Best 81 quotes in «fake news quotes» category

I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.

I just trust my intuition taking into account the psychology of things. Therefore, I am not persuaded by facts, but by behaviors.

In other words, if a patent forgery like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical facts of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.

In truth, the epoch is gone in which we had the impression that the masses of society could be guided by reason and by insights into their situation of life to achieve social improvement with their own strength. In truth, the days are gone in which the masses have a function in shaping society. It has been shown that the masses can be completely molded, that they are unconscious and capable of adapting themselves to any kind of power or infamy.

Instead of speaking of beliefs, one must actually speak of truths, and that these truths were themselves products of the imagination. We are not creating a false idea of things. It is the truth of things that through the centuries has been so oddly constituted. Far from being the most simple realistic experience, truth is the most historical. There was a time when poets and historians invented royal dynasties all of a piece, complete with the name of each potentate and his genealogy. They were not forgers, nor were they acting in bad faith. They were simply following what was, at the time, the normal way of arriving at the truth. [...] I do not at all mean to say that the imagination will bring future truths to light and that it should reign; I mean, rather, that truths are already products of the imagination and that the imagination has always governed. It is imagination that rules, not reality, reason, or the ongoing work of the negative.

In this era of fake news and paid news artificial intelligence is more and more used as a political tool to manipulate and dictate common people, through big data, biometric data, and AI analysis of online profiles and behaviors in social media and smart phones. But the days are not far when AI will also control the politicians and the media too.

It is better to not believe a truth than to believe a lie, because this defines yourself too. If you believe a lie that has negative effects, it shows you may have malicious intentions. But if you don't believe a truth that has negative effects, then you may be well-disposed.

I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].

It doesn’t matter whether it’s true, only that it’s believable.

Nur weil Informationen heute mühelos zugänglich sind, bedeutet das nicht automatisch auch, dass wir diese besitzen.

More and more people are consuming news and other content from the internet than any other medium. And that's where the problem begins. The production and circulation of physical newspaper is highly expensive and so is maintaining a tv channel or a radio station, hence, transmission of news through these platforms are accessible mostly to traditional news media sources, and the public only acts as the consumer. But the same is not true when it comes to the transmission of news or any other content via the Internet. Anybody can transmit a news via the internet quite instantly as well as consume it. And since there is no active fact-checking algorithm involved in this transmission, there is no way of telling whether the news you are receiving is real or fake, if you are not receiving it from a trusted traditional source.

More reporters shouted, and guards moved them away in the air and on foot. As they did, more kept coming towards us. They did not appear to have the mannerisms of a person, but that of a desperate wild animal. “What’s wrong with them?” “Money makes the world go around, Salan. It’s their job,” sighed Mr. Gram. “They’re like caged animals. Couldn’t they be less aggressive?” “That doesn’t get listeners. A reaction on the radio gets people tuning in. Just say nothing to them. They aren’t worth your voice or time,” Mr. Gram grinned.

Not every election will be so filled with venom, misinformation, resentments, and outside interference as this one was. Solutions are going to matter again in politics.

I will never know, because I will never be able to be in the position to witness those things. And I don't care to know something I myself cannot confirm. No one should care about this.

Newspapers are not made any longer by news or journalism. They are made by sheer weight of money expressed in free gift schemes. They serve not the interests of the many, but the vested interests of the few.

Now more than ever, journalists have a crucial role to perform in the society. You may say, haven't they been playing that role from the very beginning! Yes, they have been doing it for a long time, since the birth of printing press, but never in history, could their failure mean devastation in their community caused by their false and illegitimate counterparts.

Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally popular is the game of school. You collect six children and put them on a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. Only one thing mars it: the tendency of one and all of other six children to clamour for their turn with the book and cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep. [published in 1900]

Sex sells, but gay sex sells better.

Outrage porn": rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from real societal problems. It's no wonder we're more politically polarized than ever before.

Seasons have changed. Advancements have made it all possible. It's time to doubt everything.

Separate text from context and all that remains is a con.

Start believing in conspiracies, because those who have the power conspire, and they keep their power by having people not believing in conspiracies.

Society is competitive and some feel inferior and are jealous of others. This motivates them to believe and spread lies. They satisfy their malevolence to lift themselves. In the world I want to live in, any form of gossip should be illegal and people should talk only about arts and sciences.

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

The eighth deadly sin is lies that harm.

The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks”—including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that “to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate’ opponents.” Many of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own “alternative media” that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them….In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.

The cure to eliminate fake news is that people stop reading 140-character tweets and start reading 600-page books.

The "Fake News" of, let's say, a Democrat, are usually not the "Fake News" of a Republican.

The media’s so central to our lives that we believe what we see onscreen is real. In fact, it’s more real than reality: emotions are heightened, drama sharpened, issues simplified.

The opinion of each person matters. All opinions are subjective. We should stop relying on others' views and start believing in our own instinct whatever position in the society we have. All are equal.

The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The criterion of "truth," they say, is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a race or nation or class—that is, racial, national or utilitarian. Pushing to their limits the biological, pragmatist, activist theories of truth, the official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought. For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not. Such being the case, myth is better than science and rhetoric that works on the passions preferable to proof that appeals to the intellect.

There is no truth; Everything is a strategy for interests.

The Press will not be free to tell lies. That is not freedom for the people, but a tyranny over their minds and souls. Much humbug is talked on this subject. What is press freedom? In practice it means the right of a dew millionaires to corner newspaper shares on the stock exchange and to voice their own opinions and interests, irrespective of the truth or of the national interest.

The sad thing is, Trump's minions have no idea how dumb they sound when they repeat his lies as if they were true.

The true things rarely get into circulation. It’s usually the false things.

The truth belongs to the experience, not the attempt of third parties to interpret a story, without knowing the exact incidents, but only one or a few facts.

The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S.

The truth belongs to the experience.

The truth? What's that? Don't you know that the day has come when the truth is what we care to make it?

Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them by fifty years of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.

The word fascism is not a word of abuse any more than the word capitalism is. It is a concept denoting a very definite kind of mass leadership and mass influence: authoritarian, one-party system, hence totalitarian, a system in which power takes priority over objective interests, and facts are distorted for political purposes. Hence, there are "fascist Jews," just as there are "fascist Democrats.

To understand what ended up happening in the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand this: When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing Crimea, creeping into eastern Ukraine—he weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus. Eventually, the Russians would come into America, as they believed we’d gone into Ukraine. They took advantage of the fact that we were worn down by decades of political polarization and the balkanization of our media. America’s antibodies to the sickness of Russian disinformation were weak, if they were there at all.

Trump isn’t the first wannabe dictator who accused the press of being fake news and the enemy of the people. Hitler called the press Lügenpresse, which is German for fake news.

Trump's MAGA minions live in a Fox News bubble.

Unmoderated content consumption is as dangerous as the consumption of sewage water.

We're living amid an artificial reality, persuaded to believe it's real by astroturf engineered to look like grassroots.

We have begun to live in a world, where we eat content, drink content and breathe content, without giving a single thought to its composition and what kind of impact it has upon our lives.

We need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean.

When a thousand people believe some made-up story for a month - that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years - that's religion, and we are admonished to call it fake news in oder not to for the feelings of the faithful.

What if a person’s native or learned abilities to process information sensibly could be warped by feeding junk into the mental machine? As we say in technology: garbage in, garbage out. We know we’re products of the food we eat. Why wouldn’t we also be products of the information we consume?