Fake News is hardly a news story, but it has taken on new life with the Presidential Election and the insinuation of outside interference in the American process of democracy and the inability of the analysts to understand what happened. The results defy their comprehension.
What is different in this election is the enormous role that social media played. According to Will Oremus of Slate in his article, The Real Problem Behind the Fake News: Facebook is under fire for spreading falsehoods. But it’s getting away with a bigger lie.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/11/the_problem_with_facebook_runs_much_deeper_than_fake_news.html
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president, Facebook has taken justifiable heat for its role in spreading misinformation and propaganda about the candidates. In particular, its news feed algorithm fueled a cottage industry of fake and intentionally misleading “news” that skewed heavily anti–Hillary Clinton and pro-Trump, according to a BuzzFeed analysis. These falsehoods attracted far more user engagement, on average, than true stories from the same outlets and drowned out earnest attempts by dedicated fact-checking sites such as Snopes to debunk them.
A lot is being written about Trump’s Anti-science stance, but how biased is that reporting? Here is an interesting article that offers counter-point. We just got through eight years of misrepresentations from the Right about Obama. There is no chance we won’t experience the same from the Left about Trump.
From the magazine The Real War on Science, The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress by John Tierney , Autumn 2016
My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?
My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?
To read more follow this link http://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html
REAL science dies whenever one side tries to claim "The debate is over."
