The Deep Truth about “Fake News” – Medium

... no one has direct access to reality. The real world is nearly impossible to see in this maelstrom ... because human minds need to “construct” their own version of reality — and each of us does this within a community of shared experiences and beliefs... there are many social worlds and each is built on its own version of what is real and true....
Our team took a unique dataset of 60 million tweets referencing the US election ... a global media conversation ... We used visualization software to create images of the relationships throughout this massive web of information...
two very different conversations were taking place. The post-truthers were mostly elite media commentators ... “navel gazing” ... The media really likes to talk about the media! Contrast this with the fake news aficionados ... mostly grassroots groups and independent media outlets... Trump supporters, who actively criticized the “establishment” media as untrustworthy and unreliable... prone to trust information from authoritarian sources aligned with their worldview than the “authoritative” sources (like scientific expertise or official media outlets)...
the very different conclusions people are drawing from failures in the media can be mapped to their modes of sharing and the networks they are embedded in... Both had important things to say, yet each was talking past the other...
There has been propaganda for centuries. Misinformation campaigns are not new. What IS new is the decentralization of media creation that enables each community to remain isolated and separate. ...
The media has cannibalized the minds of millions — drawing their mental attention toward the issues that are bounced around in these information echo chambers and syphoning it away from the deep, systemic threats humanity is now confronted with.
Having a biased meshwork of corporate media outlets won’t be sufficient. Neither will the “democratized” independent people in the grassroots