The Truth About What Constitutes "Fake News" for the Left Which They Want to Ban.

a reply to: Aazadan

I think you forgot that BILL signed the law authorizing the news to be propagandized and the DNC ate it up as we have JUST seen.www.truth-out.org...

originally posted by: darkbake
What happens if a website distributes fake news? They are flagged and a warning message pops up on the screen. That's all. Some people are making false news stories on purpose and publishing them. There needs to be a way to tell how reliable the information you want to get is.

In the end, an alternative website might end up distributing what could be considered fake news simply because they are willing to speculate on stuff. Someone like me likes that aspect and I am willing to go to sites that I believe are genuinely trying to promote their perspective. Warning me that some of the news on there is false is a point well taken, but I'll still go check it out.

Think of it this way: ATS already flags threads that are portraying factually false information. It is the right thing to do. ATS doesn't use this for political gain, however. That is why I disagree with letting a left-wing extremist make the list.

To have a warning on news means that there needs to be an arbiter of what is fake and what is not. Who is that going to be? That's the problem. Just look at the nonsense on sites like Snopes..they classify true or false based on political ideology and they cover a tiny fraction of what is on the web. How can anyone or any organisation cover all news? The truth on that is they can not, so this will just be done at domain level based on political motives. Those that have the most political power will mark themselves as legitimate, and the people taking their viewers/readers as fake.

This is a further escalation by fascists of the war on the internet and freedom.

It means the same as to the right. Why the division? Why try to create another issue to keep people arguing? Everybody knows what fake is and what it's not.
Fake is not the news you don't agree with. Fake is not the other guys view.
Fake is those sites that steal the use of respected logos and trademarks and look like legitimate web sites but the stories are completely made up.
That is the extent of fake news.
It's really fake.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

All news issuing from biased sources, left or right, is fake.

Media which is spun, videos which feature heavy editing which hides reality and invents new reality, improperly tagged videos of demonstrations from time ago, being used as current affairs, posting of old topics as new media to bulk out an agenda, on any side, all media which features any bias of any kind.

Basically, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, pretty much everything Alex Jones ever put out, and so on and so forth, from all comers and all corners.

All media which places you in opposition with a given group or ideal, all media which tries to usurp your good sense, turn you from the narrow path of truth, into the broad barren landscape of propaganda, that is fake news. Its all most of us have seen in the last two years.

I am not a huge fan of Alex Jones' style of presenting news and opinion but I highly value his imput and years of dedication. He can be very difficult to listen to, due to his loudness and forceful personality but again he is IMO a critically important figure in the "alternative" media. If not for him the MSM propaganda would largley go unchallenged.

Unfortunately Alex does have to fight fire with fire quite often, by exaggerating and sensationalising "facts" which are nothing more than opinion..but the MSM do this all the time. ALL THE TIME. They continually mislead the viewer with bias and in the case of this presidential campaign...it's just been scary. Everyone but the most innocent among us have seen the mainstream media unmasked with fake polls, designed to influence the vote and with strategically shot footage of Clinton and Trump rallies to make it appear Hillary had huge audiences whilst only ever zooming in directly on Tump on stage, so as to edit out stadiums full of supporters. Fake news indeed.

This attempt to destroy the alternative media, because it doesn't agree with the narrative, is a disgusting crime against humanity. This is exactly what totalitarianism looks like. This is what the regressive left is. You only need see their tactics of using SJW agitators on the street that shout and scream in people's faces because they cannot form coherent political arguments against logic. They behave just like feminists, who of course are another division of this army against real genuine social progress.

These same extremist leftist once believed in free speech..in the days that they felt marginalised. Now they want it banned, using "hate speech" as an excuse. These "people" are a tiny minority of the population and include naive brainwashed students but they are not the real problem..it's the elite, including the champagne socialists of Hollywood who control the media propaganda, literal propaganda made law under Obama..It's this elite who are reaping the benefits of a capitalism gone wrong, gone wrong under their direction and subversion of it..who are trying to push for the socialist police state for everyone else..except themselves obviously.

