary sources. Meanwhile, please try to keep your approach collaborative and do not bite the newbies. There is an opportunity here to lead by example. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:17, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
I'm not biting, I'm only being straightforward and introducing the user to guidelines he has apparently not been familiar with before. I'm also not sure why you insist on sources. I repeatedly stated that the issue is with undue weight on the claims that fake news is Russian information warfare, and zero weight on the idea that it's just another form of clickbait profiteering or yellow journalism. I'll rewrite one section to illustrate what I mean (using reliable sources) and you can state any concerns on that. I'll need some time to finish off-Wiki work before that though, so it might not be in the next few hours. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 11:18, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. I do think we need reliable sources saying fake news websites are just another form of clickbait profiteering or yellow journalism before we can say something like that. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 23:33, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
reliable secondary sources In an article about dishonesty, who decides which secondary sources are reliable? It's like asking someone if he's stopped hitting his wife. Keith-264 (talk) 13:40, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
The Wikipedia community does. We have a useful guideline to help us and a dedicated noticeboard in case we have trouble resolving such matters here. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 23:34, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
Multiple different user accounts recently have showed up here to put forth the notion to do away with this article entirely, and all have suggested the same curious idea to merge it into so-called "Yellow journalism". That topic is not the same as intentionally engaging in fraud to fabricate whole cloth fake news websites. Seems more like WP:IDONTLIKEIT than a constructive suggestion. Sagecandor (talk) 23:39, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
Let's see what Tourbillon comes up with. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 00:04, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
I am also interested in what Tourbillon comes up with. But on the question of whether multiple people are suggesting an upmerge, perhaps rather than treat it as a curious thing, consider the idea that it is possible that LOTS of people read the actual contents of the article, and come to the immediate conclusion that a LARGE portion of this article are not about fake-news-websites aka deliberately-fraudulent-sites-that-impersonate-legit-organizations-but-lie-in-order-to-generate-money-from-traffic. Look at the whole section of Merkel-quotes. Is she REALLY only talking about *that* or is she also lumping in some commentary on propaganda-websites, conservative-websites, extreme-far-right-websites, comment-trolling-on-facebook, botnets, and all sort of things, which however bad they are, obviously ARE NOT about the topic of 'fake news websites' itself? There *is* a distinct topic being covered here, but there is also a lot of rehashing the extant article-topics of yellow journalism, media bias, conspiracy theory, propaganda, and so on and so forth, mixed in. May I suggest that people who suggest a lot of this stuff needs to be upmerged into yellow journalism, or into black propaganda, or whatever, might have a point. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:08, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

My constructive criticism, is that instead of organizing *this* article geographically, why don't we order it by type-of-fake-news? We can have one section devoted to explaining that The Onion is a relatively-harmless type of 'fake' news that is comedic. There won't be any comedy-satire-in-germany subsections, there will *just* be a worldwide view of The Onion and friends. Next we can tackle condensing all various bits related to msnbc.co[m] typo squatters into one section, up near the top since this is the purest form of deliberately-impersonating-legit-journalism. Next we can start to tackle the thorny issue of, how do we address sources that call infowars a fake-news-website, even though there is little evidence it is *deliberately wrong* as opposed to being wrong because people there actually sbelieve what they are writing. Breitbart is also sometimes called a fake-news-website, but is actually just yellow journalism, that I have seen, with no deliberate intent to deceive for scamming advertisers out of pay-per-click contractual obligations. RedState is found in a couple places as well, which is even more ludicrous; it is no better nor worse than WordPress.com and Blogger.com, it is a blogging-platform. Maybe if we start grouping by *type* rather than grouping by *place* (or by respondent-location which is about the same thing) we will start to get some idea of how much of the article needs upmerging, and how much is CORE to the topic at hand. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:08, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Because this article is only about one type of fake news. Deliberate hoax fraud on the Internet. Not satire. Sagecandor (talk) 23:09, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
47.222, the goal of at least some folks here (including Sagecandor and me at least) is to distinguish the subject of the article from yellow journalism, conventional propaganda, and satire and to focus the article on wholesale fabricated online stories. Many folks (but not all) who want to widen the scope want that because the recent fake news phenomenon reflects poorly on Trump, Russia, etc. and so there's been a strong reaction in certain media circles to the coverage of fake news. That doesn't strike me as a good reason to expand the scope of the article. That said, I agree that we should scrutinize the contents of the article, such as the Merkel comments, and make sure it fits within the intended scope and doesn't blur the lines between fake news and those other categories. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 00:31, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Sounds good, we agree on the goal in broad strokes (although I would insist that the focus has to be on *deliberately* fabricated online stories that *pretend* to be truthful in order to *financially* accomplish fraudulent gains -- fabricated stories can be 'false news' or can be 'satire news' which are BOTH distinct from being 'fake news'). But even under your weaker definition, I don't see the word "yellow" anywhere in the current prose. So we need to add a section that talks about yellow journalism, and that explains (with examples and cites) how something like MSNBC might be called biased, or something like WaPo might get a quote maltranslated, but that is not what is meant by 'fake news' because there was not deliberate attempt to defraud somebody of valuables, and no intentional pretense of identity, instead it was just a form of yellow journalism or media bias or whatever (by contrast with MSNBC.co). I also don't see any attempt to distinguish a fake news website from a piece of fake news, they are constantly conflated. There is some talk of propaganda, but almost never to *distinguish* it from fake news, almost always to conflate it with fake news.
  • "Alex Younger called fake news propaganda online dangerous for democratic nations."
  • "Fake news websites deliberately publish hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation to drive web traffic inflamed by social media. These sites are distinguished from news satire, as they mislead and profit from readers' gullibility."
  • "Prominent among fraudulent news sites include false propaganda created by individuals in the countries of Russia, [etc]"
That is NOT distinguishing the two. And the rest of the article has similar category errors which fail to distinguish with precision, what that part of the article is actually talking about. (It's not just the pope-section that is messed up!) So I think there is a lot of work still to be done. That said, I do very much appreciate that folks are trying hard and putting in a lot of work. This is just a tricky and problematic topic-area, that will need more work than usual to get to NPOV and proper weight-balance, because it has become the controversy-du-jour. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 18:15, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
These are more suggestions to expand the article to include "Yellow journalism", so much so as to make the article useless. Not seeing the point in continuing these pointless non-constructive discussions. This article is only about one type of fake news. Deliberate hoax fraud on the Internet. That includes propaganda deliberately spread as fraudulent news by those who know it to be false. It does NOT include "yellow" journalism. This term "yellow journalism" seems to be some sort of Shibboleth for those that keep repeating this term, ad nauseam. Not sure what's going on here. Sagecandor (talk) 18:39, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
No, I could be mistaken but I think 47.222 is suggesting that we add content distinguishing "fake news websites" from yellow journalism and traditional propaganda, essentially justifying the scope of this article. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 18:49, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
In my research reading the 193 sources for this article, I have not seen any making the comparison to "yellow journalism". I see no reason to add the shibboleth phrase "yellow journalism" in this article, just to have the phrase "yellow journalism" in this article for those that wish to have the phrase "yellow journalism" in this article, for its own sake. Sagecandor (talk) 19:26, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Yes, DrFleischman is correct, I'm suggesting we add a subsection explaining what yellow journalism actually is, and contrasting it with 'fake news website' and also with 'fake news story' plus go on to explain that sometimes they are conflated -- they are different things, but related conceptually. Yellow journalism is often a motive behind clickbait headlines, just like intentionally-fraudulent 'fake news websites' also often tend to produce clickbait headlines, for instance. That the 193 sources you looked at don't mention yellow journalism, is probably WHY the article is deficient in this respect. But sources exist, see the ones below, and there are plenty more where those came from. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:53, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Here are some reliable sources discussing both the online fake news phenomenon and yellow journalism:
  • Woolf, Christopher (December 8, 2017). "Back in the 1890s, fake news helped start a war". Public Radio International.
  • Soll, Jacob (December 18, 2016). "The Long and Brutal History of Fake News". Politico.
  • Chung-Yan, Chow (November 26, 2016). "How the Google and Facebook era drove news back to yellow press excesses". South China Morning Post.
  • Swartz, Jon; della Cava, Marco (December 2, 2016). "The Fake web: why we're so apt to believe fake news, apps and reviews". USA Today.
--Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:23, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Do any of those say that Fake news websites are "yellow journalism" ? Sagecandor (talk) 20:58, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Nope, I doubt it, but they implicitly explain the *difference* between the two. Which is what I want the wikipedia article to do, explain the differences. See the helpdocs at WP:CONCEPTDAB for where I'm trying to go. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:53, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Already done, in the "Definition" section of this article. Sagecandor (talk) 21:57, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
You cannot have your cake, and also consume your cake. I agree with what Tourbillion wrote in the start of this thread: Yet this article gives zero commentary on the similarities between the concept of fake news and yellow journalism. Sagecandor, you have already admitted that the article makes no mention of yellow journalism. It is a similar concept, and we ought to cover the distinction, using the sources DrFleischman dug up, so that we get closer to achieving NPOV. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:06, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
There is no cake. The article already defines the subject as hoax fraud. Nothing more, nothing less. Sagecandor (talk) 22:08, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Actually, while none of these sources explicitly says, "fake news websites are yellow journalism," they all seem to imply it to varying degrees:
  • PRI: "Fake news is nothing new. Its impact has waxed and waned through American history. But there was a golden age of "yellow journalism," back in the 1890s, when fake news helped start a war. Yellow journalism has been defined as any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical manner."
  • Politico: "During the Gilded Age, yellow journalism flourished, using fake interviews, false experts and bogus stories to spark sympathy and rage as desired."
  • SCMP: "Suddenly, we are back in the same situation the yellow press faced two centuries ago. "
  • USA Today: "There's a grand tradition of fabricated news in America media, Miller and others point out, dating to the murky origin of the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the roles William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, and Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World played in stoking conflict to help them sell papers at the dawn of the yellow journalism era. Fake news has always been popular, whether it be The National Enquirer, Weekly World News, Globe," Miller says. "And innovation has made it possible to spread that news faster and deeper." A radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, Orson Welles' Halloween Eve hoax in 1938 about a Martian invasion on Earth, created a nationwide panic. It was also a hit."
(I'm not providing these to argue that this article should be merged into Yellow journalism or that content about yellow journalism should be added o this artictle. I'm just providing source material to inform the discussion.) --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 22:30, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
This is media commentary that could at best be a sentence or two in already existing section on Fake_news_website#Media_commentary. Sagecandor (talk) 22:33, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
This is more than just about media commentary. At a minimum these sources place fake news websites in historical context, perhaps in a "Background" section. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 22:43, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Yes, and in addition to giving the historical context being a Good Thing for the readership (makes them smarter), it will also be a Good Thing for the article's balance and neutrality (keeps it from being a coatrack which ought to be upmerged). Double win. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:56, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 Done. Per recommendation by DrFleischman (talk · contribs), used sources as suggested by DrFleischman (talk · contribs) and added a new section on "Pre-Internet history". Let's not let this section get so large that it overweights the entire article and violates WP:UNDUE WEIGHT. Just enough to inform the reader that "fake news" existed before Fake news websites.  Done. [11]. Thanks. Sagecandor (talk) 02:02, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
I think more can be added on that, but what I'm also working on includes cases like this one. - ☣Tourbillon A ? 20:42, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Comment: This whole article suffers from a bad case of recentism. Portions of the US elite decided to push the "fake news" term and narrative into the public consciousness because they realized that they were losing the information war with Russia among large portions of their own population. Suddenly everyone starts to pretend that information warfare is something new, and not something that the US had used successfully to bring down the Soviet Union (with Voice of America and RFE/RL), with the Soviet Union's successor state now returning the favour. The reason why the US's version was so successful then, and why Russia's version is so successful now, is that both rely/relied largely (but not entirely) on the truth, spoken by marginalized voices from their respective societies. This is why even many of those who were not included on Washington Post's list of "Russian propaganda websites" mentioned in this article, for example author John Michael Greer, claimed to be disappointed that their site didn't make the cut to be included. To quote Mr. Greer, he sees this as merely a campaign to silence those journalists who are not "willing to buy into the failed neoconservative consensus that’s guided American foreign policy for the last sixteen years". Esn (talk) 08:02, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

This is not a forum for general discussion about Fake news website. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. Sagecandor (talk) 08:08, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
Similar criticisms to my own can be seen in the talk page archive, and will probably be seen in the future. As for improvements, I recommend adding in John Michael Greer's critiques (and similar ones from other outside-the-Beltway journalists and authors). This article is one-sided by a 99-to-1 degree. The only bit of criticism I see, the quote "The Washington Post and PropOrNot received criticism from The Intercept, Fortune, Rolling Stone, AlterNet, Adrian Chen at The New Yorker, and in an opinion piece in the paper itself, written by Katrina vanden Heuvel." doesn't even mention what their criticisms were! Esn (talk) 08:22, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
Also, this article seems to conflate two separate phenomena. One is clickbaity hoax news that "mislead and profit from readers' gullibility" (as the first introduction paragraph says). The other phenomena is State-sponsored Internet propaganda (for which, you'll note, there was already a pre-existing short article, and which has a long history in different countries). Esn (talk) 08:31, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
This article is about deliberate intentional hoax fraud. Sagecandor (talk) 08:33, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
It is about two completely different phenomena! One section is about the modern-day equivalent of yellow journalism from poor villages in Macedonia and Romania who're just trying to get as many visitors as possible by whatever means possible (and happened to find that covering Trump is the most profitable method, just as mainstream news channels found). The other section is about alleged state-sponsored Internet propaganda from Russia, a lot of which has to do not with news organizations but with internet trolls. This is part of the wider West/Russia information warfare going on right now. The campaign against it has led to accusations of modern-day McCarthyism (see the link I posted earlier), while those on the other side (Russian officials) also blame the Western governments for being behind a barrage of fake news for their own geopolitical ends (see this article for a recent example). Esn (talk) 08:51, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be more logical if the article was split in two, with part of it (the Romanian and Macedonian part) moved into yellow journalism, and part of it moved into propaganda, or perhaps a more specific name dealing specifically with state-sponsored manipulation of journalism, state-sponsored news narrative pushing, etc. This latter article would summarize the sources alleging contemporary Russian state-sponsored information warfare, as well as the EU and US government declarations aimed at fighting it, and counter-accusations of neo-McCarthyism from certain quarters. It would also include sections about mirroring accusations from Russian officials that the West controls news narratives to its geo-political advantage (I can probably find a bunch of those quite easily), and about the CIA's documented clandestine control over Western journalists (from the the 1950s until the present day, as revealed by Udo Ulfkotte). And generally, a summary of all the programs listed in the state-sponsored Internet propaganda list, from China, Russia, UK, US, Israel and Ukraine.

Alternately, since this whole news storm, and the term "fake news" itself, was generated by shock over Trump's election, perhaps this article should be more tightly focused on "fake news" (or "misleading news") and its alleged role in helping Donald Trump win. In that case, the stuff pre-dating the Trump phenomenon (about Brazil, etc.) could be removed, and the article more tightly focused. Esn (talk) 09:49, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

All the sections are related to the deliberate and intentional spread of hoax fraud. Sagecandor (talk) 17:26, 21 December 2016 (UTC)


Pre-Internet history

I was initially happy to see this section added, as I had followed the prior commentary and agreed with @DrFleischman:: "the goal ... is to distinguish the subject of the article from yellow journalism..."

However, I don't think the current section achieves that goal. Indeed, a summary (slightly oversimplified) of the content is that fake news existed before the Internet. However, the stated goal wasn't to simply add something about the history of fake news, it was to talk about fake news as distinguished from other things such as yellow journalism. I think it is useful to think of a spectrum, with well-balanced, well researched, unbiased and neutral coverage of a situation at one end of the spectrum, and wholly made up with an intention to deceive at the other end of the spectrum. Yellow journalism and satire both occupy spots along the spectrum but neither are at the end. While satire is wholly made up it is not done with the intention to deceive. While yellow journalism arguably has as its goal an intention to lead people to incorrect conclusions, it is typically not wholly made up, and the goal is often to move opinion somewhat but not a complete black versus white difference.

Additionally problematic is the choice of the two examples. The War of the World broadcast is not remotely fake news. That broadcast was preceded and interrupted by clarification that it was fiction, so wasn't intended to deceive. While some people did miss the explanations and overreacted, if there is any yellow journalism aspect, it is the subsequent coverage which made false claims about how much panic actually occurred. That's too subtle an example to illustrate the point and certainly isn't accurately reported in the section. The incidents surrounding the Spanish-American war are better examples of yellow journalism but they don't qualify as fake news in the way it is being used currently. There's not much doubt that allegations of the Spanish involvement in the blowing up of the USS Maine were irresponsible journalism, but they weren't wholly made up.

