Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news.
As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources.
That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions.
I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public.
If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites.
Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.
I agree with almost everything you write here, but I just want to make clear that my comment was about the term "fake news", and not reactionary outrage, FUD, attack TV shows, Reddit, or anything else.
Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news.
As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources.
That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions.
I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public.
If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites.
Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.