Which takes me back to Alex Jones. He predicted all this years ago..probably 2 decades ago in fact. Back then we couldn't see it coming like we do now. The man is a hero and deserves all the support we can give him. In the face of everything he put 100% into what he truly believed was happening and did it in the name of freedom, even though he was ignored by most people, even many, in the tin foil hat community, derided him as a fool..and some still do. He will always be bombastic and rough around the edges but that does not diminish the fact that overall he was right and we as a society need him more now than ever to rage against this REAL and present totalitarian tyranny. It's real and here right now and if we do not stand up and stop it immediately, there will be no future for anyone

originally posted by: reldra

originally posted by: DrStevenBrule
a reply to: ElectricUniverse



The left wants to ban all media and speech that doesn't fall in line with their beliefs.

No. You are wrong.

Then explain why left-wingers and professors at universities are working so hard to stop speech they don't like on campus? It seems to be a theme of the left all over the country right now going all the way up to the mass media.

And yet these are the people constantly caught in lies and fake stories.

a reply to: Counterintelligence

Alex Jones is part of the problem, not its solution.

Ok... lets be real for a second here. Snowden. That leak, the press persons he leaked to. Their handling of the data and the way they presented it? News. Pretty much everything else I have heard out of the print or wire media in the last ten years? Not so much.

News, real news, is boring. It is not sensationally edited, it does not come with gut churning headlines, or deliberately psychoaffective wording. It stands on its own merits, without bias, without added drama, without opinion printed as fact, without being adulterated in any way.

For example, reported properly and evenly, the fact that Hilary Clinton is involved with this decades supply and funding scheme for terror ought to be front page stuff on every network, and from every print media source. But because the information is toxic and reveals too much about the real workings of government, because the reality is that the Republicans were doing this years before she was, because it raises too many probing questions about the nature of liberty as it pertains to the lives of American citizens, and how well they know what is, and is not done in their name, the issue is left to extremists on all sides to mull over, despite it being some of the most important information one could hope to read.

But it has been made a poisoned chalice, and all who read of it cannot help but be either fired up by the bias of the reportage, or turned off by it, increasing the division between people, rather than uniting them in truth. And there are so many truths unspoken, that the owners of the bias, the issuers of propaganda do not want anyone to know, right or left, mainstream or fringe, that NEED to be known. The intelligence services of the western world have behaved with nothing but dishonour and disrespect toward those they claim to operate in defence of, and yet they do not move under constant scrutiny. Yet if the truth of their perfidy were widely known, they would scarcely be able to take a dump without someone ensuring that it was notarised and that the people were aware of it, we would, collectively as nations living under out of control governments, have to ensure that our will is paramount by preventing ANY secret we can find out, from being kept.

And yet, the bias in the media, all of it, leaves either over sensationalised dross, or poisoned truths no one can accept because the approach the author uses is so littered with speculation, generalisation or outright lies, that the truth becomes second fiddle to the virtuoso of lies associated therewith.

Alex Jone does NOT have to meet fire with fire. He could just tell the unblemished truth, without spitting venom and propaganda alongside the real story. He just does not, because like those he claims to oppose, his aim is to make the loudest noise, not tell the most unadulterated truth. All the people involved with the whole sorry mess should be ashamed of what their lack of due diligence has helped turn their nation into.

a reply to: TrueBrit

I find your reply rather confusing but if I got the gist of it right. You appear to be saying Alex Jones presents "the truth" so poorly, that he discredits it. That because he discredits it, the MSM can then further discredit "the truth" by using Jones as an example of an illegitimate news source.

Well I can certainly agree with you to a large extent, if that is your point. I have said the same thing about Alex Jones myself enough times. However even though I agree in part with you, I still say he is ctitically valuable in the fight for exposing reality.

I say this because I understand that it takes an unusual set of personality characteristics to attempt to face down the entire MSM. It's not possible to have a man/woman with a "reasonable" personality to get to the level of public awareness that Jones has gotten to.