In summary, I'd like to see a section which distinguishes fake news from yellow journalism but it should make the distinction not leave the impression that yellow journalism was simply a pre-Internet version of fake news, and if were going to illustrate with examples we ought to pick cleaner examples.--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:34, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

@Sphilbrick:Removed War of the Worlds, per your suggestion, above. [12]. As for the rest, I used the sources recommended by @DrFleischman:. "Fake news websites" are at the very very very far end of the spectrum, intentional deliberate hoax fraud for purposes of military deception or clickbait. I agree with you that section can use improvement. I strongly feel that section should NOT get much bigger. @Sphilbrick:, maybe you can suggest some sources, and/or try to improve that section yourself? Sagecandor (talk) 18:39, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
A few more fixes, per suggestion by Sphilbrick, [13]. Sagecandor (talk) 18:42, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
I agree with the sentiment that this section should not get large. While there is a place in Wikipedia for a discussion of the range of mass communication prose (if it doesn't already exist), I think it is useful for this article to remain focused on a specific segment. That said it is useful to explain how the segment is different from other segments but that discussion should not go into, for example an in-depth discussion of yellow journalism, or satire, it should briefly and succinctly distinguish.--S Philbrick(Talk) 20:14, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
I agree with Sphilbrick that it should only briefly and succinctly distinguish. Sagecandor (talk) 21:16, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 7 December 2016

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no consensus for a move at this time. (non-admin closure) JudgeRM (talk to me) 20:17, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Fake news website → Fake news – The ultimate subject is "fake news"; Fake news originate/propagate not only via dedicated websites. They may also be generated via social networks - üser:Altenmann >t 20:11, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

  • Oppose move to just "fake news". Move to Fake news online or Hoax news online. Main topic is as per first sentence of article, deliberately fraudulent news sites. Companion to List of fake news websites. Sagecandor (talk) 20:25, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Support with editing. The lead says that the article is about websites, and the focus of the lead on websites: but overall the actual subject matter of the article is fake news itself. For example, the section Impacts by country is about the impact of fake news itself. I would suggest (1) making the move and (2) editing the article to make clear it is really about fake news as such. Task (2) will not require much work, for the very reason that actually the interesting thing is the fake news and not the websites. --MrStoofer (talk) 09:18, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Support as clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC: current widespread press coverage and public understanding of the phenomenon is only ever talking about websites when it uses the term "fake news". --McGeddon (talk) 12:17, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose "Fake news" is not a discrete topic, it's just a broad catch-all description of various things like hoaxes, sloppy reporting etc that have all been around for ages and are already covered elsewhere on WP. This page, as noted above, needs to keep this title but lose half its content, and focus on the specific modern phenomenon of actual, substantive websites styled as bona-fide news outlets that publicise totally invented stories either for political purposes or for financial gain (and btw it's not clear that many of those are actually Russian, despite the rather obsessive propaganda push here that sees this as 90% being about Russia). N-HH talk/edits 19:18, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
Further to the suggestion below, I would also support a name and focus shift to make the page about the recent flurry of controversy per se. The idea of "fake news" has become a bit of a media and political theme recently, with some justification, but it's also being deployed as a political tool and as a convenient stick for beating Russia. Hence it would need to be addressed with some critical detachment though, rather than maintaining the current approach of "here are a bunch of vaguely thematically connected allegations, which WP is going to say are probably true, because a tossed-off piece I saw on CNN said so". N-HH talk/edits 08:49, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Rather than have a fake news article and a fake news controversy of 2016 article, I would suggest keeping *this* article as a WP:CONCEPTDAB which explains that there is such a thing as a fake-news-website that intentionally defrauds via making stuff up then pretending to be real news as a form of clickbait (e.g. msnbc.co), but goes on to explain that the idea has been metaphorically applied to Russian propaganda, conservative yellow journalism, etc etc. Part of that would include a new section titled Fake news as a broader metaphor, including a sub-subsection about the fake news controversy of 2016 in country XYZ. If that got large enough, it could be split off into a subsidiary article. But I don't think we should rename to fake news (metaphor), for reasons I lay out in my own notvote. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:45, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose. There is a very real scope problem--disinformation propagated through the news media has been around for decades--but the solution isn't to broaden the scope, the solution is to narrow it. I'd move this article to something like Fake news controversy or Fake news controversy (2016-). I agree that the word website is inaccurate since some of the fake stories, particularly those planted by the Russians, were propagated through "real" news websites. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:40, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose. This article is mostly about Russian propaganda and should be incorporated into that particular article. If it is to exist as a distinct article, I would support something similar to Dr. Fleischman 's suggestion of moving this to "Fake news controversy (2016)", provided that the POV concerns be properly addressed. 11Eternity11 (talk) 03:19, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
If your version of an appropriate article on fake news is to ignore all reliable secondary sources that mention Russian propaganda involvement in the spread of fake news dezinformatsiya and censor all discussion of that from the article -- that is ludicrous. Sagecandor (talk) 03:31, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Please don't assume my position. A "Fake news controversy (2016)" article would lend itself to mentioning the Russian propaganda accusations. A simple "fake news website" article would not. 11Eternity11 (talk) 03:57, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
"Russian propaganda accusations" ? So do you mean these are only accusations and no actual Russian propaganda is occurring? Sagecandor (talk) 06:03, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Calling accusations "accusations" is not a statement on accuracy. 11Eternity11 (talk) 06:47, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Didn't answer the question. Sagecandor (talk) 06:59, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
You gave a false dilemma: either Russian propaganda is occurring or they are "Russian propaganda accusations". These are accusations of Russian involvement in fake news. Me calling these accusations accusations has nothing to do with whether or not the accusations are true. I am simply calling a thing by its proper name. 11Eternity11 (talk) 03:07, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
So there's no Russian propaganda happening at all then? None? Sagecandor (talk) 03:33, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
Where are you getting this? 11Eternity11 (talk) 04:12, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
Sort-of clunky. I think I support that even less than "fake news website." BobLaRouche (talk) 04:51, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Or alternatively I word support Fake news on the Internet. Sagecandor (talk) 04:55, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Oppose this as an alterantive. BlueSalix (talk) 11:46, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
User failed to give reason. Sagecandor (talk) 20:10, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose The article deals with the subject of fake news websites, which would also include social media. Keiiri (talk) 13:49, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Satirical News (eg. The Onion) have been labeled "Fake News", as seen in this 2006 NPR article, this 2010 Business Insider article, and this New York Times Article. The definition of "fake news" for The Onion differs as "The Onion" is a satirical news site. Meanwhile, this article deals with websites that outright posts fake news. I have seen fake news before the election had even ended, such as a kmt11 (as debunked by several news outlets during Summer 2016) reporting that Jim Carrey would become a jury in Rome, Georgia, as seen here. Yoshiman6464 (talk) 16:08, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Support. It's a primary topic, and fake news is fake news, however it is disseminated.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:49, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Strongly oppose rename, also support heavy rewrite. As many comments above point out, most of the current article-body is about 'fake news', which is a synonym for false-news-by-people-we-dislike. It is important to have a very strict title here, Fake news website, and to furthermore very specifically define what that actually is: a website which intentionally manufactures fake news-stories, and fraudulently pretends they are truthful, to attract clickbait. This is a NARROW definition. Facebook is, by that definition, NOT a fake-news-website, although often the news-stories FROM actual fake-news-websites get passed around on facebook. Similarly, websites of groups which are politically disliked for ideological reasons, such as Breitbart, are NOT a fake-news-website, because there is a difference between biased news / incorrect news / false news (depends on your own bias as to how you characterize breitbart), and the narrowly-defined FakeNewsWebsite™ which is intentionally fraudulent (msnbc.co) AND just makes shit up (The Onion, America's finest news source). The Onion is not a fake news website, either, because they do not pretend to be real news, but are clearly a comedic satire thereof. Until we get this article nailed down to a proper topic (intentionally fraudulent websites that just make shit up and pretend it is real news) PLUS a bunch of WP:CONCEPTDAB sections which explain that although sometimes called 'fake news' from time to time in the media, The Onion is comedy, The People's Cube is satire, Brietbart is yellow journalism, InfoWars is real news seen through the lense of various unsupported conspiracy theories, and only MSNBC.co actually exemplifies the narrowest aka the core definition of 'fake news'. If we rename this article as 'fake news' and let Mother Jones define anything they see as 'false news' to be on-topic, we will NEVER get a proper article, because that is inherently a POV fork title! We have an article on news which covers the topic well enough -- having an article on 'fake news' only would be a WP:POVFORK that constantly criticized anything *somebody* in the media wanted to label as 'false'. Hence the endless talkpage battles over whether NBC is 'fake' (aka biased) and whether FOX is 'fake' (aka biased). Rename is a bad idea, and we need to upmerge all the parts of this article which discuss 'false' news into the media bias or news parent articles, and concentrate here solely on the narrow core of actual no-questions-about-it fake news websites like msnbc.co[m], and disambiguate that from other things that are sometimes lumped in with it as a means of guilt by association. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:39, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Article is about specifically Fake news websites and Fake news online from those who deliberately write fraud and hoaxes. Sagecandor (talk) 16:36, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
You are speaking about what you would like to see, not what the article actually is (let along what it is supposed to be). "The New York Times pointed out that within a strict definition, 'fake news' on the Internet referred to a fictitious article which was fabricated with the deliberate motivation to defraud readers, generally with the goal of profiting through clickbait.[30]" The current article is NOT about that phenomenon, the current article is a mess of talking heads unaware of ambiguities, mistranslations of foreign terms, and intermixing 'false/biased news' with deliberately fraudulent clickbait scams. Even the most cursory read-through shows that.[15] There are plenty of other complaints just like mine on the talkpage up above (and now also in the new section below). These are policy-based complaints, and repeated assertions to the contrary change nothing. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:58, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
That is an article about propaganda of a covert nature; read the mid-2016 version, before recentism-based 'fake/false news' theories were retroactively added into the intro-paragraphs.[16] It is completely distinct from the narrowly-defined 'fake news website' per the NYT definition in my comment just above, which is an intentionally fraudulent clickbait scam. Just because they pushed propaganda in the 1960s, does not make www.cia.gov into a 'fake news website'. Just because a particular news-story is false/biased/propaganda/satire/wrong, does not make the originator of that story a producer of 'fake news with intent to financially defraud' ... there is a *massive* category error, when trying to lump 'false news' of every stripe, into the realistically-speaking very teesy topic of 'fake news'. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:58, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Comments

re: "fake news" can refer to many different things [17]" -- Yes, many terms may refer to many different things. And we handle this with the concept of and rules for "disambiguation". Yes, the article you cited describes confusion with the term. And this article not the only one speaking about this. And this issue must be covered in the article. - üser:Altenmann >t 16:34, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

This article is specifically about intentional fraud. Sagecandor (talk) 17:28, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/mark-zuckerberg-responds-to-fake-news-controversy-for-third-time-in-one-week-1201922644/
  2. ^ https://mic.com/articles/161488/pope-francis-just-condemned-the-sinful-practice-of-spreading-fake-news#.hkU7vQkam
  3. ^ http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-flynn-jr-pizzagate-trump-transition-2016-12
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Useful charts but not deliberate hoax fraud

Charts here [18] are useful, but these are mostly "real" news, not fake, not intentional deliberate hoax fraud. Sagecandor (talk) 03:38, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

I especially think the article needs expansion, to have a subsection about media bias, which distinguishes that (and yellow journalism) from deliberately faked stories produced by organizations in pursuit of their intent to financially defraud somebody. The chart in one of the sources you linked to is instructive.[19] They list the following spectrum of audience-ideological-leanings, according to 2014 data from the Pew Research Center:
  • Slate, New Yorker (about as liberal-leaning of an audience as Breitbart.com is conservative-leaning)
  • NPR, NYT, Guardian, Al Jazeera. (about as liberal-leaning of an audience as Drudge is conservative-leaning) (*also* lists comedy-satire programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report please note!)
  • PBS/BBC], WaPo, HuffPo, Economist, Politico. (also lists aggregator BuzzFeed)
  • CNN, MSNBC/NBC_News. (about as liberal-leaning of an audience as FOX is conservative-leaning)
  • CBS, ABC, USA_Today, Bloomberg. (also lists aggregator Google News)
  • WSJ, Yahoo News (which unlike googleNews has reporters I believe)
  • hypothetical average USA citizen who is a dead-center-independent-swing-voter
  • empty (no conservative-leaning equivalent to WSJ) (pro-GaryJohnson&BillWeld one would guess)
  • empty (no conservative-leaning equivalent to CBS) (pro-Kasich / pro-Christie)
  • FOX News. (pro-Rubio or pro-Jeb depending on the pundit) (about as conservative-leaning of an audience as CNN is liberal-leaning)
  • empty (no conservative-leaning equivalent to NPR) (pro-Carson / pro-RandPaul)
  • Only lists aggregator The Drudge Report (pro-Trump) (about as conservative-leaning of an audience as NPR is liberal-leaning)
  • Breitbart/Hannity (pro-Trump), Beck/Blaze (pro-Cruz), Rush (pro-both) (about as conservative-leaning of an audience as Slate.com is liberal-leaning)
The stuff in parentheses is not from the source, obviously, but methinks is helpful in understanding the spectrum. If you compare the bias of the news-reporting of those same firms,[20] you come up with a similar-looking spectrum overall for the 1993-1999-ish timeframe, although there are some interesting positional-shifts of individual firms like WSJ.
These are not the only studies of the issue of media bias, obviously, but they are two nice data-points to get us started on a subsection about the difference between 'fake news' and merely biased news (which some people characterize as 'false' but is really just the sin-of-omission type of thing usually). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:18, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
These are all things and topics for a different article. Let's not overload this article with the wider topic of Media bias. This article is about deliberate hoax fraud only. Sagecandor (talk) 21:21, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
If that is really your goal, I suggest we delete every sentence and every source in the article which is NOT about fraudulent hoaxes. Please note that a piece of alleged 'fake news' or a comment metaphorically about 'fake news' cannot be considered "fraud" unless there is a deliberate intent to financially defraud someone or some entity. 70news is an attempt to trick gullible news-consumers into clicking fabricated stories, and then defraud advertising-providers (by inflating the pay-per-click revenue stream that 70news is paid). But my goal is to write a scrupulously neutral article which covers the difference between 'fake news websites' and various things which are NOT strictly fake news websites, but may have been called that in a metaphorical sense. Please see the Talk:List of fake news websites history, and the edit-history, if you don't believe that MSNBC and Breitbart have been attacked as 'fake news' by one source or another. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:40, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
What you are describing is fine for an article on Media bias. Sagecandor (talk) 21:48, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
What I would like to see, is for *this* article to describe the differences between a 'fake news website' and a 'biased media website' because people often get them conused, and they are conceptually related topics. (See also, discussion of why we ought to have a subsection describing the differences between 'fake news website' and the distinct concept of the 'yellow journalism website'.) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:57, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Already made clear in the existing "Definition" section in the article. Sagecandor (talk) 22:04, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
As with your assertion that the exiting article COMPLETELY explains the difference between 'yellow journalism' and the different but related concept of 'fake news [website]' without ever using the phrase yellow journalism (or the word yellow), your parallel assertion that the existing article completely explains the difference between 'fake news [website]' and the related but very distinct concept of 'media bias' without ever using the phrase media bias, is incorrect. We mention the concept once, as writer bias, in passing. That is wholly insufficient methinks. Do you have any policy-based argument, for excluding the explanation of these things from this article? If so, please provide some WP:PAG bluelinks that support your contention the existing article is perfect as-is. Because I'm not seeing it. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:14, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
The repeated references to, "the word yellow", is disturbing. Sagecandor (talk) 22:31, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
I disagree that the repeated references to the word yellow are disturbing. I think it is quite obvious that an assertion that an article explains the difference between two concepts and doesn't mention one of them is problematic. I've stated above, and I reiterate, I don't think this article should be, an article with an in-depth discussion of yellow journalism. That said, it is perfectly understandable that casual readers might wonder about how the two concepts compare so it is useful to have some discussion. I think that's the point that 47.XXX is making I don't read those comments as suggesting that we need a full-blown discussion of yellow journalism in this article.--S Philbrick(Talk) 20:52, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
I agree with this analysis by Sphilbrick, except to say I strongly hope this article does not get deleted or merged into "yellow journalism" or subsumed by a discussion of "yellow journalism", over and above the topic of this article itself which is only Internet usage of fake and deliberate intentional hoax fraud. Sagecandor (talk) 21:11, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
@ 47.xxx... I think the Pew Research material is extremely interesting and I thank you for providing it here as I had not seen it before. That said, I see it as useful for the article on media bias, but that is not this article. Media bias generally refers to the shades of emphasis along the political spectrum which is decidedly not the same and almost orthogonal to a fact-based spectrum. Someone ought to explore that concept in more detail but this article is already fairly large even while concentrating on one aspect of journalism; I don't think this is the right place to add what could be a very large discussion. At most, it may be useful to mention media bias in the context of explaining that's not what this article is about but that's about it.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:42, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
Strongly agree with Sphilbrick. There is a difference between Media bias which has its own article, and some kid in Macedonia who sets up a fake news website to look like Media and puts on there deliberate intentional hoax fraud. Sagecandor (talk) 21:47, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Sphilbrick, I am urging that we write a how-is-this-distinct-from-media-bias portion, correct. We need not have ALL the material *in* this article, but we need to have something that describes the concept of a spectrum of ideological bias in various news-sources (plus links to the full article), AND identifies the endpoints (which are different depending on the country... 'centre-right' in the French spectrum is much different from 'center-right' in the modern USA spectrum). After which, as part of explaining the difference, we need to have a few sentences which explain that, in rare cases, some sources such as Breitbart (one end of a spectrum) have accused MSNBC (opposite side of the center-line) have accused each other of being 'fake news' in a metaphorical sense. Here is PBS on the distinction.

