Sunday Snapshot 11/27/16 Confidence issues: The "fake news" saga continues, and this week we saw two examples of just how damaging it can be when media outlets either pick up questionable stories as fact, or have executives who see it as okay to go ahead and change the content of user reports on their site to fit their own personal agenda. 
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's decision to modify comments made about him on the site by users who support Donald Trump might be the more serious of these two incidents. Huffman copped to changing mentions of him that were unflattering, to say the least, because, according to the executive, "it does get old calling people a pedophile constantly" and he wanted to flag a user doing exactly that to him to the board's community mods. In "trolling the trolls," as he puts it, however, Huffman has not only shown that Reddit's troubles with top brass and management are not only far from over, but he's also undermined Reddit's core values. For better or for worse, the site could previously claim to have hewed pretty closely to its goal of being an open forum for internet denizens – now, however, when anything on the site is theoretically subject to the petty, personal whims of a CEO throwing a tantrum, even that foundational principle of the site is called into question. Then on a slow post-Thanksgiving Friday, content-hungry outlets grabbed up a report that CNN had accidentally broadcast porn for 30 minutes when it was supposed to be showing Anthony Bourdain's show. Some inside baseball for Snapshot readers: We looked at this at TC, decided it was sketchy as hell for a variety of reasons and passed on writing it up. A lot of other outlets, including The Independent, Mashable, Variety, The Next Web and more did pick up the story, however, which turned out to be single sourced from a lone woman's Twitter account. It was ultimately debunked and outlets followed up, but the initial interest and media spread means that a lot of people pout there probably still think CNN actually did accidentally broadcast porn, when in fact one woman's DVR seems to have had a very weird glitch. Much of the blame for the proliferation of fake news has fallen on Facebook, and even on Russian propagandists. Both of these sources are real concerns that require further exploration and solutions, but this past week's examples show that there are also deep problems present on the side of media outlets and what they choose to run, and on forums that claim to be mostly hands-off forums for free and open speech. Get the context: |
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