In other words, the character traits that often undermine Alex Jones' presentation of "the truth" are the same characteristics that enabled him to get to where he has gotten infowars to.

It doesn't matter how many critical thinkers you have on sites like ATS, because we are not reaching millions of people and influencing them. Plus lots of the people on here are the SJW's who are basically wrecking balls subverting a once worthwhile website..the amount if LGBT crap on here these days is something else...it belongs on another website not here..this was supposed to be a conspiracy theory site.

So you have a lot of muddied water here anyway..so nothing is perfect. That's the same thing with Alex, he isn't perfect and muddies the water sometimes but overall he is a critical thinker and the actual truth is getting through. Why else do you think they are trying to shut him down.

a reply to: Counterintelligence

With respect, Counterintelligence, there are those who might say that your comment about SJWs on ATS is unfounded, given your relatively short membership, and given that clearly, if you were a previous member returned, or a loooong time lurker, then you have CLEARLY forgotten what this site was like in 2007, when I joined.

Bush was the President of the United States, and all the alternative media hype was centered around attacking the justification for the War on Terror, the Iraq invasion, Afghanistan, and dealing with local issues that Bush and his bottom feeding lackey, the right wing, but nonetheless Labour leader and Prime Minister, Tony Blair failed to address, prefering to spend their money on proxy armies and illegal military actions.

THAT was a great time to be here. It was a damned awful time to be alive, but we here were largely united in our dislike of the lies we were being fed by the media, ALL of it. We were united in our dislike of our various governments, their actions, the actions of our commanders and generals in supporting the apolitical, for profit war that they were fighting, there was a real movement for some kind of better and universal awareness, bipartisan discussion that meant something, got places, and revealed things. It was THAT environment in which we postulated and considered the possibility of systems like PRISM and ECHELON before they were ever known values in the media, by SEVERAL years. We had the right, and the left centered members coming together to decry unjustified actions, and there were disagreements, but there was respect.

THAT was the grand era of ATS. Alex Jones, Hannity, CNN, MSNBC, were ALL considered to be purveyors of nonsense and half truth, for that entire time. The news media was only dealing with the issues we spoke about here, days, weeks, months, and sometimes many YEARS after we had all gone over it with a fine tooth comb. Those were intellectually astounding times to live through, a great awakening, a groundswell of acceptance that the government, media, and big business were entirely arranged to increase the oppression of free speech, not its promotion, the removal of liberty not its upholding, the violation of the rights of free citizens, not the protection of those citizens from threats external. We were united because we understood far better than we seem to now, that our enemies are ALL the government, not some of it, ALL the press, not a portion of it, ALL the structures which lie to us and make us slaves to their will by propaganda, ALL these things are the enemies of freedom, and we, ALL of us were determined to find, to learn, and then to know the truth.

Now all that seems to matter is the bubble we are in, protecting the contents from knowledge which does not fit our preferred narrative, accepting nothing which does not suit the agenda of one or another side of a debate which in and of itself is designed to keep people stupid, and prevent them from looking at the correct hand, in order to discern the nature of the trick being played upon us all.

THAT is what ATS is for. The last few years? There has been a significant decay in that unity, not because of the actions of the left or right HERE, but because the propaganda machinery which owns and controls all media has been churning out UNPRECEDENTED levels of BS, and because of its sheer volume, even those whose mouths were closed unto it, have drowned through the nose in it. It is appalling.

a reply to: TrueBrit

So now I'm getting accused of not being here before..from any other poster..what's with this BS? Do you think this is some secret club that's really hard to find and I need a special handshake or something? Why would I lie about being here over the years??? What! to give me credibility??? Well if that's your logic then I'm pretty sure there have been a bunch of idiots on this site for years (actually why I quit posting) who still don't have any plausible arguments..so why would being here for years, automatically give me credibility! It wouldn't..so why would I lie! I wouldn't, because it wouldn't make any difference me being here before or not. The fact you even brought that up says a lot about your critical thinking though and I don't give a damn how long you've been here..it clearly hasn't aided your logic.

I thought that was the most telling part of your post so I didnt bother replying to the rest of it.