...Will Oremus: Yes, the term 'fake news' is relatively new. A few years ago if somebody said, 'fake news,' you wouldn't know necessarily what they are talking about, maybe they were talking about a satire site like The Onion or The Daily Show. It came into currency in recent months because of the rise of a particular type of thing, which is a story that's basically made up. It was very popular during the election season for people to — for hoaxsters to make up stories that played to people's political biases. So, something like, you know, Hillary Clinton is about to be arrested by the New York Police Department for email crimes. They would just make that up. They would publish it. And it would get shared widely on Facebook. Since then, the term has become applied — it has become a political football. And people call — you hear people on the right calling the New York Times fake news, people on the left saying Breitbart is fake news. But originally, it was actual hoaxes that were made up out of whole cloth."[21]

And here is Breitbart on the distinction.[22] The distinction with sites like InfoWars is much trickier, since it is a conspiracy-theory website in addition to being a news-website, so it would go into a separate section, on the slimmer distinction between a conspiracy theory website and a fake news website; this opinion-piece covers the ground reasonably well.[23] There would also need to be section explaining the very slim (but very pertinent) distinction between a strict-definition 'fake news website' and The Onion or The People's Cube, which are also often classified as flat-out being 'fake news websites' by reliable sources... but are distinct from the strict core definition, in specific ways. Cf The Daily Show, which PBS also mentions. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:27, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
That would be too much weight and would violate WP:UNDUE WEIGHT and the entire article would be overweighted by this notion. This is an article about fake news webites creating deliberate and intentional hoax fraud. We already have an article on Media bias. There is even an entire article on Media bias in the United States. Sagecandor (talk) 12:54, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
I am concerned about how best to cover this. The article is already over 150 K and per size, way beyond the size which strongly suggests splitting. That said, size is not a legitimate reason for excluding relevant material. On the merits, I am concerned about how succinctly the issue can be addressed. My simplistic notion is that there are two axes, one the traditional political spectrum, which is one but not the only form of media bias, and a second axis roughly representing how factual material is. I see these two axes is roughly orthogonal. However, I suspect that the far left doesn't see the far right as simply holding a different political opinion but literally wrong, while those on the far right have similar views about the left extremes, so neither would be comfortable with a statement that factuality is orthogonal to political bias.
An even more simplistic option would be to simply state that this is not about media bias, with a link to that article (which, unfortunately, needs a lot of work).
My current thinking is that we ought to address the size of this article first, and if we could find a sensible way to split it out maybe the remaining core article could then have a paragraph or two on distinctions between fake news and bias.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:12, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Ah, but is the article about 'fake news' primarily, or about 'fake news websites'? There is already a rename-discussion up above, about whether or not this article ought to be about 'fake news' as opposed to the much narrower subject of 'fake news website' ... which includes some side-discussions of potential up-merges or cross-merges or spinoffs. My personal take is that broad-concept-articles like internet hoax and yellow journalism, in concert with topic-specific articles like 2016 United States election interference by Russia and black propaganda, can help slim down ~~50% of the contents here into places that are *about* those particular pull-quotes. Almost all of the pope-quotation-stuff is improper for an article about specifically 'fake news websites' because the pope's quotation was very generic and referred to the media's obsession with scandal and dirt-digging sensationalism, even when true... which has little to do with 'fake news' and even less to do with 'fake news websites'. There will still be SOME pope-related material here in this article, but mostly as a footnote explaining how WaPo mistranslated/misquoted the pope! On a different track of your thought about splitting and/or slimming, this article has a bunch of stuff that is already covered in almost identical words in the fake news websites in the United States, which could be used to hold most of the USA-centric political stuff (especially the black propaganda bits which don't fit the strict definition of 'fake news website'). But I'd prefer just to upmerge that content here, since the buzzword of 'fake news' -- as opposed to the more general concept of false news -- is pretty USA-centric in terms of source-counting. I also pretty strongly believe the geographic-organization-structure is doing us no favors, and am working on a revamped layout suggestion. Two other wikipedians are also working offpage on some suggestions for a revamp/rewrite/reorganization of some sort. Don't know if this will help you in thinking up a good pathway forwards, but figured I would point out the various things that are going on at present or you. Extreme right on the Internet was also a recently-created redirect, and FlynnJr was recently uncreated, and so on. Lots of stuff in flux. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 19:17, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

this is some other section whose point is unclear

Comment: Elinruby (talk · contribs) has repeatedly violated WP:TALKO by editing another user's comments in this section, in the last edit removing all replies. [24] and [25] and [26]. This makes it impossible to have a constructive conversation here. Sagecandor (talk) 06:30, 22 December 2016 (UTC)


Here Sagecandor I decided I shouldn't bite the newbies. This is how you start your own section, Dude. Elinruby (talk) 06:35, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

  • Please do not use an entire section header on a talk page to refer to a quote "mean editor" [27]. This is another violation of site policy. Sagecandor (talk) 06:38, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
    • It would technically be a violation of policy, if Elinruby was referring to another wikipedian, but as I read the diff, Elinruby was suggesting "mean editor" as a section-title referring to themselves (aka Elinruby-is-a-mean-editor). Calling oneself mean, is not a policy-violation, of course. But I think the larger point is, that wikipedia is not composed of rule-following robots here. There are some talkpage guidelines, yes. And there is wikiquette, yes. But wikipedia is not about "who followed the rules to the Nth decimal place" because what wikipedia is really about is "let us all work together to improve the content in mainspace". Other concerns are completely 100% secondary to that primary goal. Sagecandor, as a new editor, you will need to get some experience with WP:AGF as one of the key functional-sociological-interactions policies here, which allow all us separate individuals with our own personal foibles spread all over the map both geographically and ideologically, to function as a team and build the encyclopedia collaboratively. When you immediately accused Elinruby of calling YOU a 'mean editor' ... rather than assuming good faith, and then reading more closely before jumping to conclusions... could have avoided this whole editing-in-anger argument, about who was and who was not following the talkpage-etiquette-strictures. Now, quite possibly you are very anxious right now to hit reply, and 'educate' me on what exact 'site violations' you have recorded in your history-logs, that prove Elinruby was the only one at fault, and THAT is the problem in a nutshell here: what matters is working together to improve the encyclopedia, and playing the find-fault-with-others-game does not do that. I urge Elinruby to try and cut Sagecandor some slack, since Sagecandor is working hard on this difficult topic, but finding the steep learning curve of wikipedia culture and wikipedia unwritten rules a bit of a burden. And I very definitely urge Sagecandor to concentrate on content and not contributors; stay neutral in our mainspace contributions, bend over backwards to be omnidirectionally friendly to our fellow wikipedians... those are the keys to the wikipedia universe, and they are not well-served by sections like this. Or by the bickering which *led* to a section like this. Stay cool when the editing gets hot, in other words. I ask please that any further discussion, of specific behavior by any specific editor, or of talkpage guidelines and policies in a general sense, be restricted to user-talkpages rather than this article-talkpage, which is supposed to be devoted to Improving The Article. In particular, I am happy to help explain the rules, written and unwritten and when to be cool about other wikipedians bending them, to anybody who cares to ask me (but on user-talk please, not here). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 19:56, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for saying something. I have considered deleting the entire section, but of course I am not the only one in it. If @Sagecandor: is also fine with this then I move you delete this section. There are a number of other things I'd like to check with Sagecandor about but hey we can start with that as an open question maybe (?) Elinruby (talk) 07:21, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

multiple problems with article

From a quick scan I see the following:

  • Most importantly from my point of view, this is not an information security article. Journalism would be a better categorization. Information security deals with the integrity of a particular body of institutional or corporate or government information and ways to protect it from theft, vandalism or compromise. This article is about public discourse being compromised, sometimes deliberately, sure, but the target is public opinion not data.
  • Needs a copy-edit for English. Some editors may not be native speakers, which they don't have to be, but there are idiom strangenesses
  • The organization of the article is sub-optimal; it offends even me, and I am usually an offender in this respect. I agree that it would probably be better to organize in some other way than by country -- it makes the hugely disproportionate attention to the US even more glaring.
  • Facebook is not a fake news site as defined in the lede, although I agree that sharing on FB is definitely a factor in the phenomenon. So for it to have entire sections devoted to it is jarring, and probably should be addressed.

Hope some of these remarks are helpful. Elinruby (talk) 21:56, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

(cleaned up the comments below, to restore numbering-formatting-stuff, and sign each subsection with authorship. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 20:00, 24 December 2016 (UTC))
please explain how you think this article discusses information security. Cyber warfare just possibly if we include disinformation. It's information security I am taking issue with, though. Elinruby (talk) 06:04, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
do you really want a list? I could do a copy edit and refer you to the history. No wait, that was my more unhelpful self. I'll give you a couple of examples if I actually get around to editing the article. Elinruby (talk) 06:04, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
yes, I do see that. Meant to come back with a comment about that but was hoping to come up with a suggestion since the idea of organizing by type of site has been suggested and rejected. Organizing by countries is splintering the discussion, which is one of the article's problems, although it does give everybody a token nod, But when there are 200 lines about the US vs six about Brazil, you may have a weight problem. (estimates off the top of my head, didn't count -- point is the order of magnitudes of addditional text) Elinruby (talk) 06:04, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
yes, it is. But as a vector not as a point of origin, right? Unless you are saying that Facebook is a fake news site? Elinruby (talk) 06:04, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Additional problems:

  • fachosphère linking to an article on a different topic
  • "stoked emotions of wariness"?
  • "somber duty" to gather news?

just for a start Elinruby (talk) 06:27, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Elinruby, your comments are on-point. I agree about the re-organization being imperative, the infobox for 'information security' being a jarring pick (matches the *title* but not the actual *content* as of now), the incorrect usage of fachosphère (see further up this talkpage), and I also definitely agree with you that the article treats facebook in a lax imprecise fashion -- in some places we are conflating facebook with being a 'fake news website' (when it is really just a vector), and in other places we are lauding facebook as the antidote to fake news websites (but again they are just a vector and cannot therefore solve the root cause of the problem). So I suggest a section specifically covering the difference between facebook/twitter/similar social media websites, and a strictly-defined 'fake news website' plus how they interact. See also the above discussion about adding sections that discuss the distinction between yellow journalism and 'fake news [websites]', and the distinction between media bias and fake news [websites]', and so on. If you want to make a userspace draft to work on the structural problems, I will help there. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:38, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Draft:Fake news as she is written there ya go. Feel free to paste the current version and go to town. I need to figure out why there isn't a link to deep packet filtering, I could swear there used to be an article on that. Anyway, after that, I need a break as I have a slight overdose of Buzzfeed right now, and am starting to type funny ;) but I'll come back to this relatively soon. Sometime today, maybe in an hour or two...maybe more if I fall asleep. Elinruby (talk) 12:52, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Those all sound like good ideas. Also see the Glenn Greenwald article right at the end, ref 187 I think Elinruby (talk) 13:01, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Where to begin. Hillary Clinton, who did not know how to use a web browsers, is now instructing us in the dangers of their use. In not particular order:

  • RealClearPolitics is not a reliable source and it is being quoted for truth.
  • There is way way too much reliance on Buzzfeed in this article. And they are no more reliable when quotedby another media organization. Although, confusingly, every so often they publish actual journalism. Or so it appears to me. A couple of such articles are quoted here, as are quite a number of other much lower-quality buzzfeed articles which are all each quoted 5,6, and maybe seven times. It makes the article seem much better referenced than it is.
  • speaking of which, I found more sneaky piping -- I've done this sort of thing in the name of readability but this... there word epidemic was linked, which made it look supported, but I did not find this quote in this article. This is the wrong page to be doing this imho, even a little for readability.
  • Oh yeah. The article about US politics by a French news agency and published in Australia is not listing the agency as its author.
  • DCist is a blog with no published editorial policy (although, because life can't be this simple, this one story, widely shared on Facehook, looks accurate. But isn't that the trap the article is describing?
  • You cannot prove that something/someone is fake journalism or a fake journalist because they expressed doubts about election security or concern about the content of this or that email.
  • The article still needs a copy edit. I did fix a couple of incoherent anglophone sentences as I was looking at sources
  • Everybody does realize that other countries openly filter the internet, right? Especially China, quoted with approval in the lede?
  • When Britain was trying to get one of these filters approved, it was to cut back on pedophiles. (or was it Australia. Or both?) Sound familiar though?
  • There is this thing called a First Amendment
  • Google deep packet filtering or just click.

I have no particular agenda here but this article, because of the above, requires especially vigilant editing. Thank you to whoever took the information security infobox down.

  • The Intercept is a good source, and so is TechDirt. For this I would also recomment Ars Technica, possibly Gizmodo or BoingBoing. Fast Company? My point is that this is an article that does involves money, politics and the internet, and long-form journalism is most reliable of all. The BBC is usually good, but some of the articles looked a little superficial. It's very easy to just quote someone and voila, story. Ask Hunter Thompson.
  • By the way, can anyone explain to me why this article should not be merged with Clickbait?
  • I have never heard of The Local, Can anyone verify it is real?
  • There was another reference towards the end that I did not know. Its wikipedia page said it was known for "aggressive ideological reporting". I am pretty sure we weren't quoting it for its opinion but for truth. I'll come back to this. Elinruby (talk) 12:39, 22 December 2016 (UTC)


RealClearPolitics is a reliable source, especially so for the information here. Buzzfeed has already been discussed numerous times here on this talk page by others, and is a reliable source. Check the prior discussions. The phrase "epidemic of fake news" is indeed mentioned in several reliable sources. The article has been submitted for copy edit request to the Guild of Copy Editors. Not sure what they are referring to about Britain, source please. Yes, there is a First Amendment, discussion about that can go in "Media commentary" section. Already have discussion about Google in this article. Yes, I removed the {{Information security}} box. The Intercept, TechDirt, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, and BBC are good sources, usually, unless in some cases they are opinion pieces. NO, this article should NOT be merged with Clickbait, or any other article. It is its own separate independent topic with over 100 sources. This article is about intentional deliberate hoax fraud in the form of fake news websites. Yes, The Local is real. The Local. [28]. There are also wiki articles for more information about The Local, in languages Finnish, French, Swedish, and Turkish. Sagecandor (talk) 12:52, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Elinruby, it's difficult to address so many issues all at once in the same discussion thread. Perhaps you can break them out into separate threads and they can be addressed one by one? Some of these problems you acknowledge can be readily fixed, so why not just fix them yourself and that will knock them off the list? (I generally don't appreciate the "so fix it" response but it might be warranted here with so many issues raised at once.) Finally, comments like "There is this thing called a First Amendment" appear unhelpful, unless you have a suggestion for how the article could be improved? --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 17:53, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
@DrFleischman: it wasn't really intended as a to-do list, more as a sort of list of exhibits in an indictment of the whole pearl-clutching gasping tone of the article. And the very defensive tone of some of its editors when issues arise. I don't really have time to litigate the trustworthiness of these sources through the noticeboards; I have my hands full elsewhere. I appreciate your willingness though. If you actually want to do something about this, I'd suggest that we inject some sane and solid technical voices into the article. Because of course there are Russian hackers. There always have been and they are not going to stop if we start cutting back on the integrity of the internet. That is a broad mandate though, and I don't know what your expertise is in the field. If that doesn't sound like you then you might want to do a clear-eyed assessment of the strength of the references In many case there is a true statement with a shoddy reference that doesn't actually support it. I *will* work on this but I have a couple of things going on that really won't happen if not done by me. But ya. As someone with expertise in the field (internet and information security), this page needs much much work. Thank you for you civil request. SOOOO much better than the peeps who revert what they don't like. Elinruby (talk) 06:12, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Given your expertise, perhaps you can point us to some of the "sane and solid technical voices" you're thinking of? And if there are specific statements that are poorly sourced, perhaps you can tag them with {{fv}} and/or {{rs}}? --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 17:22, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
I am sorry I thought I mentioned some. Ars technica is one of my favorites. For the business of the internet, the business pages of the San Jose Mercury-News or the Palo Alto/Menlo Park newspapers. Off the top of my head; of course there are others. I am sorry. The statement you seem to have taken exception to was not intended to be curt, but I can see it might read that way. I have become entangled in a number of large pages and was feeling overwhelmed and trying to say that I objectively cannot commit to any effort that will require wikilitigation. Surprisingly though I am encountering a lot of adults though, so let me try to be one. I stopped after the third paragraph. You can quote a news story about Angela Merkel about something she said, absolutely, but I totally question her chops as a media analyst. And why are we quoting Chinese bgovernment officials on the subject of fake news? They don't mean the same thing when they say that. Elinruby (talk) 07:46, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Some work on sources in the lead section

There were a ton of tags on the sources in the lead section. I tried to see if I could make some progress. I'll come back and do more later if I can.

