Tuesday 31 July 2018

Working Out What's Fake News

The British Government is setting up an anti-fake news unit because we’re told that fake news is everywhere these days, especially by people who you suspect are partial to a little fake news themselves.
So what exactly is fake news?
It's news that's made up or not quite real or twists the facts, think Boris Johnson and that message on the side of that big red bus or Damian Green and his 'it was my assistant' when porn was found on his computer.
A good rule of thumb is if a politician calls a story 'fake new' they are generally covering something up, Donald Trump and his mad fake news ramblings about him not affairs with porn stars while paying them $130,000 and playboy models behind his wife's back is an excellent example.
What is now labelled 'Fake News' is just what we once called bullshit and most humans have a working brain which they can use to think for themselves and it comes with a pre-installed bullshit detector so while we can easily dismiss the Royals being lizards, sometimes the term fake news is simply used by people in power to dismiss opinions that will embarrass them or they simply don’t agree with.
It won't stop some people some believing mad stuff like climate change denial or that the Earth is flat but it's a worry that we are going to be told what is and isn't fake news by politicians.
It's not that difficult to make up your own mind about a story, just look at the evidence and the source and then engage that bit of the brain that filters out the made up bits and either dismiss it as bullshit or accept that someone has been caught out doing something they don't want you to know about and are trying to cover it up by loudly shouting 'fake news' at it.

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