PS I couldn't tell you the year I joined, the day I quit, the month I returned and the next several times I quit and returned under different screen names..I also didn't keep those in my diary. I ain't that anal or autistic.(no offence to autistics)

a reply to: Counterintelligence

Oh my goodness.

Please sir, do not take offence at my words above. None was meant, and none is meant in the words which will follow.

I am not saying that your legitimacy is bound up in the longevity of your presence here, and I did not insinuate that you lied about your membership length. What I am trying to put forward, is that this site has been, since 2007 at least, a place where all sides came together to discuss the affairs of the day, WITHOUT any one side ever having to swallow a line of crap to arrive at a conclusion. Now though, it seems that this site is full to bursting with people on all sides who have not only swallowed crap, but drowned in it so much have they consumed, and again, on all sides of the debate.

The simple fact is that I have never seen this site so biased in all directions, members failing to address the topic at all, failing to address the arguments made, preferring to ignore them utterly and all manner of other nonsense. So when you say that this site has changed, yes. You are right. It has become utterly skewed, and full of crap, and no one seems to want to get at the truth at the moment. That is the only change. There have always been, and will always be SJWs, who used to be recognised around here as performing a much needed public service, but seem to be the enemy for no good reason, largely having to do with how many lies per hour can be fit into a Fox News feed. You used to get reasonable arguments from our Second Amendment fandom here, and arguments which even I, as a massive lefty, could get right behind without batting an eyelid. Now though? Its hard to tell where the heck these members are these days, the reasonable right, because the whole political scale has flipped so far off the deep end, that while those members may not have moved relative to their neighbours on the scale, they sure as hell marched WAY off away from their supporters on the left!

THAT is reality, that IS what happened. You may remember differently, but I can assure you as an observer from outside the large majority of this mess you call politics, there has never been a time when this website was so full of total discord between people, and full of totally divisive bull as it is today, because back in the day, we used to know how to protect ourselves and one another from the propagandism at large in the world. That has, somehow changed, and its the only change worth noting.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

If I see a stories coming from certain sites - I immediately disregard them. The idea that some people think those sites will be accurate some of the time (or all of the time) but not accurate occasionally...well. What can we say about that?

Breitbart will be our new Pravda. How many Russians do you think bought into Pravda?

If I see a story that just feels wrong, I'll look for several more sites saying the same or close to the same, look at some of the sources for those stories, check some of the facts myself...

Too much work?

Do tell us Texan, has ATS officially ever endorsed biased and misleading or false news yes or not? Because i could show you at least a couple from the BS videos which is spreading false or misleading information... And tell us, have you ever starred/flagged any of those biased and false/misleading reports without ever having checked the facts?... Because if you have, which I am certain most of us have done so at least once, then you fall into the category of "the dumb and gullible"... Or is it just that we all have some sort of bias and tend to show that bias from time to time?... Does that make people "dumb and gullible"? because then everyone is guilty, including you, isn't that true?

All of this is just more making yourself feel better

What I think is interesting and sometimes funny is how many people now (I suspect) are trying to reassure themselves they made the right choice. Nothing is going to convince some people but time and real world events

So - this should be interesting

a reply to: TrueBrit


I think I tend to agree with you a lot more before you've blown the froth off a few than after


All very true, in fact I was recently having a discussion with an acquaintenance of mine about some discussions going on here to which she showed disdain...I had to explain to her that it wasn't always like this and why...you summed it up succinctly.

a reply to: alphabetaone



I am pleased to have found common ground on this topic!

I would hope that once the dust has settled, we can all gather here again, united in truth, and that next time an election comes around, we keep ourselves more intellectually honest than has been the general case during this cycle.

a reply to: TrueBrit

As I stated I have not stuck with this site the entire time..I pop in and out for a few months here and there but have been doing so for, well I dunno, how many years..long before it was fashionable or socially acceptable to call 9/11 an inside job..so probably about a day after 9/11/2001..but I dunno if this site has been around that long? I was interested in the whole UFO topic since I was a kid and I'm now in my 40's so I would have been looking up UFO websites and discovered this site anyway..so I probably found ATS very early on..again I don't keep diarys or stuff like that so I don't know and it's irrelevant to me but seems to be important to some people here..What I do know is that over time I get bored of things whenever I feel like they are stagnating so I move on to something else. I lost interest in UFO topic years ago due to that very stagnation.