  • Germany. I added the excellent Guardian piece to the Germany mention. It has a clear story of a politically charged fake news incident. There was "not in citation" tag on the Merkel speech, which I removed. I can understand that it was weak as a single source. I couldn't see justification for leaving the tag, especially with a second source. You may say that Merkel's claim that there is fake news in Germany is a vague claim, or you may say that others do not agree with her, but a reliable source quoting the Chancellor of Germany saying there is X in Germany is usually a good citation for "there is X in Germany" especially in the absence of sources that dispute it. Chris vLS (talk) 08:04, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Russia. There are more sources that say Russia promotes the stories, rather than creates the sites. I changed the wording of the first paragraph sentence to align better with the sources. I removed NPR source as it just quoted the WaPo story. Chris vLS (talk) 16:19, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
I put the tag on Germany; my point was that it is not a given in my mind that we implicitly believe Angela Merkel (although on little information I am under the impression that she is one of the more competent world leaders, actually). However, I certainly at the moment don't believe Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or Hillary Cinton as a matter of course, nor whoever is running China, North South Korea or Brazil this week. So while she may be different and I am willing to be persuaded that she is, I don't have a reason to think so in front of me. Also it seems to me that she said there were trolls and the article says that there had been fake news stories (I think, didn't check, but as I recall there's a small discrepancy.) I agree that this is a bit technical and the article has bigger problems. We can come back to this if this wording never gets changed for some other reason. Incidentally the source is reasonably ok and just fine for the Merkl quote further down in the lede. On Russia, yes, that was the issue, ownership/hosting of the sites vs composing the writing. If the article now matches the sources then yay. Elinruby (talk) 16:57, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Lead section - how can we make it stronger? And shorter?

The first paragraph is written in the encyclopedic voice, with sources. Most of the other three paragraphs, however, are sentences that each quote a single source or are very weasel wordy. Much of the assertions are overlapping or similar. It weakens the impact of each one. All three paragraphs could be deleted and the article would probably be stronger.

Also, there seem to be three phenomenon discussed in the sources: 1) fake news sites run for profit, 2) amplification through social media, 3) fake news creation (maybe?) and amplification for geopolitical purposes. Right now all three are fairly muddled together. Chris vLS (talk) 16:15, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes Chris_vLS, there is a lot of conflation going on, between concepts that need to be kept precise and distinct. I'm working on a structural rewrite at the somewhat-whimsically-named Draft:Fake_news_as_she_is_written page, where I attempt to de-muddle. If you want to help there, or build your own draftspace alternative option, that would be appreciated. A couple other people further up the talkpage are also in-progress on their own offpage efforts, simultaneous with my efforts. In addition to the core definition, which is fake news sites that pretend to be legitimate journalists whilst they deliberately fabricate and publish false stories with intent to defraud the pay-per-click industry (as distinct from e.g. The Onion which is faked but not fraudulent since they say right up-front they are satirical & comedic), and the vectors of propagation like facebook/google/etc, there is the largely distinct topic of black propaganda and covert psy ops which *sometimes* involves creating websites but more often just involves pushing fabricated stories (and the goal is to alter public opinion rather than to get rich quick). I also see a lot of historical parallels in yellow journalism, chain letters, whispering campaigns, and various attempts at censorship over the ages. As for the current intro-paragraphs, suggest you WP:BEBOLD and give them a rewrite to condense down the lead, or if you prefer, post a rewrite-suggestion here rather than going straightaways into mainspace with your ideas for improvements. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 18:34, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
I really like your "disambiguation" at Draft:Fake_news_as_she_is_written, with six different types of "fake news". It's exactly the point I was making earlier; this article mashes together a whole lot of distinctly different things under the same term. Esn (talk) 19:58, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

U.S. President Barack Obama said a disregard for facts created a "dust cloud of nonsense"

I am not trying to be difficult, honest, but he is quoted as saying that fake news on the internet creates the cloud dust of nonsense, not the disregard for the facts of an unspecified party. Some of the authors of fake news have expressed this sort of indifference but a lot of the people who share it do care about the facts, but believe the people who don't. I think this should be edited, but it's technical enough that I felt I should run it past other editors. I'm proposing "those who create fake news" instead of "a disregard for the facts". It's sourced to Computerworld, which is generally speaking accurate in technical matters, but like the Associated Press or Agence France Presse is written on very tight deadline pressure and thus is usually a bit superficial. And the quote is way at the end of an article about something said. And the link in the article goes to the prepared statement on the White House web page. All of this is ok but slightly sketchy. I have no doubt that the words "dust cloud of nonsense" were in fact spoken; I am sure the Detroit paper covered this and that would possibly be a better source. More secondary and more detailed. Elinruby (talk) 22:16, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Image removal

Disagree with this image removal [29].

Edit summary is also highly inflammatory.

Why is this image not NPOV ? Sagecandor (talk) 20:57, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, ignoring the edit-summary (which I agree was NOT very aligned with the goals of pillar four), it is definitely the case that the chosen image was WP:POINT-y. Why pick a story about Trump and Hillary? Is that the ONLY topic that 70news and the other strict-definition 'fake news websites' have published stories about? As you know, Trump has speculated that some percentage of the 10 million "bad-for-the-economy illegal immigrants" (or if you prefer "good-for-the-society undocumented residents") may have altered the popular vote outcome. So yeah, the chosen image failed NPOV, but at least it *was* from an actually-indisputable fake-news-website. Some folks, including the potus-elect, would argue that the particular chosen 'fake news' story was unwise, however. So I suggest looking for a screenshot of 70news, which has something less politically partisan as the story-headline. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:28, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
I agree with 47.222. We shouldn't be putting an image about partisan politics right at the top of an article that's not about partisan politics. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 22:20, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Here is a website which gives some options (although they mostly pulled from Zimdar's list which is now retracted -- she also included a bunch of yellow journalism and difficult-to-prove-as-deliberate conspiracy theorist websites). [30] Most of them are political (about half-n-half insulting to the candidates of the two major parties... which I guess means CBS was attempting to be equal-time-partisan?), but some of them are not. I suggest we use this one, which is both topical and also relatively non-partisan.[31] "[byline] YourNewsWire.com -- News. Truth. Unfiltered. -- [headline] Fake news 'epidemic' turns out to be false: recent furor around the prevalence of fake news on social media turns out to be based on fake news stories published by the mainstream media" Here is the link to the story on the alleged-by-CBS-to-be-fake-news website,[32] if somebody with an advert-blocker installed would care to take a screenshot and upload it to wikipedia as a fair-use exception. They also have another story about radioactive salmon from fukushima invading canada, which also seems fairly non-partisan of a topic. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:53, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Not a reliable source. Sagecandor (talk) 12:52, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Your statement might be true, or might be false. As with many of your statements, it is too short to make sense of what you are attempting to refer unto. Are you trying to say CBS is not a reliable source, for the factoid that YourNewsWire.com has published 'fake news'? Or are you saying that the site which published the fake news, YourNewsWire.com, is not a reliable source... and therefore we cannot use a screenshot of it in the article about fake news, as an example of what fake news is? (Which would make no sense... but then, neither does saying CBS fails WP:RS....) What is the exact URL of the source you dispute is WP:RS please. As for the topic of this subsection, I have removed the 70news screenshot which started this talk-thread, from the fake news in the United States subsidiary article, since it does not belong there any more than it belongs here. I've also expanded the descriptions and the alt-text there, if you (or anybody else reading this discussion) agree my upgrades are good changes, please copy them into the multiple-image currently found in fake news website as well. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 10:56, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Apparently Volunteer Marek was unaware of this talkpage discussion, and re-inserted the 70news image (albeit as the fourth example rather than the 1st-and-only example).[33] Is anybody unhappy with the current sequence, with four screenshot-examples of ABCnews.com.co, Denver Guardian, RealTrueNews, and 70news.wordpress.com in that order? Also, especially now that this article no longer mentions Chacon of RealTrueNews at all, I think we definitely need to expand on the example-image-captions, to explain that RealTrueNews was intended as an internet hoax at first, plus eventually revealed itself (our imagefile only shows the final form and gives the readership no clue what qualifies RealTrueNews as an example nor what distinguishes it from the others). I am working on proper captions at the Fake news in the United States article, which uses just the three images at the moment, not including 70news. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:13, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Fake news story prompts Pakistan to issue nuclear warning to Israel

Defence minister reminds Israel on Twitter that ‘Pakistan is a nuclear state too’ after fake story says Israel had threatened to destroy Pakistan. Graham-Harrison, Emma (25 December 2016). "Fake news story prompts Pakistan to issue nuclear warning to Israel". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 December 2016. Fake News got real! I SUGGESTS to add it to the article. Sokuya (talk) 20:41, 26 December 2016 (UTC) heard this earlier today on NPR news also. Elinruby (talk) 10:23, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

There was not a proper investigation by DC Metro Police into the Pizzagate claims.

Not about this article. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 19:28, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCY7xg3gsYY&t=33s — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.14.253.10 (talk) 17:22, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

This is not about this article. Besides, this video has been shot down as an RS at the relevant article, anyways. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 19:28, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

good articles

-- 17:41, 27 December 2016‎ Elinruby (talk)

That BBC article is great! Every time someone claims that "neutral point of view" means that "all sides need to be given equal weight", I'm gonna link to it.Volunteer Marek (talk) 02:13, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
@Volunteer Marek: Damnit... After that comment, now I have to read it. Stupid Wikipedia making me read stuff... MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 23:20, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

China

Most of the sources we have on China refer to Chinese sources republishing U.S. fake news. The best source I can find is this Wall Street Journal piece [34] that talks about fake stories, but it's not clear whether there are "sites" of the kind we're talking about here. It seems like the fake stories arise from bloggers, but again, it's unclear. I think we should remove China from the lead for now. The current paragraph -- describing how China is using fake news in the U.S. as a rationale for a crackdown -- is notable, but should probably be framed differently. Should we 1) include the WSJ source? or 2) remove China from the lead? Thanks Chris vLS (talk) 08:29, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

my concern is that when they say fake news they may sometimes mean people who say mean inconvenient things about the ruling party members. For example look at what happened to news coverage of the Panama Papers in China. If a fake news story within the meaning of this article made it onto the Chinese internet and there's RS for that then that is another matter. Elinruby (talk) 17:02, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
"my concern is that when they say fake news they may sometimes mean people who say mean inconvenient things about the ruling party members" -- isn't that universally the case where politicians are concerned? That's also what brought Merkel, Obama and Clinton to comment on the subject, as far as I can see. It is probably not a coincidence that Obama signed the Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act into law a few days ago. "Fake news" seems to be code for "foreign government propaganda". Hillary Clinton explicitly made the connection in a recent speech (I'm just as suspicious of when the US leaders make that connection, as of when the Chinese leaders do. I'm not the only one either, as the recent article by author John Michael Greer shows). That's why I said in a comment above that there seem to be several distinctly different topics covered in this article, with "fake news" being a term to muddy the distinction between them. Esn (talk) 19:41, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Right. Which is why we spent a little time banging heads over definition in the draft talk spaces. Ironically though, if we use the definition that a fake news website was set up for profit, this would exclude Hillary Clinton's allegations. Unless we're saying Vladimir Putin is trying to manipulate Google AdSense. I'll comment on Greer when I have read it.Elinruby (talk) 10:30, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

It is not really irony, it is just that the definition itself (as used by sources -- which is different from as-understood-by-wikipedians!) is changing/ballooning as time goes by. The classic narrow definition of a traditional fake news website is that they are like The Onion, but willing to lie and obscure that they are pushing made-up contents, in the unethical pursuit of pay-per-click cash. The more recent expansion on that theme, is to include groups that seek non-financial gains, and may not even have websites per se (such as the comment-section troll armies that are out to alter public opinion or otherwise fiddle with geopolitical things). We need to use the definitions which matter: 'fake news site' as a way to refer to The Onion (difference being they are an ethical flavor), 'fake news site' as a way to refer to ABCnews.com.co which is not-so-ethical, and also (preferably in a separate section) 'fake news sites/promoters/trolls/etc' as a more metaphorical way to talk about international propadanda and disinformation stuff. Clinton is talking about the third sort of thing, and also about conspiracy theorists like Infowars.com (but probably not Naomi Wolf... though I will note that Wolf refused to back Clinton's 2016 campaign). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 01:06, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

{{Illm}}

This template is so great !

Added links for these people who are notable on other language sites:

Hopefully someday soon they will get existing articles here on English Wikipedia. Sagecandor (talk) 02:29, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Noted. Thanks. (Not going to work on Laurence Rossignol at the moment, though. ^^) SashiRolls (talk) 15:37, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Okay thank you for the positive feedback. Sagecandor (talk) 17:25, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Not sure why this is necessary. We have the template {{Illm}} for a reason. Let's use it. These are notable articles in other language Wikipedias. This is exactly what WP:REDLINKS are for. Sagecandor (talk) 17:57, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Can we use template {{Illm}} to link WP:REDLINKS on Wikipedia and simultaneously give links to existing articles on French Wikipedia ? Sagecandor (talk) 18:01, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Response to third opinion request:
My understanding is that it would be okay to use the interlanguage link template to link redlinks while simultaneously linking to the relevant article in another language. The WP:RED in a nutshell leads with " Red links for subjects that should have articles but do not, are not only acceptable, but needed in the articles." It seems like that would be reasonable in this case. Eric-Wester (talk) 18:32, 11 December 2016 (UTC) Eric-Wester (talk) 18:32, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
To further clarify, I think we should include a redlink to the en version. Eric-Wester (talk) 18:37, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Thank you, Eric-Wester, I agree with you. However I don't want to revert to add it back. How do we proceed from here? Sagecandor (talk) 18:38, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
@Sagecandor: I'd like to see if SashiRolls would still be opposed to redlinking to the en articles and what the rationale behind the opposition is in case there's something I am overlooking. There seems to be a little tension over the topic, so I don't want to jump to conclusions by editing the article and engaging in an edit war. If SashiRolls would prefer, we can get an additional third party opinion. Eric-Wester (talk) 19:24, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
@Eric-Wester:Okay we'll have to see what the rationale would be for ignoring WP:RED ? Sagecandor (talk) 19:25, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

The net result of redlinks is to render parts of an article difficult to read. The solution I have chosen is considerably less invasive. There is no reason to call for a webpage for a (relatively minor) French minister on English Wikipedia. Moreover, just the fact that there is no standard link indicates that an article on English Wikipedia does not exist, so someone could work on one without being hit over the head with a red link in mid-sentence. (blue links and red links are actually more often used to rhetorical purpose than one thinks in my experience editing political pages) SashiRolls (talk) 19:29, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

@SashiRolls:We have a third opinion that goes for inclusion of the redlinks by Eric-Wester, above. Will you agree to go along with this third opinion please ? Sagecandor (talk) 19:36, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Please stop hassling me with your pings. I would like for people to take the time to weigh in on, think over the question. At least 24-48 hours. This is not a crisis, the current behavior is just adding busywork, making the talk page harder to read, and preventing productive editors from getting things done. SashiRolls (talk) 19:44, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
SashiRolls we disagreed. We now have a third opinion that says to go by WP:RED and add the redlinks that are notable on other Wikis. Will you agree to go along with the third opinion if I add it back in ? Sagecandor (talk) 19:46, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
@Sagecandor: I think it would be best to give it a little time for other editors to weigh in with their thoughts. The nature of the proposed change is pretty minor, so I don't think there's too much sense of urgency. Let's allow for others to express their opinion before making a final determination. Eric-Wester (talk) 19:55, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Alright will do, Eric-Wester. However it's disappointing to see a user disregarding the third opinion from a previously uninvolved contributor such as yourself. Sagecandor (talk) 19:57, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

this section break was non-arbitrary

So, if I understand it correctly, Sagecandor changed some redlinks into redlinks-followed-by-non-english-bluelinks-in-parens.[35] But then SashiRolls objected to some later changes, which began putting more and more redlinks into the prose.[36] SashiRolls later proposed that we use plaintext-followed-by-bluelinks-in-parens, with this edit.[37] My personal preference is to simply use interwiki-bluelinks, and skip the parens entirely. Sorry to add yet another cook to the kitchen!  :-)

