President-elect Donald Trump tweeted Thursday night that he had convinced Ford to not close a factory in Kentucky. “I worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky,” Trump tweeted. “I owed it to the great State of Kentucky for their confidence in me!”
There was just one problem: The automaker wasn’t planning on closing the factory. (It was going to move production of the Lincoln MKC SUV to Mexico, but increase production of the Ford Escape, which is made in the same facility.)Regardless of Ford’s plans, the incident is just another illustration of how social media has been utilized to spread false information.
Every single one of these headlines is completely wrong, easily fact checked, and peddling a fake news story spread by the president-elect. pic.twitter.com/vsE41hFjZw
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) November 18, 2016
It’s an issue even President Barack Obama has been thinking about. He addressed the issue in a press conference in Germany this week.
Obama: "If we are not serious about facts, and what's true and what's not… then we have problems." https://t.co/pO2n4KtSJv
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 17, 2016
Obama also, according to a profile by New Yorker editor David Remnick, had “talked almost obsessively” about a recent BuzzFeed story about how teens in Macedonia were creating pro-Trump websites that peddled fake stories.
Facebook and sites like these have resulted in an environment where “everything is true and nothing is true,” Obama said:
“An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”
That marked a decisive change from previous political eras, he maintained. “Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” he said. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.”
Even members of Trump’s incoming administration have shared these stories.
Incoming NSC adviser retweeted an insane story about Hillary and sex crimes with children https://t.co/sJ99wYAw8a
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) November 18, 2016
For his part, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said hoaxes or fake news account for less than 1 percent of what people see in their News Feeds. Still, the issue is not going away, and it appears that journalists and news consumers will continue to find ways to address the spread of false narratives on platforms such as Facebook and Google.
1. New reality for the press: the president-elect’s Twitter account is a competing media outlet spreading fake news. https://t.co/VPvjKnW5PI
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
2. Starts out when Trump tweets the claim that he saved a factory that, in fact, wasn’t going to close: https://t.co/TMoLGKv5IZ
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
3. Reuters then runs a story reporting “Trump says Ford not moving U.S. plant to Mexico,” with no corroboration: https://t.co/wm86o3sIg3
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
4. Detroit FP reports it as Ford keeping MKC production (true) w/o correcting false claim a factory was saved: https://t.co/g2DmPLIUgY
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
5. By morning, several news outlets have debunked Trump’s claim: https://t.co/DWBj5Wrg7N
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
6. But by this point, people are happily spreading “Trump saved a factory!” on social media: https://t.co/YkBesmyyi4
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
7. Oh, and as of 8:24 a.m., that weak USAT/Detroit FP story leads the Google News section on the topic. pic.twitter.com/RaYqMoXGnA
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
8. The Reuters story is there, updated & w hed “Ford tells Trump no Lincoln SUV production going to Mexico”: https://t.co/xUllHevNMl
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
9. But the fact that jobs that weren’t going to be lost *still aren’t going to be lost* is not the story. It's the fake news from PEOTUS.
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
10. Pushing back on fake news—some spread by the president—is going to become a bigger part of the media’s job.
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
11. I have no great answer. But at least news organizations could refrain from *helping* the fake news.
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
12. A lie goes around the world while the truth is tying its shoes. At least don’t give the lie a ride to the airport. /end
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
3 comments:
in response to headline maybe it was his previous occupier of his job Bush and the old media NYT that led many not to believe in anything
ONLINE JOBS FROM HOME CYBER-JOBS.COM
Well, there’s news and there’s horseshit dreamt up in an echo chamber of thought and promulgated in order to fool ignorant people. I applaud legitimate news outlets for “outing” false news. it’s going to be more than a full time job for the next four years.
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