As far as SJW's, if your stating they were here from the beginning, that's not my recollection but if your correct then either I didn't pay attention to their threads or they were few in number..either that or they were not as socially regressive as the ones on here now. So called third or fourth wave feminism (whatever it's current wave is know as this month) is only a culture I've been aware of for the last few years..primarily..no, actually exclusively pushed by the guardian newspaper IMO.

Also early on this site did not have dozens of different sub topics..it only had a few to my recollection and they were all based around the usual fring stuff of UFO's cryptozoology and government conspiracies..it has grown into a sprawling mess in an attempt to accommodate every kind of minority opinion..and completely lost its way along with, I'd imagine, its original core audience and contributors.

It has grown unfit for purpose in that respect..I think it's called entropy, where a system gets more and more disorganised over time until it falls apart.

The other problem is you have people who are now starting out as "conspiracy theorists" and these are college kids, who think they know everything. I GET IT, I was once one..but in the early days of this site, even though all different age groups were on it, in some respects they were all starting out on a fresh page..so there was more understanding and respect for ideas..although there were flame wars too..if I remember correctly..but still not as bad as it's gotten.

People came here to help be deprogrammed from the mainstream but now I see more and more people from the mainstream pushing mainstream propaghanda into this "safe space" haha..it's quite ridiculous. I mean the term "LGBT" IS mainstream, I hear it all the time in the MSM, because it's the MSM that push that term and it's the MSM that push feminism..these are not alternative sub cultures grown from the grass roots. They are top down brainwashing from a cultural elite. Then we have these irrational SJW types come here and push their politically correct mainstream invented "sub cultures" into a realm that is supposed to be for actual grass roots fringe beliefs.

Gay marriage IS legal, so its mainstream and accepted..yet you'll see moron SJW types on here still claiming they are persecuted for being LGBT..please, cry me a river.

This is the problem, a lot of people who think they are part of some alternative sub culture are actually championing the mainstream version of life.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: alphabetaone

I am pleased to have found common ground on this topic!

I would hope that once the dust has settled, we can all gather here again, united in truth, and that next time an election comes around, we keep ourselves more intellectually honest than has been the general case during this cycle.

One can certainly hope for that...but if the topic of this thread is more real than perceived, then we are in for a rough ride with respect to intellectual honesty...rather the ability to be informed intellectually enough to be honest in the first place.

I'm a proud atheist, as such I don't believe in divine intervention, but at some point I do believe for all of our grandstanding as humans, mother nature is the great equalizer and will solve all of our problems for us.

a reply to: Spiramirabilis

It is so easy. A simple suspicion of all news, no matter if it is CNN or Super True News Network, is always beneficial. Unfortunately, to pooh pooh a news source because of its name and not the substance of the article, is fallacious. Even the National Enquirer has been correct.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

Let's say hypothetically that your sensationalism about the left is true. How exactly is the left supposed to go about doing any media banning anyways? The right has control of soon to be all three branches of the government. Stop blaming the left for everything!

originally posted by: ElectricUniverse
a reply to: Aazadan

If we are going to ban websites that might post some false, or misleading information why isn't CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest of the media included there?... These days all news sources have bias. All news sources are guilty of posting false, or misleading information. If that's a reason to ban news sites, then ALL should be banned/barred.

Did you read my posts? I included mainstream sources. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and all the rest are equally guilty right now. Literally no one reports facts, they ALL report opinion, and that means they're not real press.

originally posted by: ketsuko
Realistically, had the media not squandered public trust the way it has, the rise of the alternative media would not be so prominent.

No, it would still be like this. People are incapable of determining fact from fiction. When given a choice most will listen to what agrees with them.