  1. Laurence Rossignol
  2. Laurence Rossignol
  3. Laurence Rossignol
  4. Laurence Rossignol (fr)
  5. Laurence Rossignol{fr}
  6. fr:Laurence Rossignol
  7. Laurence Rossignol

Of the five options listed above, I would prefer to see (in ranked order of preference), my top choice of #7, or failing that my second and subsequent picks would be to see #6, #5, #4, #3, #2, or #1. Outside the proper-name-topics of biographical articles like Rossignol, however, my preferences would be different:

  1. fachosphère
  2. fachosphère
  3. fachosphère [fr]
  4. fachosphère (fr)
  5. fachosphère{fr}
  6. fr:fachosphère
  7. fachosphère

For terms that have a direct unambiguous translation into english, the correct thing is to directly bluelink to the proper wikipedia article. However, this can be a dangerous thing! See the wikilinking of the pope's use of the word coprophilia, to the wikipedia article about people who are sexually aroused by feces, which is NOT the meaning the pope intended, as far as I can tell. (We also mangled the pope's meaning in other ways but those don't apply here.) I don't think that wikipedia should bluelink like this, fachosphère, from the fachosphère term to the fascist article, because I don't think they have the same meaning. Groups-in-the-orbit-of-fascism, or fascist-like-worldviews, is more akin to the intent here; fachosphère is broader than fascist, in other words, and includes many groups that are merely 'in the same orbit' as the actual (neo-)fascist groups. So my preference would be none of the above -- all seven of them are incorrect, if we want English-speaking readership to understand what is meant by fachosphère, then we need to specifically explain the meaning, something like this: "...fachosphère (roughly means 'groups with extremely conservative political positions by European standards which are as disliked as those held by neo-fascists')..." So in this case I still prefer to use #7 as my top choice, but would like it to be annotated with something helpful for the english-only readership. By contrast, with a proper name, I think it is *obvious* to the readership that this is a human, and if they want to learn more about the human's biographical background they can follow the link... that is a different situation, than when you have foreign-language *terminology* being used. And that goes doubly-especially when the frWiki link is a redirect, which takes you from fachosphère (aka groups-as-disliked-as-neo-fascists) to a page about the Extrême droite (literally 'Extreme Right'), which of course, is politically speaking a different animal than what somebody in the english-speaking world would mean when they talked about extreme-right... and indeed, there are significant differences between the United States colloquial meaning of extreme-right and the commonwealth-country meaning of extreme-right.

  1. Égalité et Réconciliation
  2. Égalité et Réconciliation
  3. Égalité et Réconciliation [fr]
  4. Égalité et Réconciliation (fr)
  5. Égalité et Réconciliation{fr}
  6. fr:Égalité et Réconciliation
  7. Égalité et Réconciliation

This one is easy. Well, easy if the bluelink in #2 is the SAME topic as the bluelink in #7, which in this case is the truth, I believe. Wikipedia has a bluelink for the otherwise-unadorned term, so the correct (and only correct) choice is #2. Unless we've already bluelinked it earlier in the prose of this article, in which case sometimes #1 is correct. Wikipedia doesn't link from every USE of a topic on enWiki, to the corresponding non-english-language coverage of that same exact topic on frWiki / jpWiki / deWiki / etc. Instead, we just have interwiki-linkage between the *page* about the topic, to the various other languages which cover that same topic. It would be wrong to use #7 or #6, when we already have an enWiki bluelink, which is #2. Similarly, it would be wrong to use #5 or #4 or #3, because we don't want to link every single wikilinked topic to the *fifty* other language-versions of wikipedia. We just link to the english version, and then from there, people that would prefer to read the french/japanese/german/whatever version's coverage of the topic, can do so. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 16:59, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, but could you please summarize the point of your comment in 1-2 sentences? --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 01:09, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
DrFleischman, there was a discussion between SashiRolls and Sagecandor, with help from a third-opinion-person that I will not ping since I think they were summoned here and have moved on to other work, about whether to use the Template:illm or to use a custom variation thereof which SashiRolls came up with. I advised them to use the pipe-trick interwiki-link Laurence Rossignol for any redlinked-on-enWiki proper names, to *avoid* interwiki linking any foreign terminology such as "fachosphère" and to instead give a short translation-of-the-term into American English as utilized in this article, and finally noted that wikipedia policy is *not* to interwiki-link when we already have a wikilink (such as the case with Égalité et Réconciliation). Apparently there are a few dozen names in here, of european people that have biography-articles on non-english-wikipedia projects. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 17:13, 15 December 2016 (UTC)
as someone who works a lot in article translation I have asked in the chatroom about interwiki links. Apparently the preferred style is NOT [[:language:articletitle|label of link]], which I was using at the time, but {{ILL|titleofarticle|language code}}. This comes up a lot when you're translating Provençal history or whatnot. A redlink is not necessarily expressing the judgment that there should be an English article, as a name with one redlink is unlikely to be picked by anyone as a project when important topics with several thousand redlinks exist. And it does indicate the existence of more information for those who speak the language or are willing to look at a Google-translate. Just saying. I am an agnostic about additional formatting, but why? It already can get complicated enough if the English title should be different or there is already an article with that title and so on. That said, if a page is wall-to-wall redlinks, I winnow them down a bit by requiring a more substantive article than I usually do. My thought is that if someone encounters a name, it is nice sometimes to have an answer to the question who the heck is that? But the article linked to should be more than a stublet, preferably. Etc. I have also sometimes translated redlinked article when I felt strongly that it should exist. I also, esthetically, dislike redlinks and try to have no more than one or two. Sometimes it is unavoidable in articles about Congolese or Brazilian politics for example, but what I am wondering -- I came here from the NPOV board and got distracted by this discussion, so I haven't looked at the page yet -- is why so many links to other languages on a page about an American buzzword? Elinruby (talk) 21:34, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
I need a break but I made a draft space for you, link below. Go to town and get it exactly the way you think. Do a demonstration project. Even if I dpn't like what you do, these spaces are not hard to make. here's a spare if you want to compare something: Draft:Moncopain47. I really reaaly need a break now, later Elinruby (talk) 13:34, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Elinruby, the page is currently structurally organized into geographic regions, and then out-of-context quotes about "bad journalism" of one form or another, are added to the subsection "Reactions in Country XYZ to the worldwide super-important phenomenon of Fake News [Websites]". When if you actually look into what was said by the person being quoted herein, often the phrase 'fake news [website]' was not even SAID in the original source. So we have a lot of long quotes, attributed to a lot of people from a lot of foreign countries, allegedly about fake news but often about a distinct but related subject (media bias or yellow journalism or propaganda or clickbait or online hoaxes or online fraud or media sensationalism or whatever). At some point, one person started putting in interwiki-links to all the dozens of foreign-language proper names and foreign language terminology, which resulted in a lot of unsightly redlinks. So the discussion above was partly about whether to use black plaintext, or dozens or redlinks, or some alternative compromise-formatting which retained the interwiki links but minimized the redlinks. If you have time to help here with CORRECT treatment of words like "fachosphère" (slang in France for people-we-dislike-as-much-as-Hitler roughly speaking) and "coprophilia" (slang in Argentinian Spanish for people-who-love-to-spread-dirty-things-around roughly speaking), it would be much appreciated. So I hope that gives you an explanation for the interaction of structural NPOV problems, with the large number of interwiki-and-or-redlinks. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:58, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
coming back to the technical question here, it is my understanding that the correct form is #3 in the first list, or at least that is what someone has told me once and nobody has complained when I do it that way, which is all the time. I try to minimize the number of redlinks on a page but this is not always possible. I do think they add information though. I have recently started seeing the illm form. I asked if the template for interlanguage links had changed and was told no. I am not sure what that means. On the pope's comment, and for thet matter for fachosphère, one option might be wiktionary if there is an entry. Every so often wiktionary box works and it seems to me that there is an anchor parameter so it could be piped to the correct alternate definition. I can confirm that a French speaker would understand fachosphère as the blogosphere of fascistics, but I know absolutely nothing about the pope's comment but it does sound like a plausible misunderstanding, maybe. But if the definition he was using is not in the wiktionary then I would take a minute to explain if you use that example. Personally Elinruby (talk) 21:42, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, #3 is the normal way, but SashiRolls (not bluelinking as they are indisposed at the moment) did not like the way all the redlinks looked, if we tried to give some wikilink for every person in the large media-commentary section. I also know from experience, that there is a fairly large portion of wikipedians who will delete redlinks without thinking twice about it, thus I prefer to use #7 although it is not standardized-per-MOS or whatever wiki-entity is behind the Template:illm approach. As for me, I'm happy to use illm here in this article, as suggested by yourself/sagecandor/WP:3o. I am proposing below that we rewrite so as to avoid using fachosphère (which is not merely slang but always intended as a slur), and if we do continue to using 'coprophilia' in our pope-quote I hope we make *very clear* that it was probably intended metaphorically, and briefly explain the meaning in parens, rather than in the literal pseudo-medical sense. But we'll need a footnote, since we have conflicting RS, in the pope-quote situation at least. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 00:12, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
I agree that fachosphère is derogatory and I don't see what it adds either. Or the story of the pope. Even if it is an example it would be better if possible to use one that does not require linguistic deconstruction. I've said I usually ILL everything then winnow down if the artice has too many, but let's bear in mind that I am usually working on obscure articles about the history of wine in Provence or whatever so I have the luxury of seeing what it looks like. Sometimes, as in Operation Car Wash, an example that comes to mind, the redlinks are needed because the story is notable and information about the participants is information about the participants, even if it's in Portugese. Alright so, my point is that mmm maybe here we don't have the luxury of pondering this given this is not an obscure bywater. I will look at this as I go through the article Elinruby (talk) 08:43, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

rehash of 'fachosphère'

Here is the relevant copyrighted snippet from the source:

Over the last 10 years, France has seen a sharp increase in the readership of alternative, far-right sites, blogs and social media operations, referred to collectively as the fachosphère – (“facho” is slang for fascist). Promoting views including anti-immigration, nativism and ultra-nationalism, these sites are run independently, rather than by a political party. But they feed into a mood of distrust of the traditional media, both on the far right and the far left. Samuel Laurent, head of Le Monde’s fact-checking section, Les décodeurs, said: “In France, there isn’t a wide presence of totally invented fake news that makes money through advertising, as seen in the US.” But he said France was seeing increasing cases of manipulation and distortion, particularly during election periods. One example, in the recent primary race to choose the French right’s presidential candidate, was a campaign on the fachosphère to claim the centre-right candidate Alain Juppé was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The accusation dated back to local elections in 2014 when distorted stories circulated on a far-right opinion website... Laurent said: “I think the French presidential election campaign [next spring] will be fraught with this type of thing.” In January, as the presidential election campaign prepares to kick off, Le Monde’s Les décodeurs will launch a database of questionable sites that portray themselves as information sites. The recent Paris terrorist attacks were also subject to conspiracy theories and distortions...[38]

So here is the sentence we currently have in mainspace, which is from The Guardian article on December 2nd 2016, an overview fake-news-in-the-EU (I believe).

France saw an uptick in amounts of disinformation and propaganda, primarily in the midst of election cycles.[68] Le Monde fact-checking division "Les décodeurs" was headed by Samuel Laurent, who told The Guardian in December 2016 the upcoming French presidential election campaign in spring 2017 would face problems from fake news. ...During the 10-year period preceding 2016, France was witness to an increase in popularity of far-right alternative news sources called the fachosphere ("facho" referring to fascist); known as the extreme right on the Internet.[39]

Originally fachosphère was direct-wikilinked to fascist, as in fachosphère without the translation-note in parens, which was wrong and has since been corrected. Currently there is a redirect at extreme right on the Internet, which Sagecandor created and pointed at history of far-right movements in France, but which is under discussion for deletion; here in this sentence, we can probably replace it with a wikilink to merely extreme right since wikipedia does not actually seem to HAVE a subsidiary article or subsection of an extant article which specifically discusses the radical-right-on-the-internet (as opposed to in general).

We could also just rewrite the sentence to avoid that wikilink, and/or rewrite the sentence to avoid the foreign terminology, and say something simpler like this:

In France, during the decade leading up to 2016, there was a sharp increase in the readership of far right online alternative media publications -- including social media, blogs, and websites. While these newly-popular information sources were independent of any political party, and also of the traditional media which is often distrusted by those both on the far left as well as the far right in France, they often tended to promote nativism and nationalism, plus oppose immigration. According to Samuel Laurent [fr] of Le Monde's fact-check blog, although there is "distortion" (see media bias) by the alternative media of news stories, especially immediately before elections (see whispering campaign), in France there is no widespread phenomena of fabricated fake news intended to drive clickbait scams. Le Monde plans to publish a database of "questionable sites" starting in January 2017.[40]

Is my suggested rewrite an improvement, for those two extant sentences in mainspace? I cut out mention of the fachosphère as slang, and I retained the crucial-to-my-eyes portion that Laurent did not believe France was experiencing any widespread fake-news-website phenomena... as opposed to more traditional media bias and the internecine feud betwixt the mainstream media like Le Monde where Laurent is employed, and the alternative media which both the far left and the far right increasingly prefer. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 00:03, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

I think your version is better than what was there. I am a little concerned about dragging alternative media into this, as this would lump Charlie Hebdo and Libé in with site that regurgitate Holocaust denialism and such. Elinruby (talk) 08:51, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
If you read more about Laurent, you can see that is also his worry, hence he likes to divide sites into their 'spheres' such as the fachosphère for the Holocaust deniers ... and anybody else that is to be tarred as equivalent thereto ... plus different categories like réinfosphère and droitosphère and so on ... which categorizations the target-sites tend to disagree with. Not in the way that Holocaust-denier-sites think of themselves as Holocaust-truther-sites, but in the way that *any* categorization of the various ideologically-distinct alternative media websites, whether they be far right or far left, by a mainstream journalist who works at Le Monde, will be resisted as pigeonholing. There is a definite undercurrent of establishment media versus the alternative media, not just in France but in the USA, see e.g. talk radio versus liberal media and the modern resurgence of lying press. That sort of stuff is distinct from the core say-anything-for-clickbait-revenues type of fake news website, obviously, but it does have impact when it comes to countermeasures, especially the ad hoc blacklist/greylist type of countermeasures, which Le Monde will soon be publishing to help keep "questionable sites" from exerting undue influence on the 2017 elections in France. It will be hard to get all that into the article, I agree, so corners will have to be cut, at some point, and wikilinks to extant articles carry the bulk of the weight. That said, if you see some incremental improvements you can make to mainspace now, please WP:BEBOLD and go for it. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 01:20, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Fake news as a sting operation

There's no point to this discussion, it's not about improving the article and half of the things mentioned have nothing to do with the article. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 14:07, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I just came across this

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/28/359655386/fbi-uses-newspapers-name-to-send-spyware

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/28/435415960/department-of-justice-sued-for-fake-news-story

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/associated-press-sues-fbi-over-fake-news-story/

