With the mainstream media losing pretty much all of its credibility this past election cycle, the numerous media organizations are in damage control, and trying to get search engines and social media outlets to combat so-called fake news websites.
How can you determine what is a supposed fake news source and what is a genuine news source? Well, all you have to do is use one extreme leftist professor’s list.
According to Melissa Zimdars, Assistant Professor of Communications at Merrimack College, who is also a radical leftist, activist and feminist, the likes of Zero Hedge, LewRockwell.com, Project Veritas, The Blaze and InfoWars are all websites that are deemed to be fake news sources. Project Veritas just did an incredible job exposing the corruption of the Democratic Party, while Zero Hedge provides superb analysis of financial and political stories.
The list has since been taken down, but there are some that are still circulating.
If you take a look at the list below, you can determine that much of the list consists of those with contradictory opinions, which are generally conservative or libertarian. Indeed, there are some left-wing websites, but most are right-leaning.
Reason‘s Scott Shackford, associated editor, did a great job warning about the dangers of Facebook or Google using Zimdars’s list:
So in an environment where “fake news” is policed by third parties that rely on expert analysis, we could see ideologically driven posts from outlets censored entirely because they’re lesser known or smaller, while larger news sites get a pass on spreading heavily ideological opinion pieces. So a decision by Facebook to censor “fake news” would heavily weigh in favor of the more mainstream and “powerful” traditional media outlets.
The lack of having a voice in the media is what caused smaller online ideology-based sites to crop up in the first place. Feldman noted that he’s already removed some sites that he believes have been included “unfairly” in Zimdars’ list. His extension also doesn’t block access to any sites in any event. It just produces a pop-up warning.
But Zimdars’ list is a very important reminder that once we start talking of trying to stop the spread of “fake” news, what’s actually going to happen is going to bad very quickly. These decisions of what is and is not fake will not stay defined to factual accuracy. And it will be based on somebody else’s idea of what is and isn’t fake, and the biases that come from such analysis.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: do you know what happens when you don’t conform to the mainstream media’s narrative? Huh? Do you?
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