And was wondering it it warrants a section or a line about this sting operation? Victor Grigas (talk) 14:45, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Those links make for a very interesting read, but I'm not sure this is what is referred to by "fake news website". In the case of the FBI, the spoofing was done to target a specific individual, was very temporary and was not done to disseminate false information. I think this is a related phenomenom, but not the same thing. To that end, if it's added, I think it should be limited to a brief mention, such as "The FBI has used fake links, purporting to come from well-known news organizations to get malware on to the computers of individuals under investigation." MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 15:03, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
I am working on a draft-rewrite which tries to slot things into appropriate sections. In this fake-news-as-FBI-sting scenario, such things would be a subtype of black propaganda, so it would go somewhere in the metaphor for propaganda of a covert nature subsection, though obviously it is distinct from video news releases and from foreign influence on domestic elections (e.g. 2016, 2015, 2010, 2005, 2003, 1996, etc) so it would have a new sub-sub-section called something like "Law enforcement use of the news media to spread false stories" and then explain something about counterintelligence and the real-world equivalent of WP:BAIT (trying to elicit a response that will get the target sanctioned). There is also the reverse sort of scenario, where the fake news story specifically contains a conspiracy theory that law enforcement officials are involved in a coverup, e.g. 9/11 truther stories and also the more recent pizzagate controversy, which belongs in a separate section about the overlap between fake news sites (which promote stories the site-owners themselves know are false) and websites that promote conspiracy-theories (which the site-owners often believe to be true). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:34, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't get how you can say the FBI tactics are an example of black propaganda. Black propaganda is when one side of a conflict forges information purporting to come from the other side as a form of propaganda. What the FBI did was to use forged news stories as bait to convince suspects to allow the installation of malware. That has absolutely nothing to do with propaganda. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 17:14, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
Fro the first sentence of the article, "black propaganda is false information... that purports to be from a source on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side." The suspect that the FBI was intending to deceive, is on one side, the FBI is on the other side. They are getting a supposedly-neutral third party, journalists that the suspect believes will act honestly, to lie to the suspect. It is an inexact characterization to call such a scenario "a subtype of black propaganda" because the suspect expects journalists to be neutral parties rather than to take sides, but it is close because the suspect does NOT expect the journalists to lie in order to aid the police. So I agree with you that this FBI-sting-scenario is *not* a clear-cut example of classic black propaganda (in which the 'sides' are usually nation-states or the equivalent and thus each 'side' is composed of millions of individual humans -- the suspect in a sting operation is either a single human or a small group of humans and although the nominally-neutral journalists are not on the same side as the cops neither are they on the same side as the suspect). That said, I am at a loss as to what it ought to be called, if not a subtype of black propaganda, and I disagree it has nothing to do with propaganda, which is essentially government-produced lies, since I consider the FBI part of the government. Maybe instead of black propaganda this is closer to covert psy ops, but in a domestic law enforcement setting, rather than in an international espionage-or-military setting? "...any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people..." 47.222.203.135 (talk) 19:43, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
The suspect that the FBI was intending to deceive, is on one side, the FBI is on the other side. No offense, but that is one of the most torturous twists of logic I've seen in a few weeks here. The FBI forged an article that purported to be about the suspect in order to convince them to click on a link. They didn't forge something written by the subject, and they didn't do so for propaganda purposes. There are two fundamental differences between the act of black propaganda and what the FBI did. I could just as well claim that what the FBI did was have anal sex with the suspect, because it takes at least two parties, you can have more on the penetrative side, but only one on the penetrated side and the suspect definitely got screwed. Yeah, there are some similarities if you squint hard enough, but the fundamental differences vastly outweigh them.
To explain this more formally: black propaganda is a subset of propaganda. Propaganda is "Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view." The FBI, on the other hand, engaged in some sort of sting operation by engaging in behavior designed to encourage the suspect to unwittingly infect their computer with malware that could be used to surreptitiously collect evidence against them.
I'm not sure what sort of changes you're suggesting to the article, but making a huge categorical error in defining it is not going to happen. I'm sorry. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 20:49, 28 December 2016 (UTC)
I am suggesting a major rewrite, to avoid all the category errors that I perceive in the current article.  :-) Ironically enough. If you don't want to categorized 'sting operations based on falsified publications' under the rubric of 'concepts related to fake news: propaganda of a covert nature' (from your own definition -- "info of a misleading nature used to promote a political cause" -- perhaps you see criminals as apolitical?) with a sub-subsection title of Law enforcement use of the news media to spread false stories, because you see my logic as too tortured, that is probably okay by me. I fully admit it is at best a subtype of black propaganda, and has aspects of psy ops. But your assertion that I'm making a category error, begs the question, which I will ask you once again: where *do* you suggest we put these refs? What category is non-erroneous? You are saying I am in error, which might be true, but you are not putting forth any corrections. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 00:24, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
alright, I am going to check the lede and start editing somewhere. I know we have agreed that people who are pushing stories for the ad revenue are fake news sites but if you get into this sort of detail -- and by the way those are RS that this happened imho, if anyone cares. But if fake news website = a domain, essentially, then I dunno. It sounds to me like a man in the middle attack. It would depend how the FBI did it. Elinruby (talk) 04:30, 29 December 2016 (UTC) Elinruby (talk) 04:25, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
I am afraid that anyone who perceives a distinction between the FBI stings and propaganda as a category error doesn't understand the categories in even the most trivial way. IP, you are clearly and inarguably wrong about that and I have trouble understanding how you fail to see that. You are twisting logic viciously to try to support your claim by using narrow interpretations to produce tangential relationship and positing them as fundamental relationships, all while completely ignoring the major problems this produces. At a certain point, this line of logic ceases to be wrong and begins to reek of trolling, so I would advise you to carefully consider whether it's worth it. I've seen the draft page, and while it encourages me to believe that trolling is not your MO, it raises very serious questions about your competence. To be blunt: the draft is -in places- an incomprehensible word salad, and in others, a morass of OR which bears little resemblance to the draft Elinruby worked on. For example, in the section "The nature of Truth" (a section which does not belong in any article even related to this one), you wrote "In addition to the psychological difficulties, there are also philosophical difficulties with fake news, and with fake news websites: what is a simulacrum, and what is reality?" To respond to the question first: check a dictionary. The definitions you find therein are perfectly philosophically applicable. To respond to the overall sentiment... What. The. Ever. Loving. Fuck. Ignoring for the moment the phenomenal inappropriateness of discussing the nature of truth in the context of a subject which requires a clearly defined and accepted definition of truth (and ignoring the fact that there is a clearly defined and accepted definition of truth), there are no philosophical difficulties! In fact, the only philosophical difficulties are those you introduce by bringing up the nature of truth to begin with.
I'm sorry if I've offended you. That was not my intent. But you have to understand that WP is not a place to muse about philosophy, or discuss the meaning of things beyond the trivial level which is necessary for categorization of topics. Very little of what you've written there has any business existing on this site. I would suggest you contact a web hosting company (I personally recommend arvixe.com, for being quite cheap and quite good, but there are numerous higher-profile or free outlets, as well) and set up your own website on which to host your musings. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 15:30, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
You are free to hold your opinion, and complain about competence as it if were an attempt at a policy-backed argument, rather than a personal attack. You are also free to try and improve the draftspace-rewrite, or to build your own separate attempt. But as I have pointed out more than once, in your anxious effort to point out something wrongheaded, you have failed to answer the simple question: if you don't think the FBI sting operation counts as any type of propaganda (and that people who do see similarities are morons), you ought to be able to educate poor 'incompetent' people like me. Such as, for instance, by pointing to something which is closer to the mark -- Miranda_warning#Exemption_for_interrogations_conducted_by_undercover_agents. Contrast with covert interrogation, which I'm sure you will immediately feel an overpowering anxiety to note, is mostly about waterboarding at CIA black sites... as written presently at least... but please be so kind as to draw your attention to the criminology mentions, of 'friendly' covert interrogation in a public space, as a means of extracting information from the target, under the pretense of being on their side or at least neutral in some fashion, without the target realizing you are doing so. Given your unwillingness to constructively help come up with 'undercover interrogation' plus 'misattribution-slash-forgery of documents' as a better subcategory, I don't think it will be possible to fruitfully discuss truthiness with you. As I also mentioned earlier, further up the talkpage, the existing fake news website article is full to the brim with category errors. If you want to put your ability to criticize category errors to work, mainspace would be an excellent place to begin. Perhaps you can finally help fix the section involving the pope, or the section involving Laurent, or any of dozens and dozens of other mainspace sentences where conflation of completely distinct things occurs. You need not prefer my rewrite-version, but if you see *no issues whatsoever* with the current mainspace prose, then there is little else for us to discuss. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 00:33, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

proposed change, somewhat substantive

"Unlike news satire, fake news websites seek to mislead, rather than entertain, readers for financial or other gain."

my issue is that sometimes the satire sites are making a point, not just entertaining. And let's remember that Rush Limbaugh claims to be an entertainment. We need to get the definition just right to avoid category creep imho. My proposed rewrite:

"while the goal of news satire sites is to lampoon official pronouncements and make readers laugh and consider other points of view, fake news site are designed to maximize their exposure, either for click revenue or to increase the reach of some political call to action. Also, they present their writing as truthful reporting, whereas satirical sites identify themselves as such."

That's a pretty unwieldly sentence and I am open to rewrites, but you see the nuance I am trying to introduce. Elinruby (talk) 09:02, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Honestly? Just add "provoke or inform" to the original and make it an aside. Like below.

Unlike news satire, fake news websites seek to mislead —rather than entertain, provoke or inform readers— for financial or other gain.

If you really want to double down, you could add wikilinks to the word "satire". MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 14:33, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
There are fake news websites that attempt to mislead, for "other gains" in the form of altering public opinion, or in gaining geopolitical advantage. That is mostly from the new-in-2016-buzzword, however, not at all the same as the traditional meaning of fake news website,[41] which is motivated solely by deceit-as-a-means-of-financial-gain, aka a variant of the clickbait scam. Fake gossip sites have headlines like "Jay Z rest in peace" or like "NBC cancels 2017 season of The Simpsons" but they are just after pay-per-click revenue, they don't care about "other gains". Fake outrage-traffic sites are more common, and have headlines about political/social/religious issues, which exploit confirmation bias (the I-knew-they-would-get-caught mentality often). Because of the facebook-crackdown, there are plenty of Paul Horner sites now which ride the fine line between pushing legit stories, and every so often one whopper of a tale. But the underlying motivation is cash, and in Horner's case perhaps fame/infamy, nothing more. Intermixing the narrow strict definition of sites like ABCnews.com.co which are clickbait scams, with the geopolitical intrigue stuff that is *very* different in both motivation and techniques, is part of what is wrong with the current article-structure. Suggest addressing the "other gains" stuff in subsequent sentences, and cutting it out of this one (and also inserting either 'traditional fake news websites' or perhaps instead 'fake news websites typically seek'). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 00:57, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
works for me Elinruby (talk) 00:08, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

first sentence under Definition

can we please mention something besides MSNBC as a trusted website, since many conservatives specifically mention it as biased, and also specify that there is an entirely legitimate (I believe) Australian Broadcasting Corporation which is not the spoof website? Elinruby (talk) 03:19, 31 December 2016 (UTC) We should disambiguate. The news organization's website is at net.au Elinruby (talk) 05:03, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

linguistic quibble with the lede

this is pretty technical but at one point we have fake news, which is stuff, and fake news websites, which are items, right? Then we say (also known as hoax news) - which is stuff, not items. There is a disambiguation page, right? Elinruby (talk) 00:05, 31 December 2016 (UTC) To quibble in different vocabulary, is it still the case that the "fake news websites" which are the subject of this article are distinct from disinformation as used in the cold war? Elinruby (talk) 03:00, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

There is not really a useful stuff-versus-items distinction, the topic is a bit more complicated. The Onion has at times been both a print-newspaper (stuff) and also a website (virtualized stuff). The fake stories printed in the physical Onion, were fake news stories. So are the fake news stories electronically propagated via their website. If you take a clipping from the physical copy of The Onion (or make a hardcopy printout of a fake news story on their website), then send that clipping via USPS as a chain letter, you are propagating a fake news story from a producer/originator of fake news, via some sort of physical vector. The recipient might even hand-type 'www.theonion.com' from your hardcopy, into their PC, and thus create clickbait revenue. That is not functionally distinct from what happens when people cut-n-paste some fake news story originated by The Onion into their email, or into their twitter, or into their facebook, except in terms of speed and scale. So there *is* a crucial distinction between fake-news-stories ('George Washington DNA cloned!'), fake-news-vectors (fbook/twitr/fedex/usps), and fake-news-clickbait-sites (www.theonion.com plus also anybody who recycles their stories with an altered URL to swipe the pay-per-click revenue stream), and the subtly distinct fake-news-origination-organization (*usually* the publisher is not distinct from the clickbait-site in the traditional fake-news-website-scheme but in some of the propaganda/disinformation/similar metaphorical parallels the story-originator may not even HAVE a webhost whatsoever). And yes, there is a disambiguation page, at fake news; it needs some expansion and clarification methinks, see draftspace. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 09:26, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

the reference where Agence France Presse is cited as author

isn't that a photo caption? Does that Australian news organization exist? We're already working this quote pretty hard, eight times in text. Elinruby (talk) 01:05, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

There are multiple Agence France-Presse refs, I believe the specific one you are talking about is syndicated via Yahoo News. We use it in the intro-paragraphs for 3 sentence-fragments, plus once at the top of the impact-section. We also use it for ~60% of the prose in the Germany-specific section.
  • AFP#1 == "Merkel warns against fake news driving populist gains", Yahoo! News, Agence France-Presse, 23 November 2016.[42]
  • [in the lede and topsection]... [fake news] sites have promoted political falsehoods in Germany, ...Agence France-Presse reported media analysts see it [fake news] as damaging to democracy.[currently tagged: not in citation given] ...German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned of the societal impact of "fake sites, bots, trolls". ...Fake news has influenced political discourse in multiple countries, including Germany, ...
  • [in the Germany-subsection]... German Chancellor Angela Merkel lamented the problem of fraudulent news reports in a November 2016 speech, days after announcing her campaign for a fourth term as leader of her country. In a speech to the German parliament, Merkel was critical of such fake sites, saying they harmed political discussion. Merkel called attention to the need of government to deal with Internet trolls, bots, and fake news websites. She warned that such fraudulent news websites were a force increasing the power of populist extremism. Merkel called fraudulent news a growing phenomenon that might need to be regulated in the future.
  • (my re-summarization of the ref: Merkel says public opinion on the internet (as distinct from previous generations because "[o]pinions aren't formed the way they were 25 years ago") is being "manipulated", specifically by "fake sites, bots, trolls -- things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms" and went on to say "[her party] must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it." She then talked about her support for a governmental crackdown on "hate speech" specifically on the internet in the face of "concerns about the stability of our familiar order" (aka what Germany has been like since ~25 years ago circa reunification in 1990). "Populism and political extremes are growing," is the last quote from Merkel herself, and then the AFP narrates the election-specific details: this is Merkel's first campaign-speech since she announced she will run for re-election in fall 2017, her party is the Christian Democrats, she is facing a strong challenge from a resurgent rightwing populist party AfD, particularly over Merkel's immigration policy (AFP says that "all...mainstream parties" have ruled out forming a coalition-government with AfD in 2017). There is also allusion to the Clinton vs Trump election as an analogy, where again populism&immigration versus the political establishment since 1992 were the major themes, and quote "in which the global misinformation industry may have influenced the outcome". The AFP narrative hook is "Merkel warns against fake news driving populist gains" and the "power of fake news on social media to spur the rise of populists" and mentions that although Google and Facebook "moved to cut off ad revenue to bogus news sites" that is likely insufficient because "[unspecified] media watchers say more is needed to stamp out a powerful phenomenon seen by some [unspecified] experts as a threat to democracy itself.")
We also have a Nine News site in Australia which was used to syndicate something about Russia (not Merkel-nor-Germany related necessarily), this is a different ref:
The third ref is syndicated via The Japan Times, and talks about the usSen intel cmte.
  • AFP#3 == "Obama orders full review of 2016 election cyber-attacks", The Japan Times, Agence France-Presse, 11 December 2016, retrieved 11 December 2016.[44]
  • On 30 November 2016 seven members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked President Obama to publicize information on Russia's role in spreading disinformation in the U.S. election.
The 4th ref is syndicated via USA-funded RFERL (joint effort betwixt Reuters and AFP upstream), and talks about the MEP vote.
  • AFP#4 == "EU Parliament Urges Fight Against Russia's 'Fake News'", Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, 23 November 2016, retrieved 24 November 2016.[45]
  • The resolution condemned Russian sources for publicizing "absolutely fake" news reports. The tally on 23 November 2016 passed by a margin of 304 votes to 179.
So although I think the AFP#1 ref (via YahooNews) is not being misrepresented by what mainspace currently says, I think we need to attribute some of these claims to Merkel rather than just state them as factual ("sites have promoted political falsehoods" and also "has influenced political discourse" immediately jump out). I also think we could add some sentences, about the parallels Merkel is outlining between current censorship regulations in Germany and future ones, plus the parallels between the USA situation and the EU situation in terms of political factionalism, both of which mainspace currently skips (from that one ref at least). Also, Merkel never used 'fraudulent' that I can see from the AFP#1 cite, though I have not checked her original German in a speech-transcript. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 10:41, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
Oh, and the RFERL cite-template needs to be clarified: the prose at that URL was written *by* the RFERL people, at the bottom it credits other unspecified reporting by Agence France-Presse and Reuters, but we should not imply that the RFERL stuff was authorized nor authored by Reuters & AFP, which currently we do. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 10:47, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Source for Fake News Article in Wikipedia is Fake News? — Quality Problem?

In the References is BuzzFeed News at least 13 times and the name Buzzfeed is 23 times in this article (every time as source). So the source for claims in an Wikipedia Article about Fake News is a Fake News website with an political agenda which is known for their clickbaiting headlines and misleading informations? Don't you think that we have some quality problems here? And what about the fact that "Fake News" is now a popular term used to discredit every news station someone doesn't like?213.47.44.99 (talk) 11:14, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

On the question of whether buzzfeed is considered to be a 'reliable source' on wikipedia, the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no (I've seen both outcomes). You are correct that buzzfeed uses clickbait-y headlines, and that is definitely ironic.  :-)
But they also, at least in some of their pieces, do solid reporting. So they are a grey area, which sometimes count as reliable and other times do not, see WP:IRS and also WP:RSN. If you see something particular that needs removing, which is only sourced to buzzfeed, please point it out (i.e. which sentence is wrong/misleading/whatever).
There is also the separate question of whether buzzfeed is *biased* and therefore should not be used (see e.g. chart at journalism#Production and article at media bias in the United States). On wikipedia, using sources which are themselves biased, is usually okay, as long as the factual content is what is being used, and as long as the facts are given (by wikipedia in 'wikivoice' aka the prose in the article) in a neutral fashion. Wikipedia is NOT supposed to take sides. And as you can see, this is not an easy job in a controversial topic-area like fake news, especially when the very definition of the term is evolving so quickly. I've been working offline on gathering definition-of-fake-news sources, to fix up the article in that respect (over the last week plenty of sources have flat out said the term is an almost-meaningless slur nowadays), but have not updated the article-prose yet. If you'd like to stick around and help, you are welcome, but please remember that wikipedia takes time, especially on tricky topic-areas. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 11:32, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
So this means that even Fake News websites like CNN, BuzzFeed News and Breitbart can be reliable sources. That's kind of ironic, because we are talking about an article about "Fake News websites". This whole terms tries to imply that everything such a news station reports is Fake. It's also not a coincidence that the term "Fake News" suddenly appeared out of nowhere after the US election. If you analyse that term with Google Trends, you will see that it wasn't present at all before that. There is a clear connection with it, because the term originated from news stations who where all officially supporting Hillary Clinton (just need to list the Endorsement Statements of BuzzFeed, CNN, BBC, NYTimes,...). In my opinion, we need to dump that whole article and write a new one from scratch and focus on the term itself, it's origin and it's use.
If we really want to find a consistent definition, we have to accept that BuzzFeedNews and CNN is also Fake News, based on the official statement of the President Elect of the US and the Golden Shower Gate — but then we have an Article where we define that BuzzFeed is Fake News and write about other Fake News Sites with BuzzFeed as source and 13 BuzzFeed References. Awesome!213.47.44.99 (talk) 12:00, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia is nothing, if not sometimes internally contradictory! Sorry about that  ;-)
But just because somebody once called something on a particular website 'fake news' for whatever reason, does not mean that wikipedia cannot EVER use that 'fake news website' as a quote reliable source unquote. If you will read WP:RS you will see that wikipedia's bar for reliability is very low, just about any local newspaper journalist 'counts' as a reliable source. But if you read WP:NPOV you can see that wikipedia also strives to stay out of disputes: when reliable source X says one thing, and reliable source Y says the opposite, wikipedia is supposed to just use neutral phrasing to describe the situation. Wikipedians are NOT supposed to pick and choose the winners: so even though plenty of people (not just Trump) have called CNN, or more commonly MSNBC, some variation on the phrase 'fake news' that does not disqualify those entities as reliable sources. Even buzzfeed, which originally was more of a comedy show like Jon Stewart (not a reliable source in wikipedia jargon-sense), is like that. Cf the National Enquirer.
...as for a major rewrite being needed, you are correct that the article on Fake news website needs a lot of work. There are partial rewrite-attempts here and also here, plus see further up the talkpage where discussion is ongoing. Wikipedia just is slow about implementing improvements, especially on controversial topics like this one, but it gets there (slowly). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:10, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

CNN and Buzzfeed is Fake News

I added CNN as an example of a Fake News Website, but you reverted it with the reason that CNN is not Fake News in your opinion. I think that this is highly inappropriate, because the current President elect of the USA confirmed that it's Fake News and he is a more reliable source than the personal opinion of some random Wikipedia author. This conclusion is also based on the fact that CNN reported about the Golden Shower Gate, which is exactly on the same level as Pizzagate (which has an own section in Fake news websites in the United States). Even if you argue with the fact that CNN wrote in small letters that it's "unconfirmed", you have to accept that this behaviour is still a try to mislead readers for their own political agenda. If some random guy sends an anonymous Mail to a news outlet and claims that he had gay sex with Obama, and this news outlet is reporting it in big letters on their main page… would you consider that Fake News? I guess: Yes, Of course! Because that's exactly how the Fake News websites who are currently in your examples work — they take random claims and report about them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.47.44.99 (talk) 10:47, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Please cite wp:reliable sources that state CNN and Buzzfeed are fake news sources. And, BTW, stating that the Prez said so is not RS. Jim1138 (talk) 11:10, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
  • 10:29, 12 January 2017‎ Grayfell m . . (Reverted 1 edit by 213.47.44.99 (talk) to last revision by 65.128.173.192. (TW))
  • 10:28, 12 January 2017‎ 213.47.44.99. . (CNN is Fake News. It's confirmed by the president elect of the US. That's a reliable source.)
Hello 213.47, you were reverted by Grayfell who did not comment specifically on why they did so, which was not very proper. Coming to the talkpage was the right thing however, thank you 213.47, we can get it worked out here. I've moved your talkpage-section on CNN to the bottom of the page, because that is wikipedia tradition for where new sections go (that is where people look for them). On the substance of your point, there are two things that matter here. First of all, any particular human (even the POTUS-elect) does not automatically count as a 'reliable source' in the wikipedia sense of the term. You can see the meaning at WP:RS, and there in particular you will note that WP:GOVERNMENTAL sources are considered to often be reliable, albeit usually WP:PRIMARY. However, this is specific to governmental publications, i.e. congressional record or a report officially issued by one of the govermental agencies, or similar things. You mentioned in your edit-summary that Trump once said CNN was 'fake news' but you didn't give a reference-URL to where and in what context -- if he said it on twitter, and nobody else reported on it, that would count as a personal statement but would not count as being a 'published' statement in the wikipedia sense, see WP:BLOGS. (If he just retweeted what somebody else said then it would probably not even count as WP:ABOUTSELF.) On the other hand, if Trump was quoted in a newspaper or on television or in a published book, saying that CNN is a 'fake news' organization, then that would possibly belong in the Fake news website article, and eventually in the List of fake news websites (the current "rule" there is that only websites with at least three sources calling them 'fake news' sites will be listed). Now, doing a quick search, it looks like there are several reliable sources for Trump calling CNN 'fake news', I will put a list together and then post it here on the talkpage. The second thing that matters, is whether the CNN logo belongs in the example-of-fake-news-sites at the top of the page, or whether that would be WP:UNDUE, more on that in a minute. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 11:12, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Here are the sources which easily pass WP:RS. Instead of saying that Trump said such and such, you have to do it more like this:

On January 11, 2016, during a back-and-forth altercation with a CNN journalist at a press conference, president-elect Donald Trump told the CNN journalist "you are fake news".[1]

References

  1. ^ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/business/media/donald-trump-buzzfeed-cnn.html

Political.[46][47] International.[48][49][50][51] Mainstream.[52][53] Financial.[54] Factchecker.[55] Does that make sense? It is how wikipedia keeps people from just putting anything into the article, everything must be verifiable, which usually means linking to a magazine/book/newspaper/televisionWebsite/etc. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 11:24, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. I noticed that you moved it down, thanks for that. 65.128 did undo it with the comment "because CNN is not a fake news site", i added it again and Grayfell reverted it with "Fully reverting vandalism".
The President elect of the USA said it on his official press conference, so i guess that this is considered as a reliable source. It can't get more official than that. So if i add the Youtube Video of the press conference as a Reference, it would be OK to add CNN as an example for Fake News? Thats great, i can do that!
The CNN logo totally belongs in the example-of-fake-news-site at the top, because it's more popular than abcnews, denverguardian or theresistor (honestly, i never heard about that sites before i saw them here).And do you really think that news sites reporting about what Trump said are better References than a video of the Press Conference itself?213.47.44.99 (talk) 11:36, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes, Grayfell needed to be a bit more careful with their phrasing, they should not have called it vandalism. But please forgive them per WP:NICE -- as you can probably guess, we have people show up every other day inserting "$news_org_I_dislike is the fakest faker of fake news evah" just to screw with wikipedia. So it makes folks a little touchy, and Grayfell over-reacted. In your case, you are correct that Trump really did say it, you are just unsure how wikipedia policies work. And you will find they are paradoxical, but make sense after you get used to them. Youtube is not considered a reliable source, because anybody can upload to it. The video content is *usually* not photoshopped or altered, but there are no fact-checkers at google taking down incorrect & altered videos, so wikipedia does not trust youtube generally speaking. Wikipedia prefers to trust the places I listed above: New York Times, The Hill, Politico, France24, The Telegraph, The Guardian, USA Today, Snopes.com, Business Insider, that sort of thing. FOX also counts for most things. And sometimes sites like Breitbart and DailyKos count, but we are very cautious with them because they are highly biased, whereas CNN is only somewhat biased, see datasets at Talk:Fake_news_website/Archive_2#Useful_charts_but_not_deliberate_hoax_fraud.
....as for the example-sites you have never heard of, those are the clearest exemplars of the narrow core definition of 'fake news website' which means those run by Jestin Coler (see National Report and Denver Guardian) and Paul Horner (see ABCnews.com.co), which pretend to be legit news organizations but actually just make everything up. RealTrueNews was a hoax-site that later revealed itself. 70news is more borderline, it is arguably more a blog than a fake news site by the narrow definition, but is there currently because of WP:RECENTISM, which may get corrected/balanced at some point. CNN is a legit news organization compared to them, obviously, so it is not neutral (see WP:NPOV) to lump CNN in with clickbait-hoax-sites. See also the discussion further up the talkpage about the pope, where WaPo and their affiliates just flat out screwed up and misquoted the pope -- that is errata, and might be perceived as evidence of bias, but not 'fake news' in the narrow sense. There was a case in the 1980s where a WaPo journalist *was* completely making up stories to boost circulation, but at the time that was called journalistic scandal rather than fake news. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 11:59, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
It's not like i expected that all Wikipedia authors would just accept that some major news station like CNN is considered Fake News. I already guessed that it will lead to some discussions, so lets forget about that Revert and talk about how we should deal with the "CNN = Fake News" issue.
I think i get what you mean, thanks for the explanation, so i should add multiple media sources instead of a video of the Press Conference. That is not a big deal, thanks.
I understand that the definition of "Fake News" fits better to these small sites nobody knows. But the article says that Fake News deliberately publish propaganda and seek to mislead, the "Overview of coverage" section even says that it's a form of psychological warfare and damaging to democracy. If this is the goal of Fake News, then the small news sites have just some minor effect, even if 90% of their reports are deliberately false, while CNN reaches out to an enormous amount of people and has an much bigger effect, even if just 10% is false propaganda and political bias. So if we talk about deliberate false reporting with the goal to influence people, CNN takes the lead. If we consider CNN to be Fake News, we have to place it on top.213.47.44.99 (talk) 12:35, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Alex Younger quote in lede

this is talking about fake news as propaganda not fake news as clickbait Elinruby (talk) 01:23, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, he specifically is quoted as talking about ...countries take advantage of the internet to “further their aims deniably” through “means as varied as cyberattacks, propaganda, or subversion... which is plausible deniability, cyberattack, grey propaganda / black propaganda, and subversion. He also talks about disinformation and counterpropaganda, albeit not using those terms specifically. I was interested in the media-relations techniques used, as well; MI6 invited buzzfeed, which is currently the only source we cite, but they also pre-recorded some version of Younger's remarks for the television market ("for technical reasons" which presumably means that for security reasons heavy electromagnetic TV equipment is not permitted on the building-grounds of MI6 but might also indicate that they used video news release techniques within the provided clips).
  • "Younger... strongly criticised states which have been using cyber and other forms of hybrid warfare to undermine Western democracies. Although he did not name Russia as one of the culprits, there was little doubt that he was pointing the finger at the Kremlin when he spoke about the 'increasingly dangerous phenomenon of hybrid warfare.' US intelligence agencies have claimed to have evidence that Russia had hacked emails of the Democratic Party, publishing material which damaged Hilary Clinton's campaign and helped Mr Trump's. There are also claims that Moscow may try to interfere in the coming French and German general elections. 'The connectivity at the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims of deniability. They do this through means as varied as cyber-attacks, propaganda or subversion of democratic process. The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty; they should be a concern to all those who share democratic values'"[56]
  • "Hostile states pose 'fundamental threat' to Europe, says MI6 chief: Although Alex Younger does not name specific country, he makes clear that Russia is target of his remarks... cyber-attacks, propaganda and subversion from hostile states pose a 'fundamental threat' to European democracies.... He did mention Russia in relation to Syria, portraying Russian military support... first time an MI6 chief has made a speech at the HQ... He described the internet as having turned the work of the intelligence services on its head and said it represented 'an existential threat' as well as an opportunity. He said hybrid warfare – which Russia has employed in Ukraine, though he again did not mention Russia – was a dangerous phenomenon. 'The connectivity that is at the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims deniably,' he said. ...Younger declined to provide details of how Britain was responding to such threats, citing operational reasons, but it is known the UK government does not see a need to respond to Russia in a symmetrical way, such as launching a counter-cyber-attack. Instead it could launch a series of counter-measures such as sanctions. ...Younger ran through various threats posed to the UK other than cyber-security... In a reference to the Chilcot report on Iraq, he came as close as anyone from MI6 to acknowledging that the agency had made a huge mistake through its part in falsely claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion. The Chilcot report singled out the intelligence agencies for falling into line with what Tony Blair’s government wanted rather challenging it over WMD. “A vital lesson I take from the Chilcot report is the danger of groupthink. I will do anything I can to stimulate a contrary view: to create a culture where everyone has the confidence to challenge, whatever their seniority,” Younger said."[57]
  • Others that I have not parsed closely: [58][59][60][61]
  • WP:ABOUTSELF from MI6, including link to prepared remarks.[62][63]
  • Possibly useful but some are borderline as RS methinks: [64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72]
So although this is a related topic, and probably deserves mention to highlight the differences and similarities, he is definitely not talking specifically about clickbait-is-our-motive fake news websites. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 11:32, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Omit from lead. Quotes of this nature are generally not sufficiently important to be included in the lead and are frequently non-neutral. This is an excellent example. The better thing to do is to move these types of quotes into the body, and if enough highly noteworthy views have been expressed, then summarize them broadly in the lead. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 17:34, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

another verb/wording issue in the lede

"Computer security company FireEye concluded Russia used social media as cyberwarfare." Didn't they say it *is* on an ongoing basis? I think that should be "uses" not "used". Also, is "concluded" really the right word here? That 13-page report isn't all that convincing technically. Elinruby (talk) 22:43, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't really matter whether the report is convincing; it's attributed to FireEye, and it's a conclusion they came to. Wrt to tense of the word "use", I think past tense is better, as FireEye based it on past behavior. They didn't exactly argue that it's ongoing. Finally, 'cyberwarfare' is something one does, not something one uses, so I've taken the liberty of changing the wording to reflect this. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 22:59, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
what about if we said "they released this document on this date that said bla bla"? Well actually, let me go see if there is a section labelled "conclusion" that says that. If there is I will withdraw the objection. Elinruby (talk)
That wording implies that FireEye may not agree with the claims in the report, which is a fairly ludicrous proposition to anyone who's familiar with the practices of cybersecurity firms, but not to anyone who isn't. Using source voice is perfectly fine (as opposed to saying their report "showed" or "proved" or "demonstrated" Russian use of social media for cyberwarfare), but putting it in the voice of the document itself? No, that's going too far. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 14:18, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
At least as written this content is in the context of Russia's actions in the run-up to the U.S. election, so if this is going to be changed to talk about Russia's ongoing activities then that should be made clear. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 17:30, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
I agree. I believe the past tense is the only tense supported by the source. There are other RSes if someone wants to describe ongoing Russian hacking.
Warning! This is likely to cause a big stink. I am quite confident that the Trolls from Olgino are on WP (lots of British and Eastern European proxy IPs, and highly-hackable American ISP IPs constantly whine about WP's slandering of Russia in articles about it), and there are plenty of legit editors willing to defend mother Russia's honor, as well. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 19:58, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

birds-eye overview

Refers to the ramp-up in coverage by governments and media as beginning in November 2016, notes the historical parallels of urban legends and chain letters, suggests motivation behind coverage-ramp but explains why that motivation is a fail (confirmation bias is the real problem), mentions fake-news-story by 70news but immediately shifts to discussion of fake-news-website-and-organizations-behind-them as the core topic (and differentiates that from satire-sites && partisan-bias-sites). Explains how fake-news-sites must fabricate their stories in a specific fashion to take advantage of human psychology, and pick their names/URLs carefully for that same reason. Contrasts the false news and errata with the distinct concept of fake news (but not that distinct! e.g. Rolling Stone writers and readers suffered from confirmation bias just like Denver Guardian readers did). Importantly, something I've not seen clearly explained in other sources yet (thus needs attribution probably), Macleans notes that fake news sites are highly dependent on the real news environment, as they piggyback-parasite on top of the 24-hour scandal-cycle news media, without which their fake-news-clickbait would not be as successful. Familiar prose-style and familiar-story-framing and a vaguely-familiar-seeming-name plus plausible-yet-purer-than-usual conclusions that appeal to confirmation bias, are how the scam works at a nuts-n-bolts level. Zero mentions of propaganda nor cyberwarfare, since those are *different* motivations (though sometimes using similar techniques) than a clickbait scammer has. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 09:50, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

U of CT philosophy professor Michael P. Lynch

  • "Lynch spoke told The New York Times (∃) a troubling amount number of individuals who make determinations relying upon the most recent piece of information they consumed, regardless of"

There is no "regardless of" clause in the original, is there? Elinruby (talk) 04:27, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

the rest of the predicate should read "who rely on their most recent information" (then the "regardless of the truth of it" part of the above, if in fact that is accurate Elinruby (talk) 04:30, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
NYT headline is 'As Fake News Spreads Lies, More Readers Shrug at the Truth' of which here is a snippet:

...The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news... while some Americans may take the stories literally [parenthetically mentions pizzagate]...many do not [take the fake-news-stories literally]. The larger problem [than incorrect literalism], experts say, is less extreme but more insidious. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion, punching holes in what is true, causing a kind of fun-house effect that leaves the reader doubting everything, including real news.... 'There are an alarming number of people who tend to be credulous and form beliefs based on the latest thing they've read, but that’s not the wider problem,' said Michael Lynch, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. 'The wider problem is fake news has the effect of getting people not to believe real things. ...[Lynch then described the problematic way of thinking]...'There's no way for me to know what is objectively true, so we'll stick to our guns and our own evidence. We'll ignore the facts because nobody knows what's really true anyway.' [NYT reporter continues] Narrowly defined, 'fake news' means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites. In the process, the definition of fake news has blurred."

Here is what is currently in mainspace:

University of Connecticut philosophy professor Michael P. Lynch spoke with The New York Times and said there existed a troubling amount of individuals who make determinations relying upon the most recent piece of information they consumed, regardless of its veracity. He said the greater issue was that fake news could have a negative impact on the likelihood of people to believe news that is true. Lynch summed up the thought process of such individuals, as "...ignore the facts because nobody knows what’s really true anyway.”[73]

A short mainspace rewrite would look something like this:

76 words... According to philosophy professor Michael Lynch, the wider problem with fake news is not that an 'alarming number of people who tend to be credulous' will be temporarily tricked into taking some particular viral fake news story at face value, but rather that a significant number of people may permanently cease to believe that objective truth is achievable, and therefore ignore facts wholesale (preferring to stick with their own existing beliefs or desires regardless of what new evidence may tell them)."

Which is a mouthful, I'd be happy if somebody could split that into two or three sentences, or tighten up the prose a bit -- as simple as possible but no simpler. This problem is central to the reasons why people believe fake news in the first place, too, methinks (see confirmation bias and knew-it-all-along-bias). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:36, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
ok well "amount" should be "number" because people are not fungible. (Items not stuff was the way I was trying to explain a similar distinction earlier).I agree that what you wrote is a re-statement of what he said (I think) but I agree, I would be nice to simplify that sentence. Another linguistic quibble, should be "number of people" not "number people". I am sure that's a typo; I'll get it in my rewrite attempt. I don't think we should call people credulous. Also I don't think that Michael Lynch is that immportant in himself, and fake news was does cause some harm. He just sees the longer term problem also of the loss of faith in journalism or even the existence of an objective discoverable truth. Try: "Fake news can create serious misunderstandings but so far diplomatic incidents have been avoided. People tend to rely on the most recent information they have received, said philosophy professor Michael P. Lynch [citation needed], but he worries that a significant number of people may come to believe that the truth cannot be determined." Elinruby (talk) 23:06, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
Corrections inserted, thanks. "People tend to" is wrong methinks. Lynch says that fake-news-now does cause harm (hence his word "alarming" -- but that is different from 'many'/'tend to'/'most'), but Lynch thinks that fake-news-repercussions could be more than just alarming and well into the intellectual-dark-ages type of scenario, is my understanding. Bad enough now, yet could become catastrophically bad later, in other words. As for diplomatic incidents, see further up the talkpage about the Pakistani tweet threatening nuclear response to something that was fake, or the sanctions that Obama is putting in place against Russia (for cyberwarfare tactics rather than fake news per se... but as our mainspace article makes glaringly obvious, that is a distinction lots of perfectly intelligent people find quite easy to conflate away). Not sure about the Turkish border thing, no mention in mainspace of that? Here is my re-rewrite attempt:

93 words... According to philosophy professor Michael Lynch, one long-term risk of the reactions to fake news, and the counter-reactions to those reactions, is that a significant number of people may permanently cease to believe that objective truth is achievable. Instead, such people may eventually treat their own beliefs or desires as truth (regardless of new evidence may tell them), as trust in all news media deteriorates. This is on top of the near-term problems with viral fake news stories, which Lynch notes impact an "alarming number of people" at least temporarily.

Still wordy, but uses reasonably-short sentences now. 93 words about Lynch&NYT might be WP:UNDUE for the size of the article overall, in which case we can cut it down to something more brief, and include links to Illusory truth effect and such at the bottom of the article perhaps:

39 words... According to philosophy professor Michael Lynch, one long-term risk is that "fake news has the effect of getting people not to believe real things [thus they] ignore the facts because [they believe] nobody knows what's really true anyway."

And then in the cite_web template, we can give the broader context and some wikilinks. Alternatively, we can bump Lynch down a notch and instead quote the NYT reporter, like this:

~66 words... "Fake news, and the proliferation of [hyperpartisan] raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion... leaves the reader doubting everything, including real news," according to the NYT. This problem is wider than the problem of people who take viral fake news stories literally, because doubting everything threatens belief in objective truth itself, according to Michael Lynch, and could lead to a significant number of people ignoring facts.

This is a difficult facet of the topic to summarize. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 11:42, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

pope sources need work

Decent headline, but partially-wrong attribution (Associated Press not NYT which was just temp-hosting) and currently a deadlink (here is a backup copy[74]).

  • #173, [75], "Pope Warns About Fake News-From Experience", The New York Times, Associated Press, 7 December 2016
  • Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, spoke out against fake news various problems with the media in an interview with the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio on 7 December 2016.[173]
  • The Pope had prior experience being the subject of a fabricated fake news story website fiction — during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, he was falsely said to support have endorsed Donald Trump for president.[173][97][98]

Pretty inaccurate headline:

  • #174, [76], Pullella, Philip (7 December 2016), Pope warns media over 'sin' of spreading fake news, smearing politicians, Reuters

Very inaccurate headlines:

  • #175, [77], Zauzmer, Julie (7 December 2016), "Pope Francis compares media that spread fake news to people who are excited by feces", The Washington Post
  • #176, [78], "Pope Francis compares fake news consumption to eating faeces", The Guardian, 7 December 2016
  • #177, [79], Griffin, Andrew (7 December 2016), "Pope Francis: Fake news is like getting sexually aroused by faeces", The Independent
  • Pope Francis said the singular worst thing the news media could do was spreading 'disinformation' (saying only part of the truth) and that amplifying fake news using the media for defamation instead of educating society was a sin.
  • He compared salacious reporting of scandals, whether true or not, to coprophilia and the consumption of it scandals to coprophagy.[174][175][176][177]
  • The pope said that he did not intend to offend with his strong words, but emphasized that "a lot of damage can be done" when the truth is disregarded and slander scandals, or only portions of the truth, are spread.[175][177]

Not currently being used on wikipedia...

  • ...despite having the somewhat-more-accurate body-content, and okay headline: Ars Technica, [80]
  • ...despite having fairly-accurate body-content, and meh headline: CNN, [81]
  • ...despite having mostly-accurate body-content, and pretty-okay headline: NPR, [82]
  • ...despite having solidly-accurate body-content, notwithstanding the clickbait headline: US News, [83]
  • ...one of the few in-depth stories that was *corrected* on the 9th to more-accurately reflect what the pope actually said: USA Today / The Advertiser, [84]
  • ...mentions the correct non-truncated quote, and deeplinks to the full Vatican translation into English: FOX News, [85]
  • ...reasonably accurate translation (despite 'disinformation'/'misinformation' snafu) from the original spanish-language interview into english, published by a governmental entity, also not currently being used on wikipedia: The Vatican, [86]
  • ...Also gets the pope's intended meaning mostly correct, though may not satisfy WP:RS for wikipedia's purposes: Catholic.org, [87] (it is used as a cite in a few hundred articles already however)
  • ...by contrast the Christian Post gets the quotes right but the summarization of the pope's actual meaning wrong.[88]

Later reporting (i.e. more than a week after the burst of interview-coverage on the 7th and 8th) also sometimes get the meaning mostly-correct:

  • "...as Pope Francis. His Holiness compared media’s obsession with scandal and ugly things to the sickness of coprophilia. If you’re just finishing breakfast, look it up later; but it’s nasty." Per CBS News.[89]
  • ...but not always, The Atlantic article on Dec 26th used the misleadingly-truncated quote.[90]
  • ...and opinion pieces are also often wrong, in this case a regular column in the Fiscal Times.[91]

See also, Talk:Fake_news_website/Archive_2#pope_quote. Note that the phrase 'fake news' is never actually mentioned by the pope, and his use of the term 'coprophilia' to criticize the news media in general was also reported on back in 2013, by Catholic Herald,[92] and also by Business Insider.[93] (They got the meaning metaphorically intended by the pope mostly correct -- 'coprophagia' is slang for 'the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects' in the pope's own words, and 'coprophilia' is metaphorically just 'talking shit' in the journalist's summary of the intended meaning. In addition to being a subject of fake news, as wikivoice currently notes, the pope also considers himself to be a person who was unfairly trashed in the news media, by shit-rakers obsessed with spreading scandal (even when true), back in 2013. It would be WP:SYNTH to say that in wikivoice, but can somebody please fix up the current mess we are making of what the pope actually said, and did NOT actually say, during his 2016 interview? I am annoyed that we are using errata as cites, almost as much as that we are not quite getting the nuances of the interview-quote accurate & correct. Just because the media sometimes screwsup, does not mean wikipedia ought to blindly mimic them. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:02, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

part of the problem here is definition

Fake news is content. Fake news websites are containers. The distinction matters because of the way the laws are written Elinruby (talk) 22:21, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, but not just the way laws are written, also the way software countermeasures are written: one can block fake-news-websites with a domain-name-blacklist (which prevents their earning any clickbait cash), but blocking fake-news-stories is vastly more difficult (see also discussion of motive above -- although the classic fake-news-website is run by people wanting to make a quick buck that is not the only motive). Mainspace needs to be very clear and precise when discussing these things, and separate them into subsections, with pullquotes that are specific to each subtopic put into that specific subsection, e.g. MI6 is talking about cyberwarfare/cyberterrorists and not about clickbait scammers. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:14, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, the countermeasures are also different. It just seemed like disinformation examples are being added back in Elinruby (talk) 21:11, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

We're not talking about removing disinformation from our article, are we? Just moving it the appropriate section? --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 18:42, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Cannot speak for Elinruby here, but my current purpose is to *create* appropriate subsections. The current article is so badly organized that it will be nigh-impossible to be precise -- the current article structure *assumes* that fake-news-website is an identical concept with fake-news (and also conflates those from time to time with propaganda/disinformation/yellowjournalism/mediabias/etc/etc/etcetera), then divvies up everything geographically.

Right now we have the following sections: Overview, Definition, Pre-Internet history, Prominent sources (4 countries), Impacts by country (19 countries), Response (by politifact/goog/fbook/webdevs/pope), Academic analysis. Only one of those sections, the 'pre-internet history' section, is titled so as NOT to inherently conflate fake-news-websites with the distinct concept of fake-news-stories. The rest are a muddle: academic analysis of fake-news-stories is intermixed freely with academic analysis of fake-news-websites, ditto for "Response(s)". And as elinruby and myself note above, this is completely wrongheaded from both a legalese and technological standpoint: response to fake-sites is one legal and technology world, response to fake-stories is a much different legal and technology universe.

Every single subsection of impact-by-country and prominent-sources-by-country, mix and match people talking about counter-cyberwarfare strategy (Younger) with people talking about trolls/bots/hatespeech (Merkel) with people talking about politically-motivated-fake-news-stories (Clinton) with people talking about financially-motivated-fake-news-websites (Horner). In some cases we have screwups by the sources, such as in the pope-quote subsection... but most of the screwups are just wikipedians being too hasty and jamming stuff all together haphazardly. We need to de-haphazardize, and structure the article into a new non-geographical bunch of subsections. Instead of the current structure, my suggestion is that we have something like this:

now new
definition (ambiguous) definition (fake sites)
definition (fake stories)
history (fakeStories) history (fake stories)
psychology (fake stories)
sources (ambiguous) examples (fake sites)
examples (fake stories)
impact (ambiguous) impact (fake sites)
impact (fake stories)
overlap with conspiracy sites (fake sites)
overlap with conspiracy theories (fake stories)
overlap with false fronts (fake sites)
overlap with covert propaganda (fake stories)
response (ambiguous) countermeasures (fake sites)
countermeasures (fake stories)
(no such subsection)
(and not really mentioned!) 		related concept: social engineering & long con
related concept: media bias & sensationalism
related concept: errata & opinion-pieces
academia (ambiguous) (ditch subsection)
(integrate material where specifically applicable)
media commentary (ambiguous) (ditch already-deleted subsection)
(integrate material where specifically applicable)

Specifically, we would not have anything about Yemen (or whatever country you like) in the subsection about false-front-fake-sites, UNLESS there was something of that nature that actually happened in Yemen, aka there was a false-front-fake-site *run* by unethical Yemeni citizens or there was a false-front-fake-site which *targetted* gullible Yemeni citizens specifically. And yes, in theory every website can be viewed by anybody with internet access, but the majority of the sources talk about fake-sites as being run by particular entities/groups and also as being aimed primarily at particular groups/populaces, thus so ought wikipedia.

This new structure does have the disadvantage that material related to fake-news-stories-or-fake-new-sites-or-a-related-concept will be more spread out in the body-prose, but I don't see that as a serious problem -- we *already* have spinoff articles like Fake news in the United States which can use different organizational structure than Fake news website. But for *this* article we need to explain the relevant concepts (plural), with precision and exactness, not just have a long list of pullquotes by people whom are actually talking about subtly distinct things (relative to each other). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 16:19, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I like this approach generally, although I think repeatedly distinguishing between fake news stories and fake news websites is a bit much. That particular distinction doesn't doesn't seem all that important to me. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:17, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes, we need not have explicit subsection-headers that necessarily distinguish, as long as we are careful to be precise in our body-prose. The distinction between sites-and-stories is crucial in two main 'response' areas: legislation (censoring sites is a form of regulating the freedom of the press whereas censoring stories is a form of regulating the freedom of speech), and also technological implementation (google/facebook/etc can block *sites* aka domain-names 'fairly' easily but blocking stories aka content is qualitatively different and vastly more difficult). And as we've been discussing above, motive is a third 'sources' sub-area where the site-vs-story distinction is key: clickbait scammers must have a fake-news-website, since that is HOW they rake in the clickbait cash, whereas public-opinion-manipulators need not have a site per se, and can concentrate on spreading fake-news-stories (via sites/shares/forumcomment/etc/etc). So the distinction definitely matters, in some key sections of the article.
...plus more broadly, I also think the distinction matters from an WP:Accuracy standpoint -- we quote a lot of people who are actually talking about fake-news-stories, as if they were talking about fake-news-sites. (Plus in rare cases people that are not even talking about 'fake news' as if they were.) This is not just a pedantic whine, it directly leads to the rest of the article getting into the same muddled state. Historically speaking, there are some precursors to fake-news-sites, e.g. scraper sites and phishing sites, while there are completely different precursors to fake-news-stories, e.g. yellow journalism and chain letters. I'll wait a couple days for more commentary before I go making bold changes to the section-organization, but it is badly needed. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 10